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The Lego Hypothesis

Posted by James Noble on Oct 14, 2008 05:09 PM

Community
Architecture
Topics
Programming ,
Design
Tags
QCon San Francisco 2007 ,
OOP ,
QCon
Summary
For decades, software engineering has "dreamed an impossible dream", to build software as easily as building Lego houses. In this talk, James Noble imagines a world where the dream has been realized, where software parts can be found in worldwide repositories, where most software is built by reusing existing software, and where we've finally been freed from the mundane necessity of programming.

Bio
James Noble is Professor of CS and SE at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. His research centers around software design and is colored by longstanding interest in OO approaches to design, aliasing and object ownership, design patterns, agile methodology, via usability, visualization and computer music, to postmodernism and the semiotics of programming.

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3 comments

Reply

The Lego Hypothesis by Emil Gottwald Posted Oct 21, 2008 3:02 PM
The Lego Hypothesis will be proven right by Rui Curado Posted Oct 21, 2008 6:42 PM
FOSS & GNU/Linux by YewMing Chen Posted Oct 21, 2008 8:16 PM
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    The Lego Hypothesis

    Oct 21, 2008 3:02 PM by Emil Gottwald

    I see nothing new. The only difference between today's Lego 'parts' and those of the future described, is that today they are much smaller - typically statements in some programming language at the lowest level of abstraction, or invocations of some framework function at a slightly higher level of abstraction. We will always be faced with the task of finding the appropriate parts and connecting them...

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    The Lego Hypothesis will be proven right

    Oct 21, 2008 6:42 PM by Rui Curado

    That's because we are actually giving the finishing touches on a paradigm-shifting development methodology that resembles the Lego Hypothesis. And its basic building block is called an atom, just like in Noble's presentation.

    The Lego Hypothesis will be proven right, but probably sooner than James Noble expects. Fingers crossed!

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    FOSS & GNU/Linux

    Oct 21, 2008 8:16 PM by YewMing Chen

    While there are forking and duplicate projects, a typical Linux distro today is built together with large collection of softwares and libraries that has been picked and hacked together to become a working OS. So I guess this is also one example of Lego building blocks.

    Reply

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