Flexible Software

Ever wonder how easy or difficult it would be to create a DIY version of anything?

America has a great DIY culture, so there's a lot of commercial support for kits that allow you to build or fix anything from reading glasses to whole kitchens. This is not how it works in other places where labor is cheaper and the tradespeople build and fix things. In such places, the interfaces (for lack of a better term) that products allow assume expertise on the part of the person using it.

Simple example: the bicycle is largely a recreation vehicle in the US. As such most of its parts are easily adjusted with knobs and such end-user friendly means. For the most part, you'll rarely have to go into a bike shop for a repair. They even have kits to clean your chain! This would be unheard of in a place like India mainly because there're tons of bicycle repair shops and people dont need the user friendly interface.

But I digress. The point I'm trying to make is that designing a product such that it can be broken down by somebody else than the original creator (or somebody skilled in the products innards) requires a different kind of thinking than just producing the product. A DIY robot kit is more difficult to make than a regular one. The key features added are:

• the ability to be broken down into pieces with well defined interfaces
• the ability to integrate with other pieces to form the whole product.

That's the physical world; and yet we have quite a large DIY capability in general.

Now take that same concept to the world of software. Why do we still not have long promised Software ICs? I think we know the answer to that one: because my concept of component that does logging (to pick a mundane, yet excruciatingly relevant-in-terms-of-my-point example) is not the same as yours :).

But there's more than one way to skin that cat. We dont necessarily need a universal agreement on what constitutes a specific component; we just need to ability to easily take components in and out of the software as often and appropriately as required. There in lies the rub, however. Our current means of doing this in increasing order of cost are:

• Configuration: which is the hardwired ability to switch between known behaviors of a component
• Code Change: which is the hard ability to change the behavior of a component from the current to the desired. This is the snapshot based development that I've blogged about before.
• Integration: which is the tying together of fairly coarse components with known behavior to realize a larger, compound behavior. The integration itself could be via configuration (better) or code change (not so good)

There's a reason for integration being at a large enough scale: integration is hard due to the mine != yours problem mentioned above.

Is there a solution? I think languages should develop ESB-like capabilities, and allow code change to be applied descriptively instead of as a stream of editor actions.

More on this later.

First time parents: an app rollout story

I've seen that teams involved with the first time rollout of an app are like first time parents. So pardon me while I mix more metaphors that are required to get the message across:

• Its MY baby, so how can you possibly know whats right? I let you hold it; doesnt mean you can code to it in any way except MINE
• If the baby cries, it must be a critical. Doesn't matter that you're an experienced parent who's seen this before on your App, and know it affects less than 1% of customers, and therefore will feely admit that while the issue is a critical, it need not be addressed NOW
• Related: My baby's needs come FIRST. That means before anything else. Especially yours. Because I said so. So there.
• My baby is special, so it needs to be eased very very gently into anything new - especially the big, bad world. Maybe we can get him out of the door an inch a time, so he'll be ok with it. Oh you just went ahead and threw yours in the pool and he's doing fine? Well, we'll not have any of that around here.Our production launch will have many interim milestones, thank you very much!

I can keep going, but you see what I mean? I say read Ship It, and see how things work out. You might find the second time much easier. Unless of course, you are bent on doing everything right this time around so we have that perfect child :)

 The killer combination: A team made of some people who've never built anything and some that have built exactly one thing before and are dying to fix that in the successor!

Note: I've found that there are levels of noobie parenthood. People who are completely sane and rational at one level will make an exception and become noobs for that pet/key/most important project which apparently transcends normal levels.

A runtime that does static/dynamic analysis

Traditionally, code analysis has been done offline (statically) or online (debug or test in prod). In either case the effort has been to minimize the impact of analysis overhead on execution of code. Ironically, its this exact execution state that we need to know and understand better to improve and maintain software.

In the database world, its common for the runtime (ie db engine) to maintain statistics of query execution and use that to better plan future execution. Why not have a code runtime that does the same?

Again, not a new concept - cpus have had this for ages. What about App Servers, though? Imagine having a code analyzer attached to your running code that not just tells you where the hotspots are, but also points out the tangles in your code and so forth?

The advantages are obvious: no additional tools required, code analysis in running code, etc; as are the disadvantages: performance penalty being the main one. However, I really have to ask: We've come a long way from expecting "running on bare metal" mode. Why not this additional step? In a long enough time line wouldn't the benefits and advances in hardware outweigh this?

We've seen the advent of opinionated languages. I think its time for an opinionated App Stack.

Implementation note: Steal Fantom's concept of conceptual package = deployment package.

Code as workflow

Code as workflow

At work, we have a couple of core components that are essentially workflow engines. I call them workflow engines because of the following properties:

• The components house named business processes
• The processes have granular steps and they are named, too
• Data is passed between steps via a shared context - essentially a data bus
• The processes may be long lived, and therefore have asynchronous steps

This model, while decidedly a leaky abstraction in implementation, got me thinking about plain old code, though:

Take the smallest organizing unit of modular programming - the function. It has a name, it has granular steps (although they are not named) and data is passed via a shared context - the stack.

I mention the similarity between the function and the concept of a workflow only to highlight that such a parallel is possible. In principle, any organizing unit - the class, the program, package or application could be modeled as a workflow, IMO.

I contend, therefore: At a suitably small scale, all code can be treated as workflow.

What benefit, if any, do we have with taking such a view of code, though? Business logic is expressed as workflow when we know the following:

• The individual steps have meaning to the business
• The overall process is likely to change over time, the implementation of the process is therefore required to change quickly to reflect the new reality.
• The change usually causes reordering of steps, removal of steps, or introduction of steps. The process still remains the same, as does the implementation logic within each step.

It therefore behooves us to create a framework where the steps are named and their communication is through a standard data bus so that they can be easily removed/updated/added.

Now think of code in general, and read out the reasons I mention above for needing workflow engines. Except for the scale  and the "implementation logic remains same" part, they're the same reasons you have cod around as well. 

• If you think each line of code doesn't have business meaning, you'v obviously not had a big impact bug that was fixed with a one-line change.Admittedly, not all lines have business meaning, however.
• Code does need to change constantly to reflect business reality
• All edits on code reorder the steps, remove them or add new ones. In addition, we also typically change existing steps in place. Aside from this difference, there's essentially nothing different between editing code and editing a workflow, and even that can be modeled as:

update = delete + insert

I'd go so far as to call normal code a form of "complied" workflow - it IS a series of steps that have business meaning, its just that we've deemed that particular series of steps as optimal enough that no change is expected. Until the next time we change our minds, that is.

What if we treated code as workflow?
 Imagine edits being made on code exactly as if it were a workflow where the operators available for editing are not at the character or word level, but at the step level. The developer would decide how to reorder steps to achieve the newly expected functionality, or if the better approach would be do away with the entire function (read superstep in a hierarchical workflow). Imagine the following kinds of operators:

• Add step
• Remove step
• Update Step ( = remove + add)
• Promote step  (up one level)
• Demote step (down one level)
• Coalesce steps
• Explode step

As might be obvious, what we do today with our editors is the textual equivalent of these. The advantage of this conceptual hair splitting, however, is that we now have a semantic model for changes made on code. With suitable expansion, for example, it could be shown that promote step is the process of creating an abstract class (or interface).

Imagine next, an environment where changes to code are recorded as such a series of steps. That series of steps is itself a workflow. This opens up a lot of interesting possibilities:

• A version control system that records changes to code as these workflow steps
• A build/deploy system that allows code migrations similar to current forays into automated data migration (like Rails' activerecord). Essentially deploying a new version of code involves running code that changes the existing version in place, not replacing the old version with an entire new snapshot containing the new version
• Pattern recognition applied to a set of such code edit workflows; and many similar code analyses that can now be done on the change stream itself, not just the end product.
• This is obviously the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

All's not well in workflow world, though

In almost every workflow-based system/framework I've seen - be it in house like the ones mentioned above, or commercial ones like Webmethods, I've seen some major issues:

• Polluted Data bus: Since the shared data bus is the primary means of communication, authors of individual steps have no trust on its contents as a whole. The do trust their immediate inputs, and will almost always take defensive copies of the input (in whole or substantial subsets of it). Its quite common to find multiple copies of the same data in the data bus, which obviously leads to inefficiencies and slowness.
• Leaky Abstraction: Implementing a clean workflow is not easy. It requires discipline in using the data bus, and that alone as the communication mechanism. Any out-of-band communication between the steps means the premise of being able to take steps out, or reorder them is lost. Any framework built on a general purpose language will always have to contend with the sneaky programmer who got around the pesky data bus limitation :)

These are the reasons I shy away from asserting that code IS workflow. Its useful to think of code AS workflow, however. The baby in all of this bathwater is: "Can we use the concept of workflow to model changes to code in a useful way?"

