First use of UML!

OK, so I'm joking, but here's one of my first real thank God for UML moments. I'm looking at this piece of software (actually, the RACER Proxy). There's a noticeable amount of Java source (split, as usual, into many files). There's documentation, which unfortunately is in German (and Mein Deutsch ist nichts besonderes).

However, tagged onto the end of the documentation was a UML diagram! Immediate understanding of the architecture. Hurrah.

Posted at 2004-03-19 04:17:51 by Richard • Link to First use of UML!

Alan Kay's wisdom

In my course of wandering the Web (I'm actually looking into Scheme, because it's important to know things!), I encountered two great Alan Kay quotes.

"I made up the term object-oriented, and I can tell you I didn't have C++ in mind."

— Alan Kay

"Java and C++ make you think that the new ideas are like the old ones. Java is the most distressing thing to hit computing since MS-DOS."

— Alan Kay

Posted at 2004-03-19 03:14:08 by Richard • Link to Alan Kay's wisdom

Semantic Web Hints and Tips

Very handy — I learnt something new (use lists for exhaustive itemisations).

Redfoot also looks mighty interesting — I am entranced by the idea of hypercode, where the operating Python code for the Redfoot application is actually provided in the knowledge base. Similar to some of my ideas, only executable!

Posted at 2004-03-19 02:53:20 by Richard • Link to Semantic Web Hints…