James Gosling on visualizing software designs

James Gosling on visualizing software designs and understanding large-scale distributed systems!!

Artima has an intersting interview with James Gosling, ( his weblog)where he talks about how visualizing a problem helps in solving that problem.

My fav quotes are:

One of the hard problems is exactly what you were just asking about concerning distributed systems. You've got a reference to a remote resource. What happens if that remote resource moves? Should you keep the backtracking information? How do you keep the backtracking information? Solving that problem is really, really, really hard. Lots of people went running at that brick wall over, and over, and over again, trying to find a way to make these large scale distributed references really work. In the computer science academic world, it was generally considered that an internet link just wasn't of any value unless it could handle resource moving and renaming and issues like that.

In some sense, the brilliant thing that Tim Berners-Lee did was simply to say, "I don't care." For 20 years people had been failing to solve these problems in any large-scale way. Berners-Lee decided to just do the simple obvious thing that solves the problem he needed, namely, getting ahold of a resource. And that's actually an easy problem. Coming up with those names, URLs, is a relatively straightforward thing. He did that, and that enabled a lot of what the Web is today. But the Web has all these problems. What happens if a Web page moves or gets deleted? That is exactly the problem of maintaining or managing the configuration of any large scale distributed system. On the one hand, the URL design has made the Web somewhat fragile. Broken links are all over the place. On the other hand, if they had tried to really solve that problem, the Web never would have happened, because the problem is just too hard.

Interesting read!!!!!!!!

n btw, this interview is 3^rd in a series, the second one is also good which talks about exceptions and exception handling, also contrasts the approaches taken by Java and C# when it comes to exceptions.