I think yes.

The trail to the big ball of mud

• Check out the first version of an app
• Run code analysis tools like Structure 101 or Lattix on them, and setup rules for architectural violations
• Repeat for each version to date
• Project the results on a time-lapse display tool that shows change in architectural violations over time

This will show you:

• The inflexion points where the implementation deviated from the original intent
• Impact of adding new resources
• Impact of not having policy manifested in the system/ not having documentation
• Impact of tribal knowledge

I posit that this will also show you:

• Why thought leaders that build great systems need not always make great teachers
• Why tribes/inner circles are a bad idea
• Why NIH is a bad idea
• Why publicly available implementations/frameworks are better than proprietary ones in general
• How a well documented proprietary framework with a clearly manifested policy could be a long way from becoming BBOMA. Although you might not find very many examples of such a framework :)

I would LOVE to be a tool developer, but...

developer faces a problem as part of normal app development
developer fixes the problem
developer faces the same problem again.
developer fixes the problem again.
developer faces the same problem 5 more times
developer builds a tool that automates the fix

time passes

tool gains popularity
developer now is a tool developer and spends all his time on the tool

time passes

tool gains even more popularity
developer is now part of (or owns) a company (or opensource project) whose product is the tool

another developer has a problem in his app domain that should be a feature on the tool
unfortunately original developer will never see this because his domain is now the tool itself.

Big Ball of Mud Architecture is like cancer; tools and policy are like chemo

..meaning they're the best answer we have, and all they can do is inhibit the spread.

Any enterprise has software that has technical debt, and it will keep increasing.

Tools that will help:

• Visualization of the architecture - logical and deployment; show multiple views.
• Tools that inhibit deviations from the blessed architecture instead of tribal control
• Tools that embody promised features in the code
• Code review via tools
• Incremental code quality tools

Policy

• Reduce impedence mismatch between the logical and the physical namespaces. eg: java package namespace is different from the deployed jars and that namespace.
• Map source control artifacts and deployment artifacts - make it 1-1 as much as possible
• Make setup and run for newbies as easy as possible. Not ok to have your bootcamp say "this is a difficult environment. Deal with it". Early success is a big confidence booster.

Evolutionary vs Snapshot development

When I suggested to somebody that they can implement a subset of the true solution for now, with the stated intent that the true solution will be implemented later, i realized that there was no way to retain in the codebase itself this future intent.

Current development is all snapshot based -and the tip version at that. There is no way to state - in the codebase - that we intend the current state to be a waypoint to some final architectural/design destination.

BDD is essentially a means of formalizing requirements into the codebase, and Devops is essentially a means of formalizing the deployment of code into the codebase; why not take the next logical step and add tracking the evolution of the code itself into the codebase? Why use an issue tracker for this?

Coming to think of it, why not make this a language feature?

Nagivation

This is one of those slip-of-the-tongue things that stuck in my head. I happened to say (in my head) nagivation instead of navigation, and then it struck me that this misspoken word could well be a neologism.

Nagivation: Irritating steps that websites put between you and your goal to better their interests.

I can already imagine an eggcorn to it too:

Nagevation: Avoiding nagivation links

Isn't language fun?

Aside: This is why English is vibrant and alive and highly structure languages such as Sanskrit aren't.

ಸ್ಥಾವರಕ್ಕೆ ಅಳಿವುಂಟು ಜಂಗಮಕ್ಕೆ ಅಳಿವಿಲ್ಲ

as Basavanna would say!

Goldberg Maps

This is one of those wacky, no-practical-use ideas. You have been warned.

The idea is to create a map application (platform doesn't matter) that figures out the most contorted possible route - a Rube Goldberg route from A to B, if you will.

Extra points for using multiple modes of travel that makes things more difficult, or costly (like using toll roads most of the time even when A & B are round the corner from each other)!

Should be challenging, methinks :)

Mirah: first impressions

I see Mirah in 3 perspectives:

• As a simpler Java: I should review key features from Java to expand on this.
• As a Ruby in Java: I should look at the Mirah implementation more to understand how this works, especially meta-programming.
• As an experiment in language implementation with the plugin architecture of its toolchain. This is interesting from a language design/implementation perspective.

In all, an interesting language. I think abu will be a good candidate to use Mirah.

Dependency Hell: There has to be a better way

I have just given up on trying to install Open Head Tracker - an open source eye gaze tracker. I've been researching head tracking software to see if my aunt who's currently paralyzed can use something like this, and naturally started checking out the open source offerings available; and given that she's in India, I wanted to look for a Windows solution as that's easier to purchase, service etc for non-technical people.

So open gazer is based on technologies that are cross-platform: Python, Numpy, OpenCV and Qt. The original was tested on Ubuntu, and the author expresses the sentiment that since all the underlying software is cross platform, and the software itself is in python, it should work on other platforms.

He's right in principle. In practice he is so wrong its not funny.

Unlike the linux world, you usually install binaries on windows; you just do. Its a wimpy, windows-y thing. Sorry. All windows software comes that way - and then you deal with Registry hell :)

And although each of the packages above were available as binaries, they were just not a compatible set. 2 days of trial and error later, I got the Mingw compiled release of the right version of each package to be installed and tested individually.

That didn't mean they worked together to show up Open Head Tracker's display. I still get a segfault on cvResize (after debugging through the source - thank god for scripting languages!) and I have no clue why. The only option remaining is to disable use of SSE.

The only way to do that? Compile from source.

If my experience with trying to build Chrome is any indicator, that's another wild goose chase into build-time dependency hell.

There has to be a better way!

Sidebar: The last two days have been a heady roller coaster ride through Numpy and OpenCV code, however. I dont understand most of it - mainly because I was just trying to get Headtracker to work, but there's some cool stuff in there, including in Headtracker's deceptively small codebase. Qt's demos make it look really cool too - too bad the days of the Desktop are done now. 

Pinning PortableGit to the Windows 7 taskbar

Microsoft, in all its sagacity, decided that you couldn't pin batch files to the Windows 7 taskbar - something that people have been doing for ages, and have come to like.

Googling for the problem showed three main approaches:

• Converting batch files to exe - bad
• Putting all batch files in a folder and making a toolbar out of the folder - less bad but still yucky
• Tricking W7 into thinking its an exe by opening up the hidden folder that contains the taskbar (Win-R, "Shell:user pinned" will get you there), and adding the shortcut manually. This didnt work except for briefly adding said shortcut to the taskbar, which disappeared soon.

Since all I needed was to have a one-click access to Portable Git, I thought maybe the executable could be called directly, so I ran git-bash.exe to test it out. pwd and exit would work, but not even ls. 

So then I looked at what git-bash.bat did extra. Turns out all it does essentially is to add some params to the call to the executable. So here then, is the solution:

• Select %PortableGitHome%\bin\bash.exe, and drag it to the taskbar
• Rt click to show the pin menu, and rt click again on bash to reveal the properties window.
• Change the Target to "%PortableGitHome%\bin\bash.exe --login -i"
• For bonus points, change the icon to a Git-specific one. You could use the one from GitGUI, or a free alternative one

Note: %PortableGitHome% is not a real variable, replace with your install dir.

TDD is an all-or-nothing proposition

I've been reading "Growing OO Software with tests" and trying to implement TDD practices in my projects, and I arrived at the sentiment that's the title of this post.

Let me explain.

Non-TDD is easy and alluring because you can choose to ignore certain errors. This is decidedly unprofessional, but in the early stages of the project its invaluable. When you're trying to get your feet wet, and feel around the solution space, you DO want to know the big things in the design you're missing, but you dont want to know EVERY thing you're missing.

Since TDD implies executing code, you do have to fix everything that you've missed before you get to the interesting bits; and that is why I say TDD is an all or nothing proposition - you have to fix each and every bug in your straw man code before you can get it work.

Usually, some of this extra burden is taken care of by the TDD framework that you're using - a typical TDD tool assumes a particular environment (eg, Rails), and has the support that makes most of this go away, but for environments that don't have such support - Javascript-in-browser or console apps come to mind - building the framework while building the app gets to be tedious and frustrating.

That's not to say that even with TDD tools this burden doesn't go away - its just lesser. It'd be much nicer if you could "ignore" errors that aren't crucial to early stage prototyping. For now, I solve the problem by having a prototyping phase/spike which isnt TDD based where I flesh out the solution concepts in throw away code.

