I’m not able to attend the PDC this year, but its been interesting to watch the definition of Oslo take better shape after watching it for a long while.

I was reading Jon Flander’s post on the topic, where he reiterated the “Oslo as language, model repository, and visual editor aka Quadrant” theme.  The language, known as “M” – draws this quote from John: “visual models are useful for a certain portion of the developer population, but for the most part developers like to write code, which means text.”

Text is good.  I can store text in a version control system, and branch it when needed.  I can merge it with well-known tools later on, and compare the differences between versions easily.  I can have multiple developers work on it at once with a sane reconciliation process upon check-in. 

Even visual models that have a textual representation behind the scenes struggle with these basics…because the text is not first class – it is (often) just a convenient serialization format that is sufficiently opaque for the benefits of text to be lost.

So I’m all for “M”.  It will be fun to watch the vision unfold further.