With a colleague of mine, I went to the JAOO conference in Arhus. Quite an interesting conference; kind of small, not specifically technology focused, very interesting speakers and a lot of discussions about the major issues in the IT field: Architecture // Cloud // Agile // Component Models // DSL.
We rented an ancient small house in the most picturesque street of town. So much better than a hotel without atmosphere…
The session I liked most I can summarize as: everything you know is dead and crap — but here comes DCI. It was James O. Coplien that held a talk called Not your Grandfather’s Architecture: Taking Architecture into the Agile World – take 2. The talk was highly unstructured, but so entertaining. It’s not so much that I agree with the content or think it was the best contribution for new ideas as well that I liked what his talk did with the (over over crowded) crowd!
The presenter declared a lot of concepts to be crap and/or dead; such as runtime-polymorphism, class diagrams, Java, and aspect orientation. E.g., class diagrams was declared waste of time, because the end user doesn’t care about classes — however, object diagrams were somehow very good (like users care about objects). Much of the criticism was highly appropriate, but unclearly motivated. Next, James described a paradigm which was presented as brand new and the way to “save” object orientation: DCI, short for Data, Context, Interaction. The paradigm was illustrated through C++ code examples, and seemed to rely on a special way of combining C++ class templates with multiple inheritance — mixins, effectively. The goal of the new paradigm is allegedly to increase code readability. However confusingly the concepts were illustrated, I left with a feeling DCI may actually be something we will see more of.
