Over the last few months, I have written about some of the changes occurring in the development landscape. Some of the other writers in TechRepublic’s Programming and Development space have also been approaching the same topic with hands-on articles, such as Tony Patton’s recent piece on Silverlight 2.0, and Peter Mikhalenko’s continuing articles on various Java APIs. Today, I want to touch on the concept of reflexivity.
Reflexivity, in a nutshell, is the idea that when many people believe something is going to happen, they unwittingly cause it to happen. The idea originated in economics, and I first stumbled across it in a piece about stock prices. In the stock market, when companies fear that a crash may be coming, they take certain measures (such as cutting back orders of stock or laying off employees) that play a significant role in creating a stock market crash.
We all know who the 800 lb. gorillas in IT are: IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems (which is slimming down to be a 500 lb. gorilla), and so on. Now, how many of these gorillas are really involved in what programmers do? Or, you might think about where the tools and languages you use originate. It’s a pretty short list. If you are a Java developer, your language comes from Sun, and your tools are either Eclipse (originally an IBM AlphaWorks project), JDeveloper (Oracle), or NetBeans (Sun). PHP developers seem to stick with text editors of some variety or another, by and large. This leaves nearly 100% of Windows desktop application developers, and probably 30% - 60% of Web developers using one tool: Microsoft Visual Studio. Talk about an 800 lb. gorilla!
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Reflexivity, in a nutshell, is the idea that when many people believe something is going to happen, they unwittingly cause it to happen. The idea originated in economics, and I first stumbled across it in a piece about stock prices. In the stock market, when companies fear that a crash may be coming, they take certain measures (such as cutting back orders of stock or laying off employees) that play a significant role in creating a stock market crash.
We all know who the 800 lb. gorillas in IT are: IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems (which is slimming down to be a 500 lb. gorilla), and so on. Now, how many of these gorillas are really involved in what programmers do? Or, you might think about where the tools and languages you use originate. It’s a pretty short list. If you are a Java developer, your language comes from Sun, and your tools are either Eclipse (originally an IBM AlphaWorks project), JDeveloper (Oracle), or NetBeans (Sun). PHP developers seem to stick with text editors of some variety or another, by and large. This leaves nearly 100% of Windows desktop application developers, and probably 30% - 60% of Web developers using one tool: Microsoft Visual Studio. Talk about an 800 lb. gorilla!
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