4 ms·

Given Taligent’s utter failure, not just as a business but also at delivering anything approaching useful software, only useful as a source of anti-patterns and

by fmajid 3y ago

Given Taligent’s utter failure, not just as a business but also at delivering anything approaching useful software, only useful as a source of anti-patterns and what not to do. Anti-Pattern No. 1: process is a means to an end, not an end in itself.

Angostura 3y ago
I’m not sure I agree with your belief that we live in a world where all ventures and software succeed or fail based entirely on their merits.
userbinator 3y ago
Dogma has always been a popular means to promote the latest fads in snake oil and conslutancy services. "Those who can do, do. Those who can't, teach."
- rahoulb 3y ago
  Totally off-topic but I really dislike the phrase "Those who can do, do. Those who can't, teach." It implies that teaching isn't a skill of its own. Some of the best football coaches were mediocre players (Alex Ferguson, Jose Mourinho) and some of the best players turned out to be very poor coaches (Steven Gerrard springs to mind at the moment). Can you only learn physics from someone who has made a world-changing discovery, or learn to write from a best-selling author? Or do you learn from someone who knows just enough to guide you in the right direction with enthusiasm and correct your mistakes in a way that doesn't make you feel like a failure? What is correct is dogma in software development is a problem - software is too malleable and the world changes too fast to allow one set of ideas to dominate everything. That lesson hadn't even been thought about in the 90s though.
  - userbinator 3y ago
    The implication I have in mind is that many of those who teach are doing it because they can earn $$$ better that way than by actually practicing what they preach. Expensive consulting services, training courses, books, videos, etc. It's not about whether any of that stuff actually works; it's about essentially creating a religion and extracting profit from the gullible.
GeekyBear 3y ago
> Taligent’s utter failure, not just as a business but also at delivering anything approaching useful software Technology developed by Taligent landed in other projects, for instance, the Java JDK. > in early 1996, IBM had assumed full ownership of Taligent, the joint venture started by IBM and Apple and later joined by HP. Taligent had been developing an object-oriented application framework and operating system called CommonPoint, which included extensive international support. When IBM took over, CommonPoint was mothballed, but much of the underlying technology was integrated into other IBM products. Fairly quickly, the management of IBM and Taligent came to a realization: Java was missing international support. But Taligent had great international technology, talented engineers--including Dr. Mark Davis, president of the Unicode Consortium--and a location about 100 meters from Sun's JavaSoft division in Cupertino, California. Thus, a partnership was born: IBM arranged for Taligent's Text and International group to contribute international classes to Sun's Java Development Kit, making Java powerful enough for real-world business applications. For JDK 1.1, Taligent provided the new java.text package, plus a number of new classes in java.util. This included Format and all its subclasses for formatting dates, times, numbers and messages; Collator, for language-sensitive string sorting; and BreakIterator , for determining line, word, and sentence boundaries in Unicode text. In java.util, Taligent contributed parts of ResourceBundle, as well as the Calendar and TimeZone classes (which provide flexible, international-friendly date and time support). In addition, IBM contributed a large collection of locale data from their National Language Technical Center in Toronto. This API and data provide a standard way to handle the requirements of different countries and languages, making this transparent to developers. https://icu-project.org/docs/papers/history_of_java_internationalization.html https://icu-project.org/docs/papers/history_of_java_internat...
- genman 3y ago
  Internationalization was certainly an important aspect of the Java language but unfortunately the first iteration of Java date and time management was a complete mess - namely while Java strings were immutual, Java date and time objects were not, making them considerably more error prone.
  - stuaxo 3y ago
smitty1e 3y ago
(Fr)Agile.
breadwinner 3y ago
Just because Taligent failed does not mean everything from Taligent is bad. Just because Google and Facebook were successful does not mean everything they did is worth emulating... such as open floorplans, continuous deployment, everyone-does-everything and other such crap.
- 082349872349872 3y ago
  My grandmother's advice to me on tractors, etc. was to never buy retail: get them at the auctions for the fellows who thought they could both pay dealer retail and be profitable. In this case it's possible to recognise both that Taligent inadvertently subsidised production of a nicely packaged collection of "best practices" (taken individually, the TOC topics lgtm) and that shipping crap dominates designing (maybe even building?) according to best practices but never invoicing. (I don't know if it's still true, but for a long time last century the "secret sauce" of Silicon Valley was that it was easy to find people who had just come off of one of these grand "new new thing" Потёмкин projects, and both (a) wanted to ship this time around, and (b) knew the best corners to cut to do so)
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]

by fmajid 3y ago

Angostura 3y ago

I’m not sure I agree with your belief that we live in a world where all ventures and software succeed or fail based entirely on their merits.

