In a Computerworld Article that got SlashDotted we learn “Microsoft’s own superstar developers espoused their loyalty to old-school methods of coding software” at the recent Microsoft Professional Developer’s Conference . Or rather, maybe, we find out they know what we at Symas knew all along.
The other gem in this story came towards the end of the piece. Herb Sutter, lead designer of Microsoft’s C++/CLI programming language, and unnamed others “predict that writing code to run on bare metal may come back into fashion, as chip makers find themselves unable to keep boosting processor speeds at current rates”. The OpenLDAP project clings to C as a development language because it is the next best thing to “the bare metal” of Assembler and our performance consistently justifies that decision. It is not clear that the “failure” to adopt much higher level languages and labor-saving abstraction layers has cost the project development productivity, either.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, it was a privilege to sit at ApacheCon with Alex Karasulu and Emmanuel Lecharny of the Apache Directory Server Project and talk about collaboration and interoperability. We missed Ludo of the OpenDS project … it would have been fun to twist his arm on some of the topics though we know he/they will play. The two projects agree in principle on collaboration for Replication (well under way), password policy, extensions to the Administration Model, and configuration. That’s a lot of collaboration! That’s this year’s best news so far.