Testing RIAs using pure javascript: the return of Selenium Core

As I try to use TDD to build Fluent, I was drawn to the concept of keeping the environment pure: Fluent is intended to be a Javascript only project, so I didnt see the point of having tools that were not javascript. To this end, I wrote cuke4jas - so that I can write my feature specs in javascript. That still leaves the gaping hole of DOM testing - which most people seem to fill using something like Selenium.

Except Selenium isn't  javascript alone - it minimally need Java (for Selenium RC) to run.

Or does it? Selenium core - the central piece of Selenium is STILL pure javascript; but over the years its been wrapped with the other Selenium bits to make it a complete solution that its no longer available as a separate download even. This is not without reason - the same origin policy ensures that Selenium Core will work only when you've installed it alongside the app that you want to test, which is usually not the case.

Except in cases like mine - where the app is completely in javascript, or at least completely in the browser.

It is possible to use the raw dom functions, or even libraries like Prototype, JQuery or RightJS directly with jasmine to test the DOM, but Selenium core brings to the table the full-fledged support of automating all the user's actions in a browser (with wait versions as well), so that feature specs can be written with true user actions, not imitations of those actions by calling the functions that would eventually be executed.

Design notes:

• Extract out only the selenium-core bits from any Selenium-RC package. This would be the in selenium-remote-control-xxx\selenium-server-xxx/selenium-server.jar/core
• Subclass the TestLoop class (see HTMLTestRunner for a good implementation), and implement at least the nextCommand(), commandComplete(), commandError() and testComplete() functions. That should allow for a simple executor of selenium commands.
• Of course, TestLoop requires a CommandFactory, but the core has a default implementation that does most (all?) of the work.
• Finally, the subclass will have to take in an array of commands to execute, which nextCommand would provide when requested.

The good part of all this is that you don't need to depend on the TestRunner.html, and therefore can contain all of this within Jasmine/Species/Cuke4jas's Specrunner.html, or even open up a new window and display the app running there.

Caveat:

• All of this still requires a web-server; the same rules prevent file:/// resources from being used with selenium. I've fixed it with a simple webrick script, although any other web server would work just fine.
• Once more, this will work only on files served up from the same server as the selenium files are served up from.

The need to code - my version

JaccquesM (long timer on  Hacker News) posted about his need to code in a passionate article that resonated with me a lot.

My experiences were similar, if not the same.We had some simple computer classes in school which were mostly spent playing Digger and Frogger, but we wrote some basic programs too. There was something visceral about writing something on a screen, and seeing it come live. Basic as a language and DOS Basic as an environment nailed that aspect - and how! You started the pc, typed basic on the prompt and were dropped into an editor that let you type programs that just ran! And BASIC made no presumption of modularity, so you could just use graphics commands in your program because the language had them.

Compare that to any attempt these days to teach programming to kids - all bound up libraries to be imported before the first step taken - and i'm including specific attempts like shoes et al.

When it came time to pick an elective for Pre-University I decided to pick up Computers simply because I didnt want to do Biology, and the other option - electronics - I was neutral about. The instructors were indifferent, and the syllabus was not that great, but I was hooked. I found a friend who also knew basic and we devoured the Peter Norton book on x86 programming. We'd write assembly programs using Peek and Poke in Basic - mainly TSRs for the fun of it. Our other project was writing a 2D graphics editor in Basic. This took us all year because we wrote it on paper using pencils (to erase out and rewrite lines of code that needed to be shifted), and went to another friend's house to use his dad's pc to enter the programs and see it run. There were a lot of GOSUB XXX lines (read sphagetti code), but we pretty much carried the code in our heads and didnt stop talking about it. We finally did manage to get it working, and I believe I still have the batman portrait I drew using it. Have you ever printed anything by calling the DOS interrupt to dump the screen to the printer? That was what our editor's print function did :)

We graduated to Pascal from there because it was in our syllabus, and quickly discovered the joys of Turbo Pascal and all its cool extensions - especially the asm blocks and the graphics libraries. Of course, we wrote fractal programs and marveled at fractint.

From there it was to Turbo C - to revel in the freedom of C. I remember my first C program being pretty mundane - it converted a number into words. The challenge was that it had to print out the number in the Indian way of doing so which is not the simple thousands, millions, billions model. Instead we have the thousands, lakhs, crores model; and I remember agonizing over it to make it work. Mind you I still didn't have a computer, so this was all still paper and pencil and mental debugging.

Here's why I completely agree with Jacques that coding is a drug: I was so happily engrossed in doing it that I didnt get good enough overall scores to get into a CS bachelors. So I picked mechanical instead, and focused on the areas that were computer centric - Finite Element Method, Graphics etc. My interest in graphics had led me to read up the Schaum's book on Computer Graphics and I already knew the vector math for those pieces long before we did vector math. When we started doing engineering drawing using pencil and paper, projection systems were already familiar to me - because I was on my way to build my own 3d Graphics engine using Turbo C++. All thanks Robert Lafore for making OO click for me. No other book since has made it so lucid, at least for me.

That's the other thing - books. Unlike today, there was no easy access to books in India. My best source were the scores of street booksellers who sold old books - and what a treasure trove of books they had. I learnt of Russian expert systems and computer architectures like nothing else, of APL the language in a book written by Iverson, tons of old British computer magazines that introduced me to editors like Brief and Hypercard-clones, and whole lot more - in all a heady whiff of the ocean of opportunity that lay outside the staid old land of E.Balaguruswamy and Yashwant Kanetkar (these are probably still revered in Indian academia). Sadly, those booksellers now exclusively sell pirated Harry Potters and self help best sellers, but thankfully there are Indian editions of good books nowadays.

But I digress. Throughout my undergrad my only access to computers was at college - so most of it was spent trying to get as much lab time as possible. Lots of social engineering went into this endeavor (sucking up to the CS Dept head to allow use of their lab, helping the lab assistant in the Robotics lab to use the only Sun machine, etc), and pretty little code came out, but it was a heady time because anything was possible. I did manage to get the basic 3D graphics engine working (it proudly spun a sphere around, IIRC), and managed to present a paper on (what is now obviously basic) AI at the Computer Society of India Student convention while doing mechanical engineering.

Fast forward to today: I've been an IT professional for 13 years now. I still code as much as possible at work (architecture/design decisions or helping my teams with complex fixes), but I have a healthy github account, and some more side projects at work. Coding makes me happy. I dont want to stop.

Thanks JacquesM for helping me remember why I do this.

Idea extension: The dead letter box framework

This is an extension of the idea for the delicious replacement. The idea is to treat accesses to a website as messages dropped off - dead letter box style.

Dead letter boxes allow communication to happen without meeting using a pre-agreed signal or format. The idea is to use a web server's log file as a dead letter box for various types of messages. Like so:

404 GET /dlb/tweet/my_tweet_as_an_underscored_resource_name
404 GET /dlb/todo?task=do%20something&priority=high&context=@home
404 GET /dlb/post-blog-entry?title=A%20Blog%20Title&body=A%20uuencoded_string_as_long_as_log_will_take_goes_here

Again, the way it would work is that a job wakes up regularly, greps the web server logs for these error messages, and does what's actually expected from each of these.

Subversion of http's actual intentions? Maybe. But it sure produces a very decoupled way of working - no high capacity web server with custom code to handle all these operations need exist, and new operations can be added in a very decoupled way.

The best advantage of all? As long as you're able to hit a web server - you can tweet, log a todo, post to your blog, etc, and much more. No more need to be connected to each of these different sources.

Next: do the same with email, so that the same functions are available when you send an email. Although you could implement that as an actual email processsor.

Not entirely addressed yet: security. Maybe making it https would suffice?

Idea: An acceptance test framework for command line programs

This is an extension of the standard acceptance test framework pattern to the world of command line programs.
If you specify:

• a set of scripts to run, 
• a set of inputs and expected outputs, 

the framework runs them, and prints out the results of running the tests like so:

I have most of the framework working in another project that should be easy to extract out and make into a standalone project

The problem with TDD for custom development

I had an idea for a cool app today. I wrote up the initial set of requirements, and came up with the high level "here's how the guts will work" to convince myself it can be done, and naturally started thinking of the architecture.

Soon as I had enough of the pieces "working" in my head, I thought "well  great, let's write some code. But maybe I should do it the TDD way. Hmmm..."

Here's the problem: TDD tools don't exist for what I'm trying to do. Its not a webapp, and it most probably is not in Ruby or Java. Or maybe I should write it in one of those languages then? I dont know.

My point is that TDD is probably not appropriate when you're still doing exploratory architecting of the application itself. You want to see the core pieces work, or you want to figure out what the core pieces even are, TDD will get in the way for one or both of two reasons:

• You'll get hung up on the specification and miss out the architecting
• You'll put your actual project on hold while you build out the TDD tools :)

Now TDD purists would say the specification will extract the architecture or clarify it, but IMO TDD is at its best when the second D implies automation.