userbinator 3y ago

Dogma has always been a popular means to promote the latest fads in snake oil and conslutancy services. "Those who can do, do. Those who can't, teach."

rahoulb 3y ago
Totally off-topic but I really dislike the phrase "Those who can do, do. Those who can't, teach." It implies that teaching isn't a skill of its own. Some of the best football coaches were mediocre players (Alex Ferguson, Jose Mourinho) and some of the best players turned out to be very poor coaches (Steven Gerrard springs to mind at the moment). Can you only learn physics from someone who has made a world-changing discovery, or learn to write from a best-selling author? Or do you learn from someone who knows just enough to guide you in the right direction with enthusiasm and correct your mistakes in a way that doesn't make you feel like a failure? What is correct is dogma in software development is a problem - software is too malleable and the world changes too fast to allow one set of ideas to dominate everything. That lesson hadn't even been thought about in the 90s though.
- userbinator 3y ago
  The implication I have in mind is that many of those who teach are doing it because they can earn $$$ better that way than by actually practicing what they preach. Expensive consulting services, training courses, books, videos, etc. It's not about whether any of that stuff actually works; it's about essentially creating a religion and extracting profit from the gullible.

GeekyBear 3y ago

> Taligent’s utter failure, not just as a business but also at delivering anything approaching useful software Technology developed by Taligent landed in other projects, for instance, the Java JDK. > in early 1996, IBM had assumed full ownership of Taligent, the joint venture started by IBM and Apple and later joined by HP. Taligent had been developing an object-oriented application framework and operating system called CommonPoint, which included extensive international support. When IBM took over, CommonPoint was mothballed, but much of the underlying technology was integrated into other IBM products. Fairly quickly, the management of IBM and Taligent came to a realization: Java was missing international support. But Taligent had great international technology, talented engineers--including Dr. Mark Davis, president of the Unicode Consortium--and a location about 100 meters from Sun's JavaSoft division in Cupertino, California. Thus, a partnership was born: IBM arranged for Taligent's Text and International group to contribute international classes to Sun's Java Development Kit, making Java powerful enough for real-world business applications. For JDK 1.1, Taligent provided the new java.text package, plus a number of new classes in java.util. This included Format and all its subclasses for formatting dates, times, numbers and messages; Collator, for language-sensitive string sorting; and BreakIterator , for determining line, word, and sentence boundaries in Unicode text. In java.util, Taligent contributed parts of ResourceBundle, as well as the Calendar and TimeZone classes (which provide flexible, international-friendly date and time support). In addition, IBM contributed a large collection of locale data from their National Language Technical Center in Toronto. This API and data provide a standard way to handle the requirements of different countries and languages, making this transparent to developers. https://icu-project.org/docs/papers/history_of_java_internationalization.html https://icu-project.org/docs/papers/history_of_java_internat...

genman 3y ago
Internationalization was certainly an important aspect of the Java language but unfortunately the first iteration of Java date and time management was a complete mess - namely while Java strings were immutual, Java date and time objects were not, making them considerably more error prone.
- stuaxo 3y ago

smitty1e 3y ago

(Fr)Agile.

breadwinner 3y ago

Just because Taligent failed does not mean everything from Taligent is bad. Just because Google and Facebook were successful does not mean everything they did is worth emulating... such as open floorplans, continuous deployment, everyone-does-everything and other such crap.

082349872349872 3y ago
My grandmother's advice to me on tractors, etc. was to never buy retail: get them at the auctions for the fellows who thought they could both pay dealer retail and be profitable. In this case it's possible to recognise both that Taligent inadvertently subsidised production of a nicely packaged collection of "best practices" (taken individually, the TOC topics lgtm) and that shipping crap dominates designing (maybe even building?) according to best practices but never invoicing. (I don't know if it's still true, but for a long time last century the "secret sauce" of Silicon Valley was that it was easy to find people who had just come off of one of these grand "new new thing" Потёмкин projects, and both (a) wanted to ship this time around, and (b) knew the best corners to cut to do so)
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]