“I know you can be underwhelmed, and you can be overwhelmed, but can you ever just be, like, whelmed?”

Since the start of the pandemic, I’ve had to learn three “new“* programming languages (“new“* to me, anyway) and have learnt them well enough to teach at university. To teach programming languages, I learned Haskell; to teach formal methods I learned Dafny; to teach Rust I learned Rust. Having personally experienced what it is like to work in these languages, I am in a very good position to appreciate all their worst points. There will be no tattoos, no piercings, no ritual animal slaughters of any kind — rather as adversaries do in law, let us strive mightily, but eat and drink as friends.

“There’s a difference between like and love. Because, I like Pascal, but I love Smalltalk.”

Bio: James Noble (kjx@acm.org) is an independent creative researcher & programmer based in Wellington, New Zealand. After completing honours and doctoral degrees at Victoria University of Wellington (VUW), James worked at the University of Technology, Sydney, the Microsoft Research Institute at Macquarie University, and is recovering from a long stint as professor of computer science & software engineering at VUW.

James’s research centres around software design. This includes the design of the users’ interface, the parts of software that users have to deal with every day, and the programmers’ interface, the internal structures and organisations of software that programmers see only when they are designing, building, or modifying software. His research in both of these areas is coloured by a longstanding interest in object oriented approaches to design, and topics he has studied range from aliasing and object ownership, design patterns, agile methodology, via usability, visualisation and computer music, to postmodernism and the semiotics of programming.