Software Fashion

fedor writes "Software fashions come and go, but they always claim a few victims on the way. Where there's fashion, you'll find that rather weak willed person who is the Stupid Fashion Victim (or the SFV for short). This great article from Software Reality is all about fashion in software. Do you all remember WAP? In a couple of years some of the current 'technologies' will be gone too. The article mentions VB.NET, struts and XP as current fashion..."

Comments

The one i hate most

[smartin]

Hungarian Notation., the fashion of obfuscating your code.

What about CORBA?

[DrInequality]

He hit all of my favourites: XML, Visual Fred, etc...

But missed CORBA! Surely it belongs in the Technology X != Silver Bullet category. As far as I'm concerned, CORBA best solves the "this project has too many resources" problem.

But then again, I'm probably just another SFV :-)

Re:Interesting?

[Doomrat]

Don't you see? Moderating it as Interesting is a master stroke of comedy. It's the only thing which has made me laugh on Slashdot all day. Most of the other attempts to be funny here result in my wishing cancer upon the poster.

More ignorant flamebait...

[M.C. Hampster]

From the article:

VB.Net is really just syntactic sugar on top of C#. C# offers more and better libraries.

That alone should tell you that the author has no clue as to what they are talking about. I am most definately not a VB.NET fan, but that statement is just false and shows a huge lack of understanding of the .NET Framework.

Re:More ignorant flamebait...

[Keith Russell]

They're talking out their asses on the libraries. CLS-compliant is CLS-compliant. But they're dead-on right about VB.NET. I'm pretty sure that Microsoft "upgraded" VB by starting with C#, changing the syntax to match Basic, then dumbing it down with over-verbose keywords for new language features and a lack of "intrinsic" keywords for unsigned integer types. All this for a language so different from previous versions of VB, it needs a non-trivial conversion anyway.

Hmm, instead of making the language easier to use, they just made it different. Syntactic aspartame?

Missing the biggest stupid software fashion

[0WaitState]

The biggest stupid software fashion is IT outsourcing--it has reached the point where every corporate middle manager feels they have to have a story on how they're outsourcing, long before (if ever) outsourcing has proven any reliable ROI.

Unfortunately, unlike other stupid fads applied to software such as TQM, ISO9000, RUP, etc., outsourcing does real economic damage to the victims, (as opposed to just the psychological damage represented by trying to work around the others).

Everything, including tools, in moderation!

[RevMike]

What? No mention of UML?? Together with Design Patterns, these two are making my fellow software engineers less intelligible by the minute!

RevMike's first law of development methodologies- "The only thing worse than not following a methodology is rigidly following the wrong methodology."

If UML and Patterns is making your engineers less intelligible, then they are doing something wrong. It is possible that those tools are not appropriate for your problem space. It is also possible that they need to drop the elements of the model that aren't working for them.

Design Patterns is an incredibly useful tool, especially in the OO world. But as was noted in the article, there is a danger of designing everything as a pattern. Being able to say "I use a Service Locator to look up the remote resources" or "I use this Abstract Factory to get the proper xml parser" is incredibly useful. But it has a tendancy to be overdone.

Everything, including tools, in moderation!

Re:LOL, Struts is right on target.

[Mr. Slippery]

Using modular design leads to more complex code, its a fact of life.

If modularization begets complexity, you ain't doin' it right.

Modularization should simplify, in that each module encapsulates and abstracts a well-definined function. It may add volume to your code, but should render it easier to work with.