TL;DR: I have an idea for an after-hours coding experiment at the Conj. Interested?
I'm at ALE2011 in Berlin. Jason Ayers gave an interesting presentation. He works for Cincom, a maker of Smalltalk. They wondered what would happen if 8 people programmed together on the same problem (instead of one or two). They set up an experiment in which 8 people on 8 computers could each have their own interface to the same Smalltalk image. (That meant that any change Person X made to a method in the system would be instantly available to everyone else once the compiler accepted it. It'd also be picked up by the continuous testing system.) They gave the team a problem to solve and a set of steps to work through (patterned after the way wolf packs hunt and kill prey). They've done multiple trials at different conferences (etc.). It sounds both fun and interesting. And for those of us into pairing and tight collaboration, it might be illuminating. As he presented, I found myself thinking that a similar thing should be possible with 8 Emacs instances talking to one `lein swank` instance. It'd be useful to have a sort of automatic-commit-and-push-on-file-save plus a lightweight way of automatically picking up changes other people make. I expect that'd be more annoying than the Smalltalk experiment -- there are advantages to the Smalltalk/InterLisp one-image-to-rule-them-all model -- but it might still be fun/interesting/illuminating. I'd be willing to do the implementation work to allow us to run this experiment at the Conj during after-hours or other hacking time. I'd need to know there were interested participants and someone from the Conj organization to do logistics. (A table that's as round as possible, plus power, should suffice.) What say you? ----- Brian Marick, Artisanal Labrador Contract programming in Ruby and Clojure Occasional consulting on Agile www.exampler.com, www.twitter.com/marick -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en
