Java inventor tries for a jackpot

A profile of Charles Simonyi in Technology Review describes Java inventor James Gosling as a recent convert to modeling:

Recognizing that the software industry constantly reuses old programs, Gosling proposes finding a way to plug existing code into a modeling tool that will represent it graphically, rather than requiring programmers to pore over millions of lines of text. ...

Code-named Jackpot, the project is still small, well outside Sun's product development process.

In an Artima interview that provides more information about Jackpot, Gosling throws a little love to technical writers:

One of my general design principles is that it's really helpful to have a good tech writer on the engineering team early on. If you're building something and you have a tech writer trying to document it, and the tech writer walks into your office and says, "I don't know how to describe this," it means one of two things. Either you've got a really stupid tech writer who you should fire. Or much more likely, you've got a bad piece of design and you ought to rethink it.

Java · 2003/11/03 · 0 COMMENTS · Link