As I've been writing this, I'm thinking there's another alternative: Plan for TDD - decide when you'll start doing it and with what tools, and which parts of the app are appropriate to use it for - but dont do it just yet until you know the architecture itself.

Installs should be hudson-simple

Idly musing about the causes for Google Wave to reach the place it did, it stuck me that its new incarnation - the yet-to-be-unveiled "Apache Wave in a Box" - should be dead simple to install if it has any hope of adoption.

My gold standard for java apps that are dead simple to install? Hudson or now Jenkins.It should be as simple as downloading a jar and running it. Everything else should flow from there - including updates.

Idea: InstantQ

It struck me as I was waiting at the bus stop the other day that in urban living is a lot of standing in queues. The bus stop follows the honor system by default, and people are generous to a fault (at least where I live in Chicago), but could technology help?

What if you could start a queue using your smartphone when you arrive at the stop? Anybody arriving after you would look for your queue, and join it.When the bus arrives, it automatically notify each person in the order in which they joined the queue that it was their turn.

Now this might be too slow for a bus stop where once the bus arrives, everyone gets in in a few seconds, but any other place that involves waiting in a queue, this might help avoid queue anxiety.

And now for the commercial version: Any organization that needs to provide service to people has these elaborate systems that show the "Now serving" display could just buy the InstantQ software that would run on a PC and "host a queue". Anybody with a phone could join, and as long as we provide the ability to join a queue via text, we could cover most of the population.

Jack/Webster/Fluent: Use YAML as the text format

YAML seems like a nice fit for a text-based format for Jack or Webster/fluent. The things that attracted me to YAML are:

• Strings dont need to be quoted unless absolutely required. This is a huge advance over json
• YAML has references.

it still might not be the best way to represent code as data, but its close.

Reality Driven Development

I've started reading Growing OO Software - Guided by tests, and two paragraphs in Chapter 1 struck me as interesting constrasts:

The catch is that few developers enjoy testing their code. In many development

groups, writing automated tests is seen as not “real” work compared to adding

features, and boring as well. Most people do not do as well as they should at

work they find uninspiring.

and a few lines later:

If we write tests all the way through the development process, we can build

up a safety net of automated regression tests that give us the confidence to make

changes.

It seemed to me that the first is grounded in reality and the second aspires to a idyllic future.

What if we came up with a methodology that actually assumed reality, and while we're at it, the worst possible one? The concept is nothing new - for eg, network design assumes the worst always - the internet's architecture is replete with strategies against the untoward happening while expecting it to.

So, any methodology expecting to better the software development process should expect that:

• The average programmer doesn't want to write tests
• The code developed will outlive any one person involved in its creation and maintenance
• The architecture, design and implementation will always represent the forces that were in effect at the time of their being decided upon, and therefore will be exactly what those forces required them to be
• Forces will change over time, and will pull/push the architecture, design and implementation in ways not expected originally
• Architects, Designers and Developers are forces on their own right, and will do things "in their own way" despite any official or external mandate .
• Evolution of the software will be more akin to frankenstein-in than darwinian, ie, all software will gravitate towards a Big Ball of Mud
• Average developers will prefer tools to better practices, i.e prefer fixing instances of bad behavior to changing them
• In a large enough organization, average developers are not cross-functional. They have a niche and are very happy in it. The exceptions do prove the rule. 
• The average developer will tend to narrow the definition of his niche because his world is constantly expanding and its difficult to keep up.The only possible exception to this rule is interview time, when the developer will make an all out attempt to project an air of being a generalist.

I could keep going, but you get the general idea. That then, is Reality Driven Development.Nothing new here, I just gave a name to something we all know - kinda like Ajax :)

How to practice RDD, you ask? Well you already ARE - this is the status quo :).

If you're intent on changing that status quo for a better reality however, the first step is to accept the reality. This might be easier for the actual developers to see as that IS the reality, but for people intent on changing that reality it might be a little bit more difficult. I personally am someone trying desperately to close my eyes to this reality because it doesn't fit the ideal world of "how programming should be done". I'm guessing that proponents of Design Patterns, proponents of best practices of any kind, mature developers and TDD/ATDD/BDD practitioners would feel the same way. "If only we could get Joe Developer to see the light" seems to be the underlying sentiment; but accept we must.

Once we accept that this is how we actually build software, we can move in quite a few ways towards a better outcome, and again by extension from fault-tolerant network design, I present some ideas:

• Quality doesn't have to be absolute: However your app currently works, it does. Don't let your next step be 100% quality. Instead focus on the next 5% increment.
• A model of layers of reliable quality built over ones that aren't: Remember the OSI model where each layer did one thing right but was expected to do others not so well? And how layers above did those things right? This is an extension of that idea. I don't have exact suggestion yet on how this should be applied to the list of problems above, but it seems like this is the approach that any solution should adopt. 
• Support over prescription: This particularly addresses changes in behavior such as TDD and BDD. Asking developers to change their workflow on its head is not likely to be accepted except by those already predisposed to changing it. Instead, make the adoption easy by providing support. For eg, why not create a tool that records the outcome of any debug session as a junit test automatically instead of expecting the developer to hand-write the test?

I realize that the ideas above are not exactly fleshed out, but I'm alluding toward an approach to software development that's grounded in reality, and aims at improving the overall maturity and reliability over time. I don't mean something like CMM, however, because its interpretation has almost always meant handing off the quality responsibility to an external auditor. I'm leaning more towards something like the agile manifesto, but grounded in reality. 

Note on CMM and its interpretation: I have found that CMM is more often than not interpreted as an organization compliance initiative, not as a means to measure maturity and improve. This is exactly opposite of the CMM's stated intent, and therefore can be ascribed to flaws in the interpretation of the model. The most visible parts of the CMM machine, however are always big, up-front audits and compliance checks.Its no surprise, therefore, that the average developer treats the CMM process with suspicion, and its outcomes even more so.

Note on interpretation in general: TDD, Agile and such best practices suffer the same issue of the gap between espoused ideal vs interpretation of that ideal by practitioners. RDD is a response to this gap.

Concept: Treat requirements as external forces, especially non-functional requirements

Along the lines of my idea to use FEM-like analysis on code, I realized that it should be possible to model the things that cause the architecture and design of the software over time as physical forces.

Case in point: My team is currently working on adding multi-lingual and multi-currency support to a fairly large app. Adding this predictably requires changes across the board, and led me to visualize all the places we're pushing and pulling at the current design/architecture to make this happen.

Could this instead be considered a single external force acting on the elements of the system? Can we study the "material properties" of the code under such forces and "sum up" the forces?

If we could do that, it would certainly move us out of the current dark ages where cost of change is still measured as a list of things to change per a specific change plan.

Maintainability of code

Most of my career has involved maintaining code built by others. I'd wager that most developers' career has been the same, even if they didn't want to admit it. Sometimes maintenance goes under the name of updating your own code, so people delude themselves into thinking they're not maintaining code, they're just creating the next version. From a maintainability POV, any code that's built is legacy.

And yet most (all?) methodologies of software development either address completely start-from-scratch greenfield development, or propose ideal practices that mature, passionate developers who are in the field for the love of programming.

The reality, however, is that most development involves enhancing or maintaining code - usually somebody else's, and mostly crufty; and in all likelihood the crufty code is from somebody who's presence in the industry is a happenstance rather than a planned event. If you're lucky it merely represents somebody's state of maturity at the time of writing, and that person has now improved.

A comprehensive methodology for maintainable software, therefore, must:

• To address the legacy code angle:
• Provide mechanisms to create "good enough" comprehension of the code
• But avoid attempts at large scale or totalitarian model-driven comprehension. Such attempts will always fail in the real world simply because there will always be something outside the model
• That is, allow for leaky abstractions
• That is, allow for manual steps. There will always be manual steps. The methodology should allow for that by exclusion or explicit statement.The former is easier.
• Help identify what changes and what doesn't. Easier: help identify what has changed and not in the past and let the humans extrapolate to the future.
• Provide a means to migrate from what is to what should be that's incremental.
• To address the maturity concern:
• Allow for different levels of maturity
• Allow for the ability to define "good enough" architecture, design and code; and the ability to easily enforce it
• Allow quick enough comprehension of these definitions
• Allow for gradual adoption, and a means to measure progress

The usual solution is to relegate this to Software Engineering, which typically spirals into talks of CMM and suchlike - process heavy, people agnostic.

