Free seminar on domain-specific modeling

Steve Holden steve at holdenweb.com
Wed Sep 21 04:19:37 EDT 2005


Martijn Iseger wrote:
>>if you don't understand the "silver bullet" reference, you're not
>>qualified to use phrases like "makes software development 5-10 times
>>faster".
> 
> 
> You could reverse that as well: http://www.dsmforum.org 
> 
> 
Having taken the time to educate myself (following the repeated spamming 
to promote a seminar) I can offer the following observations, but I am 
omitting the URLs as I believe you've already had far more publicity 
than the site really merits.

1. Any organisation that can talk about "a leap in productivity of 400% 
from Assembler to BASIC" as though nothing occurred in between suffers 
such a total disconnect from computing history that it's hard to take 
other utterances seriously.

2. "The last OOPSLA ... put forward Domain-Specific Modeling as a 
solution. Similar statements have been uttered recently by Bill Gates 
and Grady Booch, among others." The fact that a technique is promoted at 
a conference doesn't mean the book about it came down from a mountain 
carried by a prophet. The technologies the dsmforum site rubbishes were 
similarly promoted. If you *have* to choose a prophet then I'd stick 
with Booch, as Gates has proved many times that he's a far better (or 
anyway more ruthless) businessman than he is a software architect.

3. "Domain-Specific Modeling is only possible because it narrows down 
the design space or domain" presumably means that component-based 
approaches are more successful when the components are created with the 
problem domain in mind. What a surprise.

And so on. Please note I am not saying that DSM has nothing to offer, 
simply that it isn't marketing itself any more effectively (or IMHO any 
more convincingly) than any other comparable technological advance.

Since you appear to be an account or channel manager perhaps the best 
advice I can give you is to leave c.l.py to your technical staff and 
avoid such blatant self-promotion. DSM might seem like a silver bullet 
to you, but others have seen similar claims come and go without major 
changes in software methodology.

You might also like to look up "flowchart" in your dictionary ;-)

regards
  Steve
-- 
Steve Holden       +44 150 684 7255  +1 800 494 3119
Holden Web LLC                     www.holdenweb.com
PyCon TX 2006                          www.pycon.org




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