StephenTaylor

APL programmer innovating with agile development practices at the Pensions division of Britain's largest insurer.

Edits Vector, journal of the British APL Association.

5jt.com •

• Extreme Terseness: Some Languages Are More Agile Than Others
  Research report for XP2003.

• The Experience of Being Understood.
  Requirement specification looks a lot like language acquisition. Reflecting on what Wittgenstein had to say about language acquisition suggests an unusual development practice.

• Pair Programming With The Users Vector 22 1
  Writing software alongside the users; semantic density as a metric of how well executable code can be shared with the system's sponsors; functional programming techniques for maximising semantic density.

• Software Development as a Collaborative Writing Project
  (with Brian Bussell, Director, Pensions Division, Norwich Union Life)
  (Accepted for XP2006) Writing software is commonly talked about as a kind of engineering, subject to the disciplines that get bridges built. But its similarities with collaborative writing projects are more useful, and the processes of drafting legislation or developing movie screenplays suggest practices quite different from those of civil engineers.