The reality, however, is that software development is largely a human effort, and precisely because it lacks the usual shackles of other human endeavors. A mechanical, electrical or electronics engineer will always hit upon some natural limit. Not so the software engineer. His limits are the limits of the mind. If you can think it, you can make it.

And therein lies the problem. If you can think it, so can a multitude of other software engineers; and each such mind can think of at least one variation to the same problem using the same essential solution. This is why I believe we will not see Software ICs any time soon. Most process oriented methodologies tend to gravitate towards this concept, or to the equivalent one of "resources tasked to do X will repeatably produce output of increasing metric Y".

Meantime, in the real world, human programmers are finding ways to game that system. 

As software practitioners, what are we doing to better this? There seem to be promising starts with the BDD and (to a smaller extent) TDD movements, and (in a less focused, but generic scale) with the general move towards declarative programming. There're some incremental gains from tooling in general, but those gains are largely in the area of reducing the steps that the interface requires you to go through to achieve any particular task. There's also some progress in architecture analysis, validation and enforcing that constructs such as DSM and its ilk provide - if practiced regularly.

However, all of these lean toward the mature, self-aware programmer. By the time it reaches Joe Developer, its an organization mandate, not something he WANTS to do. So the gaming cycle begins. This time, however, its insidious because it projects the impression that code quality has improved. We therefore need tools and methods that "work in the trenches". I don't have a good enough answer, but here're are some interim steps that I can think of:

• Allow for easy documentation of what exists, and in such a way that the document follows changes. Working diagrams are a good way of documenting the subset of the code that's understood. 
• Use tagging as a means of collation of documentation created thus. Its easy and "good enough".
• Don't loose what you gain. Developers gain a lot of system knowledge during debugging. There's no easy way of saving that for posterity, so the knowledge is lost. Do not expect developers to write a wiki page - they don't have the time. This area is ripe for tools such as 
• bookmarking and code traversal trails being saved. 
• A "tweet my XApp-fu" app is what's required here.
• A way to share all of this that's searchable
• Make creating tests a 1-click affair. Any run of the software should be convertible into a test, especially a manual  during the normal write-compile-test cycle that the developer engages in.
• Allow cheating on setting up the context. In most production systems, its not easy to inject mocks or test doubles. Test automation should allow for as little of the system being mocked out as possible.
• Mindset changes:Somebody on the team needs to evangelize these:
• "Works on integration box" is less useful than "PROVABLY works on any box". This implies CI without requiring buying into the CI religion.
• Exemplar test data is better than just test data. Exemplars are test data sets that "stand for" a scenario, not a particular test run. 

Webster/Fluent/Jack: Create a text-based syntax as well

I realized that while I'm trying to usher in better programmer tools, most programmers might already be comfortable with their existing ones. So to foster better adoption, the simpler idea might be to allow a text-based syntax as well.

Hopefully, they wont be able to escape the wily wares of better tools for too long!

Idea: Queues: a visualization of work queues

I have been thinking about the concepts mentioned in Product Development Flow, and visualizing a dashboard based on the Queues mentioned in that book. An agile team could be represented minimally by a queue - the list of tasks in its backlog, and how the team processes that list. If we had a visualization of this, it would be easy to represent how well/efficiently the team is working

Extending this downwards, the team's performance could be measured in different ways: as a summation of each team member's work queue (which would allow per team member productivity and efficiency estimation), or as a summation of work completed, or (even interesting) as a summation of the different workstreams it's currently undertaking.

Extending this upwards, a set of teams or the entire organization could be measured in terms of the queues for each team, and the attributes of each queue chosen to be measured.

Speaking in software terms, I'm thinking of creating:

• A system that allows the creation of a queue, and a visualization of it.
• The ability to create parent and child queues
• The ability to "sum up" based on arbitrary attributes of each queue

An easy launcher for redcar on Windows

I just (re)discovered Redcar, and have been playing with it. I love it so far (especially the seamless git integration, and the tree-document-view concepts) but I find unnecessary windows irritating, so I obviously didn't like that Redcar needed a command window open in addition to its own SWT one. Here's how I made launching Redcar a 1-click affair.

1. Install redcar and make sure it works on its own. ie, typing redcar on any command window should start it up.
2. Convert the redcar icon from png to ico using imagemagick. You obviously need a unix box for this, or have imagemagick installed on windows. Online tools are also available, but this seems the most programmable and quick - especially if you have a unix box around :)
   

    [user@box]$ convert -resize x16 -gravity center -crop 16x16+0+0 redcar-icon-beta.png -transparent white -colors 256 redcar-icon-beta.ico

3. Create a windows shell script (redcar.vbs) that loads up redcar without a command window
   

       Set WshShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
       WshShell.Run chr(34) & "redcar" & Chr(34), 0
       Set WshShell = Nothing

4. Open up a launch folder of your choice. Mine is the Quick Launch bar.
5. Rt click on the folder, New -> shortcut, and in the wizard that shows up, enter the following:
1. Location: drive:\path\to\redcar.vbs
2. Name: redcar
6. Rt click on the shortcut -> Properties. Then change the following:
1. Change Icon -> Look for icons in file: drive:\path\to\redcar.ico
7. In the folder (or in my case, on the Quick Launch bar), Click on the Redcar icon. Redcar should now load up straight to the splash screen.

Notes:

• The one drawback with this is that you no longer see the debug information that the command window provides. I could not have know that Redcar looks for git during its launch without that output. So there's still reason to launch redcar from the command line. This method doesn't prevent such launches.
• I noticed that there's a github project creating a windows launcher for redcar, but it seems to me like the steps above could be easily automated and the artifacts added to the redcar core distribution for a simpler launcher.Maybe I'll fork redcar and add them :)
• If you're using Portable Git on Windows like me, the key to having redcar find git outside MinGW is to add the following to your path:

drive:\path\to\PortableGit-xxx\cmd

Jack: Javascript should be the base language

It just struck me today morning as I was getting ready that the base language for Jack - my idea of the next gen programming language - should be Javascript. The good parts, of course, but definitely javascript.

This ensures that it has the widest spread of runtime environments, has the functional bits built in, and - as long as we keep the base concepts to the good parts -  none of the ugliness

Idea: A textmate rewrite in Fantom

Textmate seems ripe for a rewrite to a platform outside of Macs, and what better language than Fantom?

Sigh. Another project idea that'll have to wait.

Idea: More Effective Workspaces

Workspaces are invaluable in keeping focus on the job at hand. I've been used to Workspaces on Linux Desktops for a long time, and recently discovered a Windows powertoy - MSDVM - that does the same on windows. This idea is a couple that I've had that can make them more effective:

• A per-workspace todo list: So that when you form a plan of what to do in that WS, the plan is visible always
• A "Send todos to workspace X" feature: I frequently find myself remembering to do something official while I'm on my personal workspace. It would be nice to be able to send a todo to that todolist without losing context.
• An "I'm stepping out" button with tickler for when you return : Click on the I'm stepping away shoudl allow you to enter quick text on what you're currently doing, so you have a high visibility "This is what I was doing before I stepped away" note on the workspace when you return. I constantly find myself doing this using a new notepad instance even though i have other todo lists - just so its front and center when I return. It would be nice if the workspace did it for me.

Of course, all of this can be done with current software and some manual setup, but it would be nice if the todo lists were workspace-aware, so this works out of the box.

A goal for Fluent

Fluent, pka Webster is the Web-based DSL metalanguage+editor I'm working on currently. It seems like the language workbench challenge would be a good fit for a goal to work towards.

True BDD for Webapps

Current BDD implementations have a "core" language they support. How about a bdd framework for ANY webapp?

"Outside in", the core BDD concept implies that you start with the outer layer of the app and implement inwards. Well, why not apply that starting with the html, going inwards to js, refactor js to make it mvc etc.

So the true BDD implementation for Web Apps should load in a browser, and allow any browser action to be validated naturally.

Implementation Ideas:

• a html based runner of the spec a al jscoverage (which should be rewritten in js, btw) is required, so your spec can be loaded in html, and runs the target app in html as well
• spec will be in a cucumber/robot syntax - very english-y, which will be converted into functions in javascript. Nothing new here, this is what all existing BDD implementations do anyway. We'll just leverage the best Javascript one.
• building html must use zen coding for example so its easy to do so.
• Adding behavior will involve writing a spec for it, and adding the basic js code for it, then refactoring it to use an appropriate framework (mvc, etc) and so forth.
• As that progresses, the main spec becomes more detailed, and contains nested specs for specific layers. Eg, the javascript layer could be tested directly using rhino, etc

Simple Admin Tool

Most applications have configuration defined in files. This idea is to automatically wrap a simple admin tool around the configuration file instead of building one from scratch.

