Re: Technologies and frameworks for their own sake
- From: Thomas Gagne <tgagne@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 30 Jan 2006 21:31:20 -0500
Your experience reminds me of something I've been thinking about for a couple years, and that's how technology seems to be getting increasingly complicated for no good reason -- except, perhaps, to drive tool vendor's profits.
It's no secret I'm not a big fan of Java, but it's an example of technology that provided little (if any) advancement of its own but has generated a huge market that, to Sun's dismay, has benefited Sun's competition as much or more so than Sun.
If you can accept, even marginally, the premise Java has contributed little new to the world of language design or implementation then you can see how one complicated layer necessitates another -- enter the Java IDEs, like Eclipse. Is programming in Java such a daunting enterprise it's impossible to do efficiently or competently without Eclipse-sized IDEs?
Consider SOAP, SOA, web services, etc. While companies are studying how to build and deploy them vendors rush in hawking tools, platforms, and frameworks to make grappling with them easier. In the meantime, months and years have passed and business enterprises have either delayed sharing information with buyers and suppliers or have instead deployed web interfaces to data so enormous it defeats the purpose. If you're a large supplier to an OEM sending hundreds of shipments/month does anybody really expect they'll want to page through their invoices or payment remittances 50 lines at a time?
Of course, having the web interface provides a checkbox for CIOs to x-out and occasion to test their outsource development plans.
Apparently, simple queries returning simply formatted data is too low-tech to justify budgets or perhaps too uninteresting for designers and architects to get excited about with their attentions focused on enterprise architecture patterns and J2EE to concern themselves with Occam's Razor-esque solutions.
I bet everyone can think of examples of how programmer's own tools have become more complex than the problems they need to solve, and another tool is needed to properly use the first, creating another dependency, another technology to read about, another technology to certify in, and another combination to solve with another framework.
In the 1980s the savings and loan scandal was precipitated by real-estate speculation, building a house of cards destroyed by the first person unwilling to pay millions for an office building with only 15% occupancy. In 2000 the internet bubble burst shortly after people discovered $300/share was unreasonable for a company without a working business plan or profits.
Is there an Emperor's New Clothes risk in software? Will there come a time when programmers and designers look at all the new layers, interfaces, frameworks, VMs, etc., and decide the remedy is worse than the malady?
.
- References:
- Technologies and frameworks are killing creativity?
- From: Francesco Vivoli
- Technologies and frameworks are killing creativity?
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