Jon Udell: The riddle of asynchrony

An amusing podcast about, among other things, the programming model appropriate for SOA, and especially whether is should be synchronous or asynchronous.

You'll feel right at home, since the concepts "abstraction" and "state" raise their head quite early into the discussion...

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I don't know whether to laugh or cry

...when the representatives of the leading software companies cannot just find a common language for their discussion. Is it just me, or they sound very confused and discuss ideas on different levels of abstractions, jumping from thing to thing? Um, I prefer ivory towerists to, eh, pitch pittists.

The Biggest Benefit

Yeah. Just as "design patterns" give a common vocabulary for recurring design elements, the level of formalism we tend to employ in the functional programming community helps clarify the kinds of discussions that Udell and company want to have. I've said it before: if your conversation includes topics like "stateless session beans" vs. "entity beans," or "message-oriented middleware," or "distributed sessions," then the functional community has a great deal to say on the subject, and more importantly, has the vocabulary in which to say it. You can keep working in Java or .NET, but having a functional background helps maintain conceptual and terminological clarity.

Uhm, laugh...

Definitely seems the better alternative. But seriously, yeah, some stuff was lacking. Something among the lines of UML hierachical statecharts (?), mealy machines (?), Yourdon / Ward-Mellor?