So, for eg, a java properties file when input to this tool would automatically generate a website that allows  values in the properties file to be created, display, updated and deleted.

Not in scope: updating in-memory variables with the new values. Although a simple reloadProperties() call can be supported.

Wireless Projection

You go to a meeting room, and typically connect up your laptop to the projector or plasma screen in it.
But do you really need to? Why cant you connect wirelessly to the display?
That then, is the core of this idea.

If the projector/plasma is connected to one machine, others can connect to it wirelessly and display the content of their screens on it.

Alternately, the one connected attendee can then easily enable other attendees to use his machine to remotely display their screen contents! This has the added advantage of allowing anybody to use the display, not just the one person connected to it - without the hassle of disconnect/connect/key combo to show etc; not to mention the chance of allowing group participation through easy passing of the display baton.

Implementations possible:

1. Xserver on a box that's physically connected to a projector/plasma.Wrapper server & client programs that allow Webex/vnc-style connect-ability to project local display onto that display.
2. VNC client/server setup with client in listen mode
3. Custom wrap of xserver or vnc that automates all this.

Metalysis

Metalysis: The analysis paralysis that results from thinking about meta and meta-meta programming. A prime sample
language = domain model + syntax (template + css)
the model till now describes:
    - the elements of the language
    - how to display/edit it
but the editor's interaction model is fixed based on the meta model   

so true language editor is
language editor = domain model + display model ie syntax (template + css) + interaction model (javascript behavior)

now this behavior could be modeled as a domain language itself, but for it to be useful, it would need something that can execute the domain, not just understand and allow its editing

so true language = domain model + editing model (display model + interaction model) + executor (interpreter/compiler)
:
So I should just create the meta model and its interpreter, and running it will spit out my language editor, ready to run!

This is when I came back to the ground and started writing an event loop and handler. Nothing like normal GUI programming to make you realize you're nothing special!

Webster: switch modes instead of making it hybrid

I just had a brainwave: I have been mulling about ways to bypass the creation of a hybrid editor, when it seems like there's an easier way: allow fluid change to text mode of the whole document.

When you dont want to treat the code as code, just switch to text, and use text semantics. Simple :)

Of course, change "whole document" to "part of document" and you get a hybrid editor for free.

Which of course, goes back to the "islands of one language floating in a sea of another" idea that I've been mulling about. What if the "document" was actually a disjoint data structure held together by multiple instances of small editors? Each such editor would handle its own language fragment.

More thought required, obviously :)

Idea: Photo to Graphviz diagram: an android app

Take a picture of a whiteboard diagram with your android phone.
This app converts it into a graphviz diagram.

A delicious alternative

Delicious is the one intenet resource I use, and that is now on the verge of being sold or shutdown. Here's my idea of an alternative. As always, I like them to be self-sustained, and preferable controllable by my self.

All we need is a web server, and hits to a particular url in which the link to be saved is contained. The url doesnt even need to be active; it just needs to log to the web server's logs. An offline job runs as frequently as needed, trawls the logs, extracts the links and stores it.

Entry and viewing of the link database is mediated through a browser plugin as now, because that's the most common usage anyway.

Simple, and as long as you have a web server (which you should anyway), you're good. The only custom component is the offline job.

Idea: Photo to Graphviz dot file for android

Finally posting this idea from last year. The idea is that you'd take a picture of your latest-n-greatest app architecture that you just scrawled on the whiteboard (as you usually do nowadays at the fag end of that big architecture meeting), and this app would automagically convert it into a graphviz dot file.

Simple, huh :)

Things that I'm really interested in

This is one of those big picture posts. Here're the "hard problems" I'd really like to solve:

• Code Comprehension: How to understand a new codebase easily. If i wrote an oreilly book it would be called "Understanding Code"
• Code creation and maintenance: A lot of this is manual, repetitive, lossy and tedious. Programmers should use the tools (that they make for users) for their own use. And: less snapshot-based development, more fluid one.
• Applying AI techniques to code itself.

Slots: It's like freemind converted to twitter :)

Pardon the cheeky title.


The idea is to have an app that will allow you to take a piece of text, and define "slots" in it. Essentially something like the "Its like x for y" sentence above. It then stores the template sentence, names for each slot, and the values. Once these are stored, Slots then allows for them to be queried using the template sentences. My previous idea of the app to remember where things were could then be just an application of slots.

Further development of the idea:

• It need not have any specific interface; it should embed itself into other apps or work on clipboard text.Input is therefore any text. This means that it could be an android app, or browser extension and still work the same.
• Storage can be local our cloud.
• Once a match is made, action can be taken in any/many ways to actually do something
• 
  

OT + Grammar = New way of defining languages?

Operational transformation is a way of defining documents via the series of steps required to create the document - among many other things.
Language grammars are usually defined by rules on how to recognize a document once its created.

What if the latter was done in the former's style?

Need to think this through but if the rule set is not prohibitively large this would be a nice way to achieve incremental parsing, not to mention the ability to have "islands of known information" mixed with WIP unknown fragments, methinks

Idea: A language that has DI built in

... in fact how about a language that:

• Has only mixins, no pure interfaces (this is probably there in at least a dozen languages already, albeit without the no pure interfaces restriction)
• Allows objects to interact only through dependency injection?

As always, I'm pretty sure a language expert would poke some serious holes in these ideas :)

Layered model for software components

Another idle thought; obviously having your laptop around when you're half asleep at 5am is good :)

How about  a OSI Layer model for application level software components? Lower layers wouldnt have guaranteed delivery or security, which would be provided by the higher layers.

Concept: Dynamic analysis of code statically

Some idle browsing of the architects' dzone led me to think about how programs can not be completely analyzed statically; which led me to think of how humans understand code by just looking at the source.

We run it in our heads.

If we can do it, can't computers? And I don't mean it in a Godel-limit-breaking way, but surely there should be small enough chunks of code that a computer can "run in its head"?

Related thought bits:

• Since the godel limit is that representation != understanding, how about we settle for metadata calculus = very weak for of understanding? Semantic web for code, that is.
• Would knowing the type and range of inputs to a particular piece of code help us understand the code better - a la Agitar creating unit tests on the fly?
• Often missed out is the "world" around the code, and its impact on the running of the code. It might be useful to model the world as well, and probably develop a taxonomy of such environments. Eg: when function x() is run in java it will behave in one way vs when run as javascript. This is a loaded statement 

Need to think more about this.

Slashchrome: an idea whose time is long overdue

Its been a while since I considered taking this project up, and decided against it because it seemed like too simple a project. The idea is to enable Google Chrome to be able to search using the forward slash key. Nothing new, spectacular, or revolutionary.

I had, in fact, gone through the bug trackers of both the Chrome and Chromium(issue 150) projects a while ago, but a recent re-reading got me back to the old fervor: Here was a dead simple feature that the core developers refuse to implement, and the only reason that I can see is that some webapps (read GMail) capture the slash for its own purposes and the browser doesnt want to get in the way.

The developers insistence in ignoring users who have been begging for the feature since its inception is reminiscent of the Pidgin vs Carrier saga. Its time to fork Chromium and include slash search, methinks.

Since so many people are asking for it, I thought somebody would have already forked it, but a google search did not turn up any such projects.

I also looked briefly at an extension that was written to overcome this limitation, but comments on the thread seem to indicate that a core implementation is still desired. Hence this idea. However, there are some really nice features in the extension that I'd borrow when implementing this.

Roadmap:

• V0.1: fork Chromium and change the keyboard mapping of search from ctrl-f to /
• V0.2: Make the switch configurable via options so that people can still switch back to ctrl-f behavior if needed
• V0.3: Blacklist support for sites that use slash for their own purposes (this from the typ-ahead extension)

Thoughts:

• I looked at the source briefly assuming that finding the keyboard map should be simple. I've not yet been able to.
• The build setup also seems pretty time consuming. I should probably setup on windows (being the first implementation and all, and probably the most users), but that entails setting up on VS Express - which seems like an excursion down the proverbial rabbit hole in itself.

Idea: A browser plugin that answers the question: "How did I get here"

Sometimes I reach a page through a long and circuitous traversal of the interwebs, and I wonder how I reached there. It would be nice if there was a browser plugin that showed me that path.

And no, the back button is not exactly the answer because of new tabs.

Better: We need a browser that shows the part of the web that has just been browsed as a graph, so other traversals can be considered openly instead of through our memory of where we have been!

Fantom: a new language to learn

Today I discovered Fantom - a surprisingly interesting language that seems to get so many things right. My first thought was to re-implement Joey in it. We'll see.

The language is definitely interesting - especially considering 2 brothers built it in the (mostly) spare time.

