Ward Cunningham - Do you get religious about programming languages?

The Discussion

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  All of the Ward Cunningham videos have been interesting so far.
  

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  You hit the nail squarely on the head, with the one side is not Really talking about the same thing as the other side. I have run across this same kind of thing in dealing with the notion of Capitation in heath care payment schemes, often a payor will be saying something like...
  
  We will pay you X amount per member per month
  
  The party getting paid that amount will have a pile of cash with which to pay claims for the subset of members that actually require services.
  
  Those claims payers may be dealing with things in a much more granular time interval days for example. They believe that member days divided by the number of days in that month will yield member months and tie back to the first party's Fogures (I know that is not a typo).
  
  They often don't and its all because they are dealing with two different time bases in the first place. It never will tie out untill that situation changes.
  
  ANother example is when you examine eligibility against Capitation, simillar kinds of exceptions come up all the time.
  
  The development of our software over the years has taught me that, More importantly it has given me the Cognative amunition to be able to counter these observances in discussion with either of the two sides through the course of day to day work.
  
  Object oriented languages have greatly assisted in this endeavor.
  

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  Ward,
   Everytime I watch your videos one thought go through my mind. Man, this guy is good I would love to work with him.
  
  There are not many people who are passion about technology and not just a DEVELOPER (they are more like coders). I can see that developing software is your true passion and learning another language is great challange.
  
  I can not say, that I know over 100 programming languages, but surely I do not mind learning a good OOP one. I enjoyed Object Oriented Concepts, so much that I can not even think it terms of blob of code, but rather the abstract ideas.
  
  Looking forward to hear more, Maxim
  
  [www.ipattern.com do you?]
  
  P.S. Robert great job on interviewing!

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  One more thing, when I hear people complaining about learning a new programming language I always tell me to suck it up! I had to learn English, so I can program in VB
  
  Maxim

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  It's funny. I've found that I've been learning half a dozen languages per year, just because I've got to do a task where a language is incredibly powerful. I hope I'm never up to 100, but you never ever know.
  
  After about a dozen or so, the languages matter less than the platforms. For me, the platform I'm working with is incredibly important, much more so than the language, because generally there are 30 languages for any given platform (by platform I mean more than the OS, more like the development and user environment you're running in... NT Login Scripts would be a 'platform' to me, and there are at least a dozen languages within that which are really strong really only at that type of scenario).
  
  There are certain platforms I really enjoy working in, particularly database stuff becuase it's abstract, login script stuff because it's very user-interactive and just about anything .NET as it's just so damn fun to work in VS.NET
  

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  I know around 29programming languages.. and me learning more and more and more.. I like to learn them.. but the language which really liked by me is Visual Basic.. its really fantastic language.. very easy and very quick.. but ya.. Assembly Language, nothing can beat it.

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  I've just learned WikiTalk. I think of it as a component assembly language that gives you access to the pieces of a wiki. Kudos to DavidOrnstein.
  
  http://www.flexwiki.com/default.aspx/FlexWiki.WikiTalk

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  Gotta' say that this is one very switched on man.  Actually Ward and this video reminds me of a programmer/mentor that I used to work for many years ago (Ray).
  
  I remember this guys saying to me 'many years ago' (while I was learning programming / MASM) that learning a language is the easy part, it's the concepts and using the language correctly that is the hard part.  Each day we speak so many word, to various people and so many are not done wisely or smartly.  Imagine if we had the same type of hit / miss ratio, we would in a mess.
  
  Had to laugh when I heard Ward repeat the line 'it's a rounding problem'.  How many times have we all heard that ??
  
  Great video's.  Really would be great to converse in people, into the small hours of the night.. 

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  Small-talking Drum

  So, dig: I take the fundamental concept of object oriented programming from the traditional African drum ensemble (of many peoples, namely those of West Africa): what you would call “poly-rhythms” can also be thought of independent objects working together in a tightly coupled sound system. Add to this the implementation of drums for long distance communication and now you have web services sending aural packets of information over large distances, making a loosely coupled sound system. What is interesting is that in all cases, these sound-object systems “speak”—they are designed to communicate an idea. So when Ward talks about how modern Occidental machine-based objects “speak” we are on the same wavelength of ancient wisdom juxtaposed with contemporary technology.

  Object oriented programming allows me to anthropomorphize my code into a cooperative of beings that speak to each other, harking back to days long gone… a world that no longer exists.