[toronto-lisp] A Not Strictly Lisp Question

[Abram Hindle]

My understanding is that the people who know what the business has to do
are not the developers and can't talk to the developers or refuse to
talk to the developers. Instead developers keep trying to make tools for
these business analysts to formalize the processes they understand.

Unfortunately BAs aren't programmers so any attempt at formalization
always comes off as some hard to use tool for BAs or an oversimplication
for developers.

Many of SOA people hope they can just compose services with a high level
script and get on with business but too often they run into lame little
cases where they need some scripting in the middle anyways or the
service doesn't do as much as they need.

At least with SOA you have people defining interfaces which are more
stable than those defined in Java.

I wouldn't worry about SOA, think of it as the commandline, except as
services and servers instead of commandline programs.

Healthy doses of skepticism are to your advantage ;)

abram

David Penton wrote:
> Or maybe, to be frank, perhaps not a lisp question at all. So delete
> this if you are busy.
> 
> However...from the two meetings of the Toronto lisp group I have
> attended, I gather that several of you do web development, or related
> stuff. So some of you are probably knowledgeable in areas that are a
> mystery to me.
> 
> I made it CASCON today and enjoyed the session on "Practical Ontology
> Infrastructure". Of course, this topic has plenty of connections to
> things that may interest the lisp community. But that topic is not the
> source of my questions, or rather my bafflement.
> 
> Over the past ten years I have often been utterly flummoxed and not a
> little annoyed when I try to grasp what is going on in the "business
> world" of computing. At CASCON this week many of the sessions were about
> SOA (Service Oriented Architecture). The notion of SOA came to my
> attention some time ago, but although I looked it up on wikipedia and
> even read some commercial blurbs on it, I still have no damned idea what
> they are talking about. I enjoy learning things that seem like "computer
> science." But I cannot for the life of me penetrate this combined
> computing and business stuff.
> 
> From my limited, jaded, and admittedly dated perspective, it seems we
> are subjected to a never-ending succession of questionable panaceas,
> cooked up - maybe - by marketing people. The ones that are about
> computing over the internet seem particularly offensively squishy to me.
> 
> Would anybody be willing to fill me in, perhaps not on the mailing list
> if it is too off-topic? LIke, as I struggle to learn lisp and such,
> should I really pay attention to "software as a service", "service
> oriented architecture", and so on ad infinitum?
> 
> Or should I just grow old and die of gum disease and varicose veins. F**k.
> 
> - Dave -
> 
> 
> 
> 
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