Things to learn from/use:

• Fan(tom) is self hosting, ie the compiler is written in fan itself. So building it from source involves using an older release of fan. This is pretty standard in compiler land, I guess, but still novel to me; and probably novel in that the although the final executable is a native binary, it goes through intermediate non-binary output levels
• It compiles to its own intermediate code called fcode, primarily because the original intent was to be able to generate code that worked the same on Java and dotnet.
• Javascript compile - sweet.
• The FWT toolkit - havent started using it yet, but any library that allows declarative UI is good in my book. Especially since the same fan source can be used to generate  web ui a la extJS.
• It also seems to have a fluent api to building html - another nice thing
• Units (a la Frink) and a datetime api with durations built in.

PS: When I saw the link in LtU I half expected it to be inspired by the Phantom, but apparently not. I have decided, however, that if I do develop in fantom, the projects will be Phantom themed :)

Some structural editor links

Saving here as there's no delicious bookmaklet on the iPad.

an interesting study of actual developer usage of text editors, and implications for structural editors

Linked discussion at LtU http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3567

FrankenEditor: an unholy marriage of emacs and vi

As is obvious from my previous post, I have just re-discovered these editors; and obviously think there should be a best-of-both-worlds editor. See the bottom of said post for feature list.

Another thought: recast Webster into a vim/emacs mode. That will go a long way in adoption.

Doh! Vi and emacs ARE structured editors

In hindsight this was to be expected. I have been reading up the vi and emacs documentation and finally realize that they are both structural editors - not like Alice and Concrete and Webster (when/if its made) is, but definitely they're smart editors, and in some parts, they're structural editors too.

Vim got it right with "command mode is normal, you drop into edit briefly", while emacs got it right with its major modes.

Thoughts in no particular order:

• They seem to have a fixed concept of the "constructs" that comprise structured text, although that could well be my superficial reading of the docs. ESP considering the file explorer mode, for eg. That seems to be a full-fledged structural editor
• emacs already has the concept of skip words ie structural elements that should be skipped over in navigation which is exactly what Webster/concrete does. Dunno if vi does.
• vi's idea of normal mode seems to be more efficient than emacs's "type normally, use ctrl/escape sequences to insert commands" as a user interaction strategy. Should use this for webster.
• this explanation of why the command sequences need to be as weird as they are is useful in understanding emacs, as was Tim ottinger's explanation of the vi command syntax
• they both separate function from it's keystroke - an important detail.
• The good things, therefore are:
• structured text
• structured navigation
• undo/redo/buffers
• command syntax, ESP of vi
• normal mode is navigation, not text entry
• emacs mnemonic navigation seems better than vi's home row based one, although using modifiers for the levels of objects (char,wore,line,para) doesn't.

It seems like there's opportunity to take a modern stab at an editor that's in the spirit of these two behemoths, and yet goes beyond their limitations.I would not be the first to think this :)

I propose, others implement...And a vim hater recants

Predictably, some of the ideas ive been writing about are being implemented by others, notably webster.
I recently found concrete on github, and it's a pretty close approximation of Webster. It doesn't have all the niceties I meant to implement ESP cos it's viewpoint is MDA, but it's there for the most part, and does the modeling in a neat and lightweight way by reusing html, CSS and standard dom - something I intended to do, but didn't succeed with.

The real reason for this post tho? I just realized that vim could just be half way down the syntax editing route!

Coming from someone who doesn't think much of vim's weird modes and keystrokes that's as about face as it could get. Tim ottinger's vim tutorial was what made me change my mind. This is by far the most approachable vim tutorial iv'e read and finally had me grok the vim way. Now the need for command and edit modes seem almost required, especially considering all syntax driven editing is in such a mode! Vim could be thought of as a syntax driven editor that supports the "text language"!

Maybe I'll implement Webster as a vim mode someday!

Doc Dep: A tool to handle the dependency of code and its corresponding documentation

As I work on Abu, I realize that documenting a project is a separate side project in and of itself. I started with a simple Idea.txt, and that has burgeoned into the following:

• A readme.md (for markdown) for github's main page
• A contents.md showing the contents of the codebase
• A design.md for the design "discussion"
• A user guide - WIP
• A developer guide - to be created
• A roadmap.md
• A log.txt for my personal use - as a tickler for when i stop working and have to pick back up later.
• A news.md (yet to be created) letting people know of recent changes

And what's interesting is the interplay between changes I make to the code (or design) and these documents. Each change in code/design obviously impacts one or more of these documents, but there's no easy way for me to keep track. Eg, change in design impacts the user and developer guides, the news file, and sometimes the readme and roadmap files. Any new top level directory added  changes the contents file and so forth.

Now, what if I had a way to say "this code file impacts these document files", so that when the code file changes, I have to change the corresponding document? That then, is the idea - DocDep - which will have:

• A means to list all the documents in a codebase - some kind of config file should do, or probably a /doc directory could be assumed if we want to go CoC.
• A means to represent the dependency between a file and these documents - easily done by creating a tag - embedded within a comment - in the files
• A means to alert the developer when a change has occurred on a file, which therefore needs a change in the document file linked to it.
• This could be as simple as generating a todo list by commit, Eg: todo: change guide.md to handle change in commit# xxx; Or...
• We could go anal and prevent checkin of the code changes without the documentation.

Codeviz: Some thoughts

This post to be fleshed out better later, but here's an insight I had today.
The format that codeviz will use must contain the following types of information:

• graphs
• nodes
• edges

... and these pieces of information should be easily intermingled with each other, and must be line oriented, ie the data that a node has about its parent should be expressed in that line itself, not presorted by parent to include this child. This enables easier sequential processing.

Quantum Commuter

This is an idea that I've had for quite a while, and thought I'd blogged about already, but apparently I hadn't.

You ever had the choice of two routes to the same destination and wanted to find out if the "road not taken" was the better one? Well this idea is one that'll help you find out.

Chicago's public transport system - CTA - provides an api to find out bus times and a whole slew of transit related information. The idea is to create an app that allows you to select two (or more) buses/trains that ply between points A and B; and pit them against each other using the API. The display would show a live display of the progress of the buses/trains, and who won.

I've always wanted to "clone myself" quantum mechanics-style to do something like this IRL, so I call it Quantum Commuter. Nice play on words, even if I say so myself :)

Btw, this could be an easter egg in an otherwise normally useful bus tracker app :)

Idea: A URL/URI spec for code

This is one of those early morning ideas that I have to put down before I forget it: How about a URL spec for code? Something like:
code://somecompany.com/someapp/package/structure/goes/here/AClass.java#methodName#if3@rev234

The idea is to be able to refer to any part of the code externally, easily, and transparently. guarantees on the posterity of the resource returned similar to general URLs, so they're more URLs than URIs.

Elements that should be in the url:
- language used (better notation that file extension tbd). alternative the protocol could be the language name instead of "code"
- ownership of the app by company/individual identifier. i think the java package concept of inverting the domain name works fine here
- package structure
- source object reference. could be file name, but doesnt have to be so in this abstract space
- intra source object references to methods and specific lines, eg the 3rd if in a method
- version information in the form of a scm version specifier

Code Canvas

I just discovered a Microsoft research project from 2008 that foreshadows quite a bit of my ideas with Webster. Its called Code Canvas (demo video).

In line with the N+1 concept, the few things I can think of (if I were to think of Webster as a product) are:

• Treats everything as a graph - down to the individual tokens. This is a game changer in the way wave was :(
• This also means using graph operations to edit code.
• Any language, not just CLR
• Any mix of languages eg, one web app uses shell scripts, build scripts, assemblies/jars, html+javascript+css, ui frameworks (jsp/asp/etc), compiled code (c#, java, et al), ORM scripts, so forth

I do like the semantic zoom, and the Quad tree algorithm to enable it.

Idea: The "Switch around the And" plugin

I was watching a colleague editing a document, and was struck by the the number of steps he need to change a phase like "cat and dog" and convert it into "dog and cat". I myself have had this problem quite a few times. How difficult would it be to make a plug in (in whatever editor) to automate this simple task?

So, this then, is my next idea: Create the "Swith around the And" plugin. For specificity let's call it a Word Plugin. But no reason to stop there - how about for most other editors?

In fact, when I think about, this could become like one of those projects that write "hello world" in every possible language. The "And switch" plugin for everything from vim to word to what have you :)

And of course, this is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Why stop at just "and" as the matching pattern? Why not add this as a feature to any code editor so swapping arguments of a binary operator is easy and automated?

Todo: Somebody must have done this already. Google it.

