A Possible Future of Software Development

Google Tech Talks
July, 25 2007

ABSTRACT

This talk begins with an overview of software development at Adobe and a look at industry trends towards systems built around object oriented frameworks; why they “work”, and why they ultimately fail to deliver quality, scalable, software. We’ll look at a possible alternative to this future, combining generic programming with declarative programming to build high quality, scalable systems.

Speaker: Sean Parent
Sean Parent is a principal scientist at Adobe Systems and engineering manager of the Adobe Software Technology Lab. One of his team’s current projects is the Adobe Source Libraries

Duration : 1:1:33


[youtube 4moyKUHApq4]

18 Responses to “A Possible Future of Software Development”

  1. 1
    D3mi4n

    This is what …
    This is what Dijkstra said software development should be!

  2. 2
    shishkabobby

    This sounds a great …
    This sounds a great deal like why Erlang uses functional programming (no side effects) and actor-based messaging. A spreadsheet is the most common sort of functional programming. You have established a sort of analogy between a spreadsheet, a DAG and your programming tasks. It seems like this suggests that we are going to see more functional programming. Time to brush up on Lisp/Scheme/Clojure, Erlang, Scala or F#.

  3. 3
    outcastization4

    Even though things …
    Even though things kind of suck right now you can still make smart investments to at least avoid the rate of inflation which is pretty large at the moment.. check out the newsletter from authoropen . com

  4. 4
    bamf75

    yeah…real …
    yeah…real programmers work with a magnet.

  5. 5
    seanparent65

    Sorry – I haven’t …
    Sorry – I haven’t been monitoring the questions here. Paper mentioned (incorrectly attributed to Doug Gregor – who’s done other good work) is:
    Ronald Garcia, Jaakko Järvi, Andrew Lumsdaine, Jeremy Siek, and Jeremiah Willcock. An Extended Comparative Study of Language Support for Generic Programming. Journal of Functional Programming, 17(2):145–205, March 2007

  6. 6
    beyerandrew

    Does anyone have a …
    Does anyone have a citation for the survey paper mentioned around 0:50:00?

  7. 7
    raswirsky

    The internet ruined …
    The internet ruined everything, lowering the standards of what a “computer programmer” is.

  8. 8
    DJFishlips

    yeah, sure… Did …
    yeah, sure… Did you know that Adobe revolutionized the print industry with PostScript then PDF, “fag software” like Illustrator, they were the first to use Bézier curves for vector graphics, etc.

    “without Macromedia’s technology Adobe will be history today …”
    Creating Fireworks would be impossible without using technologies invented by Adobe.

    Or at least, that is my opinion :)

  9. 9
    poch333

    Hahaha. True.
    Hahaha. True.

  10. 10
    KnightChatX

    Can’t wait till …
    Can’t wait till Windows 7 comes out. This concept reminds me of SimpleBasic and Boku and XNA concepts.

  11. 11
    nouShit

    Adobe sucks, …
    Adobe sucks, Macromedia software ruled, they buyed them and ruined everything … including Flash, Fireworks and Dreamweaver the 3 most powerful web apps ever maked, they had go-live and such software that nobody used … without Macromedia’s technology Adobe will be history today …

  12. 12
    craiggybear

    So, Sean, this is …
    So, Sean, this is why Adobe products are riddled with more holes than a sieve these days?

  13. 13
    Marascreams2210


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    Who says it ain’t easy being sleazy? I’m bored and I want a adult to do me!

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  14. 14
    MultipleEFP

    Software companies …
    Software companies and enegenerig in Russia is growng every day !

    Investments in russian Software is a good idea !

  15. 15
    vicaya

    Agreed. The video …
    Agreed. The video is a great case study on how to build a quality reusable library/framework.

    Kudos to you and everyone involved to make ASL open source in MIT license. I’m one of the fortunate (paid) open source developers as well.

    My original comment meant to point out that the title of the video might be a bit misleading to people who’re expecting new methodologies and/or new tools/languages.

  16. 16
    seanparent65

    As with geometry, …
    As with geometry, there is no royal road to computer science. It is a challenge to the industry to learn to collect our knowledge into (re)usable components and the responsibility of every professional engineer and scientist to contribute.

  17. 17
    vicaya

    It’s still the same …
    It’s still the same old approach to software engineering though: look at a class of specific problems to see if it can be solved by a more general solution, which is basically a reusable library. By properly limiting the scope and expressiveness of the library via a DSL, you reduce the probability of errors. Somebody still have to have solved the class of problems before one can embark on writing such generic libraries.

    There is just no silver bullet in software engineering.

  18. 18
    fasteez

    really important …
    really important matter.

    how to talk about the future of things that should be mainstream for 50 years :)