Working smarter, not harder: An interview with Kent Beck (IBM developerWorks) [LWN.net]

IBM's developerWorks features an interview with Kent Beck. "Extreme Programming (XP) founder Kent Beck likes to say he made up XP's fundamentals during a particularly troubled project in 1996. While strictly true, from talking to him you sense he'd really been formulating the process for quite some time. Find out what Kent thinks about the contribution of the Java platform to software development's success (or lack thereof) in this exclusive developerWorks interview."

(Log in to post comments)

Working smarter, not harder: An interview with Kent Beck (IBM developerWorks)

Posted Jun 19, 2003 22:31 UTC (Thu) by mly (guest, #2171) [Link]

As a programmer with lots of experience of Pascal, C, C++ and Python, I can certainly agree with this:

Beck:

Java is so pessimistic. You have this compiler saying, "I'm not sure this program isn't going to run so I won't run it." I find that attitude disturbing in a program. I notice that the safety in pessimistic languages is an illusion.

This is certainly an illusion, and the effort needed to sustain this illusion typically leads to much more code, which means that there will probably be more bugs to clean out, and certainly a much longer development time than a comparable effort with a smarter (and more trusting) language.

Mind you, weak typing is not a recipe for success in it's own regard. I don't claim that, but I think it's important to see that it's not much of a safety net. After all, if we trust the programmer with using the right algorithms and formulas, why not trust him with the much simpler task of using proper types?

Kent's Smalltalk background

Posted Jun 20, 2003 16:57 UTC (Fri) by dvainsencher (guest, #4143) [Link]

is showing. If a powerful language that isn't pessimistic interests you, you might like what you find at www.squeak.org