Evolutionary Programming!

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad via Digitalmars-d]

On Wednesday, 6 January 2016 at 13:08:46 UTC, Guillaume Piolat 
wrote:
> Sure some systems use cutting edge techniques and management.

I think Jason brought up the idea that programmers by tradition 
think a particular way and this probably will delay change IMO. 
Pushing Mythical Man Month and Moore's law can steer what people 
believe is possible or should happen, like a self-fulfilling 
prophecy (we believe it is true, and therefore act in ways that 
makes it true).

But... maybe hardware changes will force a shift in tradition, 
then it will be easier to establish completely new practices. The 
industry will probably try to uphold Moore's law, by increasing 
the number of cores. At some point that will force a change 
(using 100  actors/agents instead of 1 monolithic program). I 
hope.

> Maybe I'm oblivious to that since I was born in late 80s.

I think we all take SQL for granted, but relational databases was 
a major shift in data modelling/implementation. And NoSQL is 
major step back as a database tech (back to hierarchical database 
structures), but still a leap forward in a cloud setting compared 
to using a regular file system. So... what is technological 
advance? Depends on what it replaces, not only the tech.

> In some ways I think we still haven't catched up in significant 
> numbers with some of what Brookes proposed. Like the Surgical 
> Team http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?SurgicalTeam (original article is 
> worth reading). Such an organization definately happens but I'd 
> by accident.

Oh yes, methodology should be different from team to team based 
on problem area, people involved, organization... The "no silver 
bullet" holds there, which is useful for students, since process 
consultants sell "the one true way" (the process they know) as 
universal. E.g. I think "agile" often just means "no methodology, 
but we still have a little bit of structure".

I think methodology and programming languages aren't really 
comparable entities. The "no silver bullet" claim holds for 
methodology, I agree. For programming languages... not a silver 
bullet, but you can get a long way with high quality "forks", 
"knives" and "spoons".

Currently we have rusty knives, we have to be careful or we cut 
our tongues. The Haskell crowd are eating with bent tea spoons, 
lucky guys... ;)