IBM fellow Grady Booch remains one of the company's most respected authorities on programming. The chief scientist, since 1980, of development tools specialist Rational Software, which IBM acquired in 2002, Booch is a geek's geek and one of the original developers of the Unified Modeling Language.
Such is his dedication to his craft that Booch refused to let a little thing like a heart attack last year get in the way of maintaining his blog. Spending an increasing amount of time on research, he remains an active participant in IBM's vision for next-generation software engineering, which includes experimenting with Second Life and mashups.
You blogged from your hospital bed last year. Do you have a mild case of cyberdependency or were you just staying focused?
About an hour after I'd regained consciousness from my open heart surgery, I started a conversation with my nurse and mentioned that I had a blog. He visited the site real-time and suggested that he be my eyes and hands to blog for me while I lay there, still wired to a variety of software-intensive machines. So, I'd not call it cyberdependency, but rather I'd call it just exploiting the resources at hand.
You are championing virtual programming environments with IBM's Codestation in Second Life. How does this work and do you think it represents a new era for global collaborative development?
For me, it's a simple economic choice. For example, this week I'm in London and yet need to give a keynote to a group in Brazil. I could fly there — at a cost of several thousand dollars and the cost of days of my time, increasing my carbon footprint — or I could be there virtually, which is not quite as good as being there in the flesh but still far better than just voice or video.
In a software-intensive system, the ultimate truth is in the code
Do you buy into the argument that business mashups will drive the next wave of web services?
Economics will drive the next wave of web services. Mashups are on the edge, and service-oriented architectures [SOA] at the core are the economically viable and technically viable choice for a large set of problems now. Remember, the mashups themselves must be well architected if they are to endure and remember also that SOA is really just a particular manifestation of the classic message-based architectures.
You're one of the original authors of the Unified Modeling Language (UML). What would you say to developers who distrust the simplicity of a UML diagram and argue that it fails to convey the complexity of the underlying code, which may be bug-riddled?
In a software-intensive system, the ultimate truth is in the code. However, the code is never the whole truth, because there is a loss of information from design to code: information that cannot be reverse engineered from the code — elements such as...
