I went to hear Grady Booch speak tonight in Bellevue. The topic was development tools and where they are going. He is a good speaker and the talk was enjoyable but I found myself questioning some of his conclusions. He gave a nice history of development environments and how we as developers have been moving up the stack and putting more and more into the tools themselves. His conjecture is that the next round is something he called Collabrative Development Environments (CDE).
I think there are a couple problems with the CDE model he outlined. First, it was nearly entirely composed of elements we can get from elsewhere. These are things like wikis, IM, social networks, and even telepresence like Second Life. These things are not specific to developers and are being absorbed more into our general usage of computers. I don’t know if he is saying these will be merged into a mega product or what. I shudder to think about something like Eclipse or Visual Studio including IM, wikis, and a Second Life window.
Overall, it was a nice enough talk. He played to the Microsofties in the crowd too much and his bias towards Rational heavy tools was there. But he’s a fun speaker and I did agree with his emphasis on solving more of the human communication issues.
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