Oh the Irony

Back in 1999, I wrote a paper for the First IFIP Working Conference on Software Architecture, entitled "Views and viewpoints in software systems architecture". If you are interested in that sort of thing, you can find it here
(PDF).

It had a nice history of the idea of "views" in software architecture, surveyed precursors to that notion from software engineering, and examined the ideas in (then-current) use. It's a bit polemical in places (there was an on-going debate at the time about software architectures described with multiple views vs. a single dominant structural organization of components and connectors).

Today we know a lot more about views and viewpoints, and it could use a refresh or update, but that is not the point of this story.

The paper is rarely referenced, so I was surprised to find it cited by a US patent examiner: US 7,043,695 in a 2006 patent on "Object positioning and display in virtual environments"! Nothing to do with software architecture views and models!

The morale, if there is one? Our patent system is out of control.

Please join the League for Programming Freedom, and help fight software patents.

Ada Lovelace Day: Role Roll Call

If you've been under a rock for the last few months, perhaps you don't know about Ada Lovelace Day, 24 March (see http://findingada.com/ ). On that day 1678 (at last count) pledged to blog about a woman who is a role model in technology.

Today is the day and this is my blog contribution. For the past two months I've been making lists, trying to pick from the women I know of, have worked with and been inspired by just one to blog about. But it has been too hard to pick just one person, so I have made a list. Call it my "role roll call". I'll be micro-blogging the roll call throughout the day (on identica and twitter) and then capture it here at the end of the day.

You can follow the day's proceedings here (nice mashup).

Here's the Role Roll Call, as it unfolded on 24 March:

#ald09 Let the role roll call begin with: Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, programmer of the analytical engine.
6:21 AM Mar 24th from Identica

#ald09 Christine M Anderson, Ada 95 Project Manager.
http://www.af.mil/bios/bio.asp?bioID=4520
6:46 AM Mar 24th from Identica

#ald09 Nancy Leveson, pioneer in software safety, great work which I've used often.
http://sunnyday.mit.edu/
7:05 AM Mar 24th from Identica

#ald09 Judy Goldsmith dancer, computational complexity (which I mostly got) now Bayesian stuff (on which I've no clue!).
http://www.cs.uky.edu/~goldsmit/
7:54 AM Mar 24th from Identica

#ald09 Jean E. Sammet, IBM, ACM president. we met on IEEE Ada as Design Language committee.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_E._Sammet
8:16 AM Mar 24th from Identica

#ald09 Judy Clapp, my first manager at MITRE.
http://www.mitre.org/employment/trends_highlights/clapp_eng_award.html
9:04 AM Mar 24th from Identica

#ald09 Tanya Reinhart, linguist, Israeli peace activist, classmate. dearly missed.
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/20070318.htm
9:36 AM Mar 24th from Identica

#ald09 Carolyn L Talcott, formal reasoning, distributed systems, program transformation and reflection.
http://blackforest.stanford.edu/clt/
10:51 AM Mar 24th from Identica

#ald09 Wendy Carlos, I wish I could play my Moog like that!
11:26 AM Mar 24th from Identica

#ald09 Christine Hofmeister, chair IFIP WG 2.10 Software Architecture, colleague.
http://www.esu.edu/~chrish//crhhome.html
11:46 AM Mar 24th from Identica

#ald09 Myra Jean Prelle | concurrent | parallel | distributed | computing
12:31 PM Mar 24th from Identica

#ald09 Mary Shaw (CMU), colleague, pioneer in software architecture, software engineering education.
http://spoke.compose.cs.cmu.edu/shaweb/
12:54 PM Mar 24th from Identica

#ald09 Chloe O'Brian, that tough, smart intelligence analyst on 24 (played by Mary Lynn Rajskub)
1:29 PM Mar 24th from Identica

#ald09 Karen Lease, XML sorceress.
1:48 PM Mar 24th from Identica

#ald09 Nancy Lynch, distributed computing.
http://people.csail.mit.edu/lynch/
4:40 PM Mar 24th from Identica

#ald09 Janet Baker, entrepreneur, Dragon Systems founder, Balkan folk-dancer.
4:42 PM Mar 24th from Identica

#ald09 Maretta Holden, software engineering lab manager and researcher at Boeing for many years.
5:19 PM Mar 24th from Identica

#ald09 Patricia Lago, architectural knowledge and its representation.
http://www.cs.vu.nl/~patricia/
5:54 PM Mar 24th from Identica

#ald09 Adele Goldberg, Smalltalk-80, ParcPlace Systems.
6:27 PM Mar 24th from Identica

#ald09 Kathy Land, president IEEE Computer Society.
6:39 PM Mar 24th from Identica

#ald09 Judy Stafford (Tufts), software architecture, software testing.
http://www.cs.tufts.edu/~jas/
6:51 PM Mar 24th from Identica

#ald09 Margaret Minsky,
http://margaretminsky.com/
7:18 PM Mar 24th from Identica

#ald09 Valérie Issarny (INRIA), coordination, multi-policy security, trust management...
http://www-rocq.inria.fr/arles/members/issarny.html
7:34 PM Mar 24th from Identica

#ald09 Barbara Liskov (MIT) 2008 Turing Award, data abstraction, subtyping, distributed computing.
http://www.pmg.csail.mit.edu/~liskov/
7:47 PM Mar 24th from Identica

Watch this space: Ada Lovelace Day

Here's a worthy cause for which to dust off this idle blog.

"I will publish a blog post on Tuesday 24th March about a woman in technology whom I admire but only if 1,000 other people will do the same."

— Suw Charman-Anderson

Ah, Ada. My first long-term technical love affair (well, there was that thing with Lisp, but that is a story for another time). Ada is such a cool language — fine-grained, object-oriented concurrency — There, I said it out loud!
If we were using Ada, would the industry rags be talking about a "multi-core crisis"? I don't think so...

Take the pledge here
Read more here