Idea: Boxview - a new kind of html editor

This is an idea for a better html editor:

• Expose the box model to the html programmer by visually showing the boxes that elements are contained within
• allow changing of padding, margin and border properties directly instead of through property sheets
• automatically calculate the minimal set of properties required to specify the box model built by the user. Eg, if a child and its parent element have the same property, bubble the property up an dinherit it.
•  Allow abilty to specify "global" overflow and containment of elements directly instead of through interacting css properties.
• Allow views of the model with no content, some content and  a lot of content directly, so that the model can be stress tested.
• 
  

Visual != Graphical

It just struck me that visual programming doesnt necessarily have to mean a graphical programming environment.  It should be possible to denote the visual aspects of the program in text mode as with graphical mode.

It does mean some environment, however. A text editor is not one. And that might be the deal breaker for most visual programming environments.

Now what if we had a visual programming IDE in text mode?

Syntactic Sugar IS UI for programming languages

I'm reading Paul Graham's On Lisp, and this section from the chapter on macros struck me as interesting:

Backquote is usually used for making lists.1 Any list generated by backquote can also be generated by using list and regular quotes. The advantage of backquote is just that it makes expressions easier to read, because a backquoted expression resembles the expression it will produce.

...

The longer the macro definition, however, the more important it is to use backquote

 This may not be original, but I just realized that syntactic sugar is the UI for programmers. It just happens to be stuck in the limitation of text. I couldnt help but think that a Structured Editor would obviate the need for backquotes, or the usual "lisp is full of parens" complaint.

All they were trying to do was to make a UI for the programmer

Idea: Where's my stuff

An app that remembers where you keep your stuff. It could be as simple as a wunderbar-style interface. You fill in the blanks for the following sentence:
"I keep/ have kept in/at "
Input could be text or images.

Nothing revolutionary, but should be really useful, methinks. esp as a phone app
maybe this'll be my android app.

webster: avoiding the editing problem

- "everything is a graph": the problem (as is obvious from various discussions on the web on the topic) with structured editors is to allow seamless editing of code. the standard example being converting a for loop to a while loop. My idea is to treat everything as being part of a graph, with infinite breakdown. The default level will be at the "syntax" level, but if you want to break that further, press a hotkey, and the syntax-based placeholders and user inputs get reduced to text nodes.

Superficially, this is similar to the "hybrid editors" that have a mode to switch to text input which is then parsed back. But the key difference is that the conceptual graph is retained.

Combine this with the leaf based parsing should help keep the experience smooth.

Some more thought:
operations allowed by a text editor

• navigate text
• create, modify and delete text
• copy and paste arbitrary text, either in line mode or block mode

to emulate this, how about a structured editor has a "text grid" view

• at every text grid event, the structure model is notified, and it changes the model accordingly
• if a placeholder value is changed, no model changes are required, just the slot value has to change
• if a keyword is changed, a triage construct consisting of the following is constructed:

the rest of the structure is retained in the anticiaption of rollback,

a new structure is anticipated and candidates are stored, which through multiple events may get realized into an actual new structure

• if a new structure is realized, the old one is discarded
• the engine will aim for the quickest new structure that can be realized, given the language syntax

More thoughts on webster

I've been browsing on the general concept of structured editors hoping to find precedents, and finally hit paydirt recently - they were apparently a rage in the 80s and 90s and quite a bit of research was done on them. Of course, they were called syntax directed editors then.

Google returned a lot of hits on this new term, and one paper in particular caught my attention: http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0710/0710.2358v1.pdf

It talks about a syntax directed editor called Absynthe which allowed editing of code via the grammar of its language - the editor would provide templates for entry of valid language constructs, complete with placeholders for the free text pieces. Of course, they use the right terminology - syntax elements and terminal symbols, respectively.

The paper also went into some detail as to why such editors have not found much favor:

A first problem within a pure template model is that only terminal symbols can be entered as free text. This characteristic is absolutely intolerable in practice. Suppose you want to enter an arithmetic expression containing three or four operators. Then you should select the appropriate template by means of commands or menus for each operator and argument - which results in many additional commands being triggered.

This is why a pure template model has never been implemented in practice. Both the Cornell Program Synthesizer ([Reps 84], [Teitelbaum]) and Mentor ([Donzeau]) have used an hybrid model of top-down replacement of place holders with template and bottom-up construction of phrases from free text. We have also adopted such a model in Absynte. In a hybrid model, a focus is used to delimit an area of free text editing. In this area the text may be temporary incorrect. In the systems where the internal representations are ASTs, a first drawback is the administration required for parsing and unparsing the new representation.

If a free area is really useful to enter arithmetic expressions it does not solve the most important defect of the template model: how to handle modifications within a tree structure ? The replacement of a while statement by an until or if statement is more difficult than the corresponding change in a traditional text editor (the later is quite simple). In general, the replacement of one construct by another causes all information belonging to the old construct to be deleted. If the user wants to save some pieces, he can sometimes do it in special buffers or windows, but he must perform these operations separately (for each syntactic category and, of course, before the complete removal) because every piece of program to be saved must be inserted in its future template separately.

I don't have any better answers than the one suggested in the paper itself - that of storing deleted node content in a special buffer for use later - but here're some of my thoughts:

• Navigation = change of mode. That is, if you navigate out of one of the free text/terminal symbol areas, you're automatically in "edit node mode" - transparently.
• Allow pre-order creation of child nodes. That is, instead of requiring that the parent be created before the children can be, allow the tree to be created from all possible left (or right, if the language is RTL) terminal symbols, and keep pruning the tree as you go.
• More to come as I think of it
  

Webster: the web-based structural editor

This is an update on my previous post of a web-based MPS editor.

I've actually found some time to work on this, and I have a basic version working - well in 2 pieces.

1. A renderer that takes a language spec and an instance of the language, and spews out an editable html version of it - with keywords non editable etc.
2. An editor that takes this rendered version, and adds behavior to it a la MPS - allows navigation, ctrl-space like popups etc.

I still need to combine these together to realize the real goal, ie that of a web based AST editor, which will effectively be Language Workbench meets bespin with an MPS flavor.

But wait, there's more!

My real intent is to go much farther than that:

• Generalize the standard editor commands so that they are the true graph edit operations that are required to transform one version of code to the next. Eg, to add a new import statement, today we insert a line, type "import java.blah.foo;". This should be transformed into: "insert a new import node, which produces an editor node that allows us to choose java from the ctrl-space drop down, then blah, then foo. And so on and so forth.
• Generalize it further such that editing the structure of an application is no different from editing the structure of a class/program - these are graphs too, inherently. So I'm thinking of a zoom in/out feature. Zoom far enough in, and you see the standard AST editor. Zoom far enough out, you see something similar, but it now shows your packages, applications, deployment graph, what have you. Consider using SVG for this.
  
• Webster meets Subtext: Create capabilities similar to the ones demonstrated by Jon Edwards' Subtext. This might however be part of a language that uses Webster more than
  Webster itself.
• Implement Jack in Webster
• Implement Robot framework in Webster

FEM - like analysis on code

This idea is partly from a section I remember from the "Inmates are running the Asylum". Alan Cooper compares code to a huge stack of cards one on top of the other, with just that single flick threatening to bring the whole thing crashing down.

How about treating code as a structure, and using finite element method-like analysis on it? Of course, the math would be discrete, not continuous. But the possiblities are interesting - we already create software in layers, with upper ones depending on the lower ones. Surely some definitions of structural stabilty can be got from those? Similarly the dynamic nature of programs could possibly be modeled as forces...

food for thought..but that's as far as I've got with this idea.

A Web-based MPS Editor

I have been playing around with IntelliJ's Meta Programming System for a couple of days now, and I find it a very interesting and promising tool - to teach myself its constructs, I'v started writing an IDE for Robot scripts. I've got a basic editor and generator done and it looks pretty good, especially for completely declarative code.

I was wondering, however, at the applicability of the concept to the web - as in how easy it would be to port the concept of a declarative structural editor to the web. The MPS editor language is surprisingly similar to divs and spans - all one would need to move the editor to the web would be to slap on a generator that creates D/HTML/5 widget wizardry!

Another project to start....

Implementation thoughts:
This might not need a full fledged editor like EditArea - since its structural, it might actually be cumbersome if it were. It might be easier to have a simple div/span structure or even a table with variable row and col spans, with a single in-place editor component for the current element being edited. Of course, keypress handlers would have to be written to make it usable for keyboarders (like me), and we'd have to find a way to show a cursor always.

Interesting ideas on continuation-style parsers for javascript editors: http://marijn.haverbeke.nl/codemirror/manual.html

Further implementation idea: use the MPS Editor language to define it, and create a generator for the editor from it that outputs GWT! This way the editor is web-enabled!