I’m not able to attend the PDC this year, but its been interesting watch the
definition of Oslo take better shape after watching it for a long while.
I was reading John
Flander’s post on the topic, where he reiterated the “Oslo as language,
model repository, and visual editor aka Quadrant” theme. The language,
known as “M” – draws this quote from John: “visual models
are useful for a certain portion of the developer population, but for the most part
developers like to write code, which means text.”
Text is good. I can store text in a version control system, and branch it when
needed. I can merge it
with well-known tools later on, and compare the differences between
versions easily. I can have multiple developers work on it at once with a sane
reconciliation process upon check-in.
Even visual models have a textual representation behind
the scenes struggle with these basics…because the text is not first class
– it is (often) just a convenient serialization format that is sufficiently
opaque for the benefits of text to be lost.
So I’m all for M. It will be fun to watch the vision unfold further.