Any opinions on this interview with Sun's Victoria Livschitz, a senior IT 
architect and Java Evangelist?

"The Next Move in Programming: A Conversation with Sun's Victoria Livschitz"
by Janice J. Heiss, February 2004 
http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/Interviews/livschitz_qa.html
_____ 

"Here's what's really sad -- the overwhelming majority of so-called successful 
development projects produce mediocre software." 

"The parallel between chess and programming is rather obvious. Programming is 
also about knowledge, creativity, and technique."

"It's not the prevention of bugs but the recovery -- the ability to gracefully 
exterminate them -- that counts." 

"A forest is a complex ecosystem, but for the average hiker the woods do not 
appear complex." 

"Object-oriented programming allowed developers to create industrial software 
that is far more complex than what functional programming allowed. However, we 
seem to have reached the point where OO is no longer effective. No one can 
comfortably negotiate a system with thousands of classes. So, unfortunately, 
object-oriented programming has a fundamental flaw, ironically related to its 
main strength [reducing complexity]." 

"Consider a few common concepts that people universally use to understand and 
describe all systems -- concepts that do not fit the object mold. The 
"before/after" paradigm, as well that of "cause/effect," and the notion of the 
"state of the system" are amongst the most vivid examples."

"Elaborate mechanisms have been devised over the years to handle transactions, 
workflow, orchestration, threads, protocols, and other inherently "procedural" 
concepts. Those mechanisms breed complexity as they try to compensate for the 
inherent time-invariant deficiency in OO programming. Instead, the problem 
should be addressed at the root by allowing process-specific constructs, such as 
"before/after," "cause/effect," and, perhaps, "system state" to be a core part 
of the language."

"But expanding the pure object-oriented paradigm to allow for a richer set of 
basic abstractions -- like processes and conditions -- is only half of the 
arsenal in the war on complexity. The other half is a powerful 
aggregation/decomposition model that is rather weak, convoluted, and fragmented 
in modern programming."

"In the fight against complexity, an attempt to engage the programmer's 
intuition and subliminal perception is the best strategy, yet it is terribly 
neglected."

"There is a plethora of other relationships that also don't fit very neatly. 
Master/slave, many-to-many, component/container, interval, element/metadata, and 
so on, are just a few common ones that we deal with every day."

"As far as optimism about the future, I see a lot of interesting work around 
presentation of data to end users. Sun's Project Looking Glass is a good example 
of the innovative thinking and good use of intuitive metaphors that make 
interactions with complex multi-media information effortless. Apple and 
Microsoft seem to be working on similarly interesting technologies. Sadly, none 
of it is going into basic research and the development of principally innovative 
general-purpose programming languages."

"Enormous productivity gains remain to be uncovered and difficult problems are 
yet to be solved. The world has gone crazy with XML and then web services; SOAP 
and UDDI are getting enormous attention, and, yet, from a software engineering 
standpoint, they seem to me a setback rather then a step forward. "