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Michael Feathers (@mfeathers)

Twitter Bio:: Independent Consultant
Location:: Miami, FL (for now)
Website:: http://michaelfeathers.typepad.com/

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Oracle and the End of Programming As We Know It

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Oracle is a company that's never particularly cottoned to developers. While Microsoft and Google have developer DNA wired deeply into their genes, Oracle is first and foremost a database company that prides itself on ruthlessly pursuing its business agenda with a take-no-prisoners approach. Whether its reckless approach to technology appeals to developers or any other community matters little to the company. Because Oracle stands for nothing but its own interests and because of its long history of aggression, it is feared by all market segments it touches: suppliers, competitors, and its own customers.

There is little surprise then

An IDE is not enough

|4 Influencers

The internets are buzzing with new IDE ideas. I credit Bret Victor’s masterful demo for much of this. Chris Granger is having amazing success kickstarting his IDE concept. Josh Marinacci discussed some possibilities. I have been working in this area for over a decade and have very mixed feelings about these events. On the one hand, it is great to wake people out of their stupor and and show them what might be possible. But on the other hand I am bothered with the unspoken

Unix doesn’t follow the Unix philosophy

|2 Influencers

The Unix philosophy is a noble idea, but even Unix doesn’t follow it too closely. The Unix philosophy, as summarized by Doug McIlroy, says

The UNIX ls utility seemed like a good idea at the time. It’s the poster child for the UNIX way: a small tool that does exactly one thing well. Here that thing is to display a list of filenames. But deciding exactly what filenames to display and in what format led to the addition of over 35 command-line switches. Now the man page for the BSD version of ls bears the shame of this footnote: “To maintain backward compatibility, the relationships between the many options are quite complex.”

James

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