John D. Mitchell's Blog

April 2006 Archives

McNealy out, Schwartz in as Sun CEO

Yes, it's true. Scott "Scooter" McNealy is stepping down as CEO of Sun Microsystems. Sun may be doing better than previously but it's still losing real money. Worse, it lost most of its mindshare over the last 6 years.

Jonathan Schwartz will continue as President and become the top dog. Personally, I think this is a really good move. Jonathan has embraced a much more clueful approach, especially relative to the big, corporate behemoth that is Sun. :-)

A few weeks ago, I attened a Sun "VC Event" where they were pitching the new servers to VCs and their various portfolios companies down in the Valley. [The best part of getting there on time was getting time to chat with James Gosling because no suits are ever on time. :-?] Jonathan gave a strong pitch for Sun's new world view. Not just the words and slides but his presence and presentation gave off a much better tone than Scooter (let alone full-on psychos like Ballmer :-). Good luck!

Okay, honeymoon is over...

Hint to Jonathan: Sun sucks at follow through... Alas, I'm still waiting for delivery of a T2000 server to check out and there's nothing good about making people who really want to try out your products wait and wait and wait. But I'll talk a lot more about that stuff once I actually receive the demo box.

ObJava: The $64,000 question is still: what are you going to do with Java? Your presentation was full of lots of talk about how Sun is not only embracing but driving lots of open source but the family jewels, Java, is still firmly under lock and key.

Krugle is hiring

Yes, it's true that I've been lax in my blogging so far this year because I've been working as the Chief Architect of Krugle. Sure, I've written some entries on the Krugle blog but living the startup life is definitely not conducive to regular blogging -- even at a company whose blogmaster is none other than the wild and crazy Chris Locke of e.g., The Cluetrain Manifesto fame (and the rest of the team ain't too shabby, either :-).

What we're creating with Krugle is a search engine for software developers. I.e., no more pawing through pages and pages of Google searches, hunting around various web sites, etc. trying to find useful results for technical information. We're crawling millions of technical pages and sucking down terabytes of source code using Nutch, processing pages with Antlr-based parsers, and serving up the search results using Lucene.

The site is currently in a limited beta and we're getting great feedback. I just saw that we're the most anticipated launch on the Museum of Modern Betas. Heck, that's even cooler than winning a DEMOGod award.

So, if you know any take-no-prisoners, hardcore people who want to work on a project that's actually making developers' lives better... Krugle is hiring.

Tests, Specifications, Typing, Oh my!

There's some interesting discussions taking place on the nature of tests. Brian Marick distinguishes between tests as specification vs. tests as examples. Michael Feathers asks if type systems in programming languages are really tests.

Kevin Lawrence (and the Agitar crew) talk about the philosophical contention between the notions of For All and There Exists. That is, the difference in mindset of existentialists vs. universalists. Looking at debates in e.g., the extreme programming world, there's a lot of confusion and arguments back and forth that stem from this constructivist vs. deconstructivist conflict.

The biggest tragedy in these debates, IMHO, is that people on both sides of the fence polarize and calcify in their self-righteous positions. The fact is that we need some amount of both approaches to succeed. For example, writing test-first leads to horrible code if you don't also refactor as you go. Accretive unit tests that aren't themselves refactored leads to big, ugly and unmaintainable test suites. More simply, positivist (aka "garden path") tests must be balanced with deconstructivst (test (to) destruction) tests.

Stepping up a level or three, it's even better if, rather than merely mitigating and ameliorating problems, we change the game such that it's hard/impossible to even articulate bad ways and trivial/easy to articulate the garden paths. That is one of the biggest benefits to taking a linguistic approach to development.

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