Thursday 25 October 2007

OOPSLA: Brian Foote "big balls of mud"

Lots of people have mentioned to me the Big Ball of Mud paper. It's a classic apparently.

One of the authors, Brian Foote, gave a keynote at OOPSLA. I'm afraid to say I found it deeply disappointing. The talk - which lasted ninety minutes - really had very little to say, other than repeat the BBoM thesis (this really only takes a few minutes to describe). Given that the BBoM paper is now ten years old now I was hoping to see what the speaker had learnt given these ten years: were things better or worse? What have we been doing right? What more needs to be done? Should we give up? Or is there some new research area waiting to emerge?

None of these questions were answered. Although the talk was mildly entertaining with creative use of powerpoint and stories, I didn't feel that it was appropriately technical enough to end an OOPSLA. Shame. Sorry, Brian.

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