There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

Basics of qualitative research: Grounded theory procedures and techniques

According to W. Edwards Deming, American companies require nothing less than a transformation of management style and of governmental relations with industry. In Out of the Crisis, originally published in 1982, Deming offers a theory of management based on his famous 14 Points for Management. Management's failure to plan for the future, he claims, brings about loss of market, which brings about loss of jobs. Management must be judged not only by the quarterly dividend, but by innovative plans to stay in business, protect investment, ensure future dividends, and provide more jobs through improved product and service. In simple, direct language, he explains the principles of management transformation and how to apply them.

Out of the Crisis

How has Japan become a major economic power, a world leader in the automotive and electronics industries? What is the secret of their success? The consensus has been that, though the Japanese are not particularly innovative, they are exceptionally skilful at imitation, at improving products that already exist. But now two leading Japanese business experts, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hiro Takeuchi, turn this conventional wisdom on its head: Japanese firms are successful, they contend, precisely because they are innovative, because they create new knowledge and use it to produce successful products and technologies. Examining case studies drawn from such firms as Honda, Canon, Matsushita, NEC, 3M, GE, and the U.S. Marines, this book reveals how Japanese companies translate tacit to explicit knowledge and use it to produce new processes, products, and services.

The knowledge-creating company : how Japanese companies create the dynamics of innovation

物件導向軟體之架構(Object-Oriented Software Construction)探討

In the beginning, so our myths and stories tell us, the programmer created the program from the eternal nothingness of the void. In this essay, we recognise that programs these days are like any other assemblage, and suggest that in fact programming has always been about reuse. We also explore the nature of reuse, and claim that Components themselves are not the most important consideration for reuse; it is the end product, the composition. The issues still involve value, investment, and return. But pervasive reuse promotes a change in the method of construction of the program, and in the program itself.

No name: Just notes on software reuse : OOPSLA Onward! Track

Industrial practice in software engineering has developed in recent years from rigid heavyweight document-based development techniques, such as the Rational Unified Process, to incorporate more agile, iterative, communication-centric approaches such as Extreme Programming. This shift has created a need for a similar shift in software engineering education. We report our experience of incorporating an Extreme Programming option into an existing document-centric software project course. While students taking the option were generally positive about Extreme Programming, the projects' external clients had a more mixed experience.

Less Extreme Programming

Object-oriented design patterns have been one of the most important and successful ideas in software design over the last ten years, and have been well adopted both in industry and academia. A number of open research problems remain regarding patterns, however, including the differences between patterns, variant forms of common patterns, the naming of patterns, the organisation of collections of patterns, and the relationships between patterns. We provide a semiotic account of design patterns, treating a pattern as a sign comprised of the programmers' intent and its realisation in the program. Considering patterns as signs can address many of these common questions regarding design patterns, to assist both programmers using patterns and authors writing them.

Patterns as signs

AMo deSystemforFlexibleAliasProtectionJohnPotter,DavidClarke,andJamesNobleMicrosoftResearchInstitute,MacquarieUniversity,Sydneypotter,clad,kjx@mri.mq.edu.a uAbstract.Ob ject-orientedprogramminglanguagesallowinter-ob jectaliasingtorepresentlinkeddatastructuresandnetworksofinteractingob jects.Aliasingcomplicatesformalreasoningab outprograms,asitcano ccuranywhereinaprogram.Inourmo desystemprogramsareanno-tatedwithmo desthatindicateob jectownershipandcontroltheextentofob jectaliases.Bylo calisingaliases,ourmo desystemprovidesacontextforformalreasoningab outob jectsystems.Beingstaticallycheckableoursystemo ersapracticaltargetfortheformalre nementofob ject-basedsp eci cations.1Intro ductionAliasingisendemicinob ject-orientedprogramming[22].Ob jectsareusefulformo dellingabstractionsfromtheprogram'sapplicationdomainb ecauseob jectshaveidentity|evenifanob ject'sstateorb ehaviourchanges,theob jectisalwaysthesameob ject[30].Unfortunately,identityimmediatelyleadstointer-ob jectaliasing,b ecauseob jectsrefereachotherviatheiridentities.Becauseanob ject'sstatecanchangewhileitsidentityremainsthesame,achangetoanob jectcana ectynumb erofotherob jectswhichreferit,eventhoughtheob jectb eingchangedmayb eunawareofreferringob jects'existence.Aliasingcomplicatesreasoning ab outob ject-orientedprograms;sp ecif-icallytheinabilitytolo caliseob jectreferencesintro ducesalackofmo dularitinthereasoning,requiringvariantstob eformulatedoerentireprogramorexecutionstate.Tomanagealiasinginob ject-orientedprograms,wehavtro ducedexiblealiasprotection,anovelconceptualmo delforenforcingencapsulationandmanagingthee ectsofaliasing[35].Thisgrewfromourearlierworkwithdy-namicschemesfordetectingchangeswithaggregateob jectscontainingaliasedob jects[34].Flexiblealiasprotectionrestsontheobservationthatproblemscausedbyaliasingarenottheresultofeitherormutablestateinisola-tion;rather,problemsresultfromtheinteractionb etweenthem,thatis,whenaliasesmakestatechangesvisible.Wehavdevelop edatechniqueforenforcingexiblealiasprotectionbasedonprogrammer-suppliedaliasingmodeclarationswhichannotatethetyp esofvariableandmetho ddeclarations.Usingmo dedeclarations,thealiasingprop-ertiesofanob ject'simplementationcanb echeckedstatically,andtheextentofthestatechangesp erp etuatedviaaliasescanb edeterminedandcontrolled.

A mode system for flexible alias protection

Functional specifications describe what program components do: the sufficient conditions to invoke a component's operations. They allow us to reason about the use of components in the closed world setting, where the component interacts with known client code, and where the client code must establish the appropriate pre-conditions before calling into the component. 
Sufficient conditions are not enough to reason about the use of components in the open world setting, where the component interacts with external code, possibly of unknown provenance, and where the component itself may evolve over time. In this open world setting, we must also consider the necessary} conditions, i.e, what are the conditions without which an effect will not happen. 
In this paper we propose the language Chainmail for writing holistic specifications that focus on necessary conditions (as well as sufficient conditions). We give a formal semantics for \Chainmail. The core of Chainmail has been mechanised in the Coq proof assistant.

James Noble

Papers

No name: Just notes on software reuse : OOPSLA Onward! Track

Less Extreme Programming

Patterns as signs

A mode system for flexible alias protection

Holistic Specifications for Robust Programs