The man who rewrote the formula engine
by Volker Weber
Damien Katz has a very interesting story about the time he spent rewriting the formula engine for Notes/Domino R6. There is so much in it, that each reader takes away different aspects. These are my key points:
- You can have a successful product with a completely neglected component, that nobody "owns". I have seen this quite often in other companies.
- Reporting a bug does not get it fixed.
- Somebody with zero knowledge of C++ who is really dedicated can write a compiler and a runtime that outperforms an optimized C program that has been around for years.
- Being bugward compatible is mandatory for backwards compatibility.
- Shitload is an engineering term meaning great amount.
Hire this man!
Comments
grossartig !!
I personally find the "neglected component, that nobody owns" reflection alarming - and no doubt one of the reasons that Notes is so rough around the edges.
see also comment by Ed Brill
http://www.edbrill.com/ebrill/edbrill.nsf/dx/damien-katz-formula-engine-rewrite
I personally find the "neglected component, that nobody owns" reflection alarming - and no doubt one of the reasons that Notes is so rough around the edges.
Yeah, but that’s very common... it’s not just something wrong in Lotus!
yes, it also is a common among Business Partners that blame Lotus/IBM for their own apps not running properly (yes, I am in this community for more than 10 years now).
oh, and I love that one: "It's truly easier to ask forgiveness than to ask permission, not to mention things get done a lot faster if you just do them."
:-)
Damien tells a really interesting story about his work at Iris. Everybody (like me) who loved to work with Lotus Notes at that times Iris had to decide and is frustrated about how IBM is destroying that work, should read this article.
How exactly is IBM destroying that work?
@ed Brill:
Damien: "But such is big corporate management, they don't even realize how much they're damaging things, they are essentially politicians not engineers."
I remmber my last devcon in Las Vegas (2002 or so). Everybody talked about the comming release R6. I spent a lot of time and money to learn about the new J2EE-Intergration in Domino. 6 Month later IBM decided to remove all that J2EE stuff from Domino.
That's only one example. IBM seams to let Domino die just to reimpleement everything in Webshpere. And this dead is very slowly ...
In the end this might be a good solution and the reason might be the unmanagable code Demien talked about. I don't know.
Wolfgang -- I made that decision, not some big bad IBM machine. (OK, I had some help from five other people, but I was the person writing the Notes business plan at the time). You can still do a lot of Notes/J2EE integration, we even bundled a runtime license for the best J2EE server on the market in Domino 6.
At any rate, there's nothing still today, and with Domino 7, that requires any component of WebSphere to run Notes/Domino. So I really don't feel this is a fair characterization.
