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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..."
Actually, I always suspect an idea is bad when Sun Microsystems has an entire Java-One conference based on it.
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
That girl in the school girl uniform is pretty scarey!
Whats next? A front page story post with the goatse guy?
It's good for a lot of situations, but it's the most overused framework I've ever seen.
Rick
We regret to inform our readers that the column, formerly titled "Soapbox" will appear under a different name after the girl on the left ate the entire soapbox.
"as demonstrated by Britney, our sexy young model over on the left"
That's my mother you insensitive clod.
In the pro community of linux, I've seen the fashion of linux distributions.
.deb format. Rpms and Ebuilds are the new fashion!
First it was Slackware, then Debian and now Gentoo. Now that Debian has lost around 90% of its market share it is being left out to dry with its anceint packages and deprecated
Whats next? Ive recently seen a rise in Mandrake cooker users, as they provide the ultimate in ease of use combined with the power.
Clippy the paperclip told me so.
Hungarian Notation., the fashion of obfuscating your code.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
.NET will disappear once Microsoft starts pushing their next initiative and forces upgrades and rewrites. It's all about the $$$, never about the product. The product is just a conduit for money.
This is why OSS is so great. Most of the time, it's not about the money; it's about the product. Therefore, it's not about getting sales, it's about getting users.
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 :-)
DROS - Open-Source Robot Software
What? No mention of UML?? Together with Design Patterns, these two are making my fellow software engineers less intelligible by the minute!
-3Suns
~~~~
The Revolution will be Slashdotted
Technology X = Money/Success/Silver Bullet
Illegal division by zero at line 1.
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.
Richard Dawkins in his book "The selfish gene" introduced a concept of a meme. Meme is a replicator, just like gene, except that it represents an idea. It is copied by us, humans, either verbally or in writing, software, paintings, etc., and so on. Susan Blackmore in her book "The meme machine" expands on the idea.
Now, what does it have to with "Software Fashions". Both Dawkins and Blackmore present well-thought out argument that memes are subject to similar forces as genes. As a consequence, just like in a genetic world you can have outbreaks of viruses, in memetic environment there are outbursts of ideas. Some of them are as much use as a flu virus, and until our minds develop resistance to it, they will spread. Once memetic vaccine has been developed they die out.
Blaming software fashions on SFV is just like blaming flu outbreak on a SVV (stupid virus victim). Note that memetic fashions are common and not restricted to software. From bell-bottoms, through furbies to whatever the latest craze we have now.
A religious war is an adult version of a fight over who has the best imaginary friend
From the article:
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.
Forget the whales - save the babies.
.NET is more like a cold than a fashion. After a while, it will just go away and everyone will feel better that it is gone.
Makes you wonder if there is some hidden insight in calling the Linux version 'Mono'.
I've dirtied my hands writing poetry, for the sake of seduction; that is, for the sake of a useful cause. --Dostoevsky
The authors validate many of my own concerns with the products mentioned, although some of their predictions are already coming true:
.Net model, as noted.
Rational Unified Process has contained roadmaps for XP process variants for over a year. RUPs primary purpose in life now is to keep consultants employed, although there's a ton of good stuff in there. Sorting it from the three tons of crap is why you need a consultant.
VB.net appears to have been largely abandoned by IT, and Microsoft's not far behind. That's good, since it just doesn't fit the
I'm not too sure what the joke is behind local interfaces on entity beans, I thought that was what entity beans were supposed to be in the first place. The whole pass-by-value thing just wasn't going to work, even if the caller and callee were in the same VM, so how else should J2EE support container managed persistence?
Finally, yes, Struts is bloated and needs to be either updated with something that has a smaller learning curve (like auto-generated beans and forms) or just something else (like the author's suggestion of JSF, which is probably going to be the thing for Java webapps). However, for organizing your code Struts gets the MVC thing down. It's just over-engineered for most apps.
but i'll bite..
;)
I am actually not sure why Gentoo is so popular right now.. I use it, but I have kind of specific reasons for using it (four-node openmosix cluster of boxes that need to be identical and so upgrades are cron'd to go off at the same time)..
For the average user not really needing to sit and fiddle around with make.conf and funky masked ebuilds I would not recommend it, Mandrake is nice for home systems where you have a ton of stuff plugged into the box and need something quick that just plain works..
I guess maybe other have specific reasons for using it..
I would post to the forum there but that is to risk massive flames and extreme moderation.
fun fun..
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
On the other hand one must ask whether programming in C# really is better than doing RAD in C++ Builder or even (ugh) Delphi.
Also, while it may be a "fad" at the moment, we should remember that Java was as well for a long time. Yet Java definitely made it past the fad moment. With C# this is even more likely since it seems like Microsoft will be making Windows more and more dependent upon .NET whether we like it or not. Thus calling it a "fad" seems difficult, despite all the exaggerated hype.
These guys have some points, but I think a much better article could be written about this topic. In particular, I object to some statements made:
Robin [...]was once asked during a job interview: "What's your favourite design pattern?" What's the correct response to that?
I don't think that's such a stupid question, as long as it's interpreted correctly. A good design pattern, like a good algorithm, is likeable in its own right, because of it's elegance and the way it breaks down a complicated problem. Maybe the interviewer wanted to know if Robin was really passionate about programming.
VB.Net is really just syntactic sugar on top of C#. C# offers more and better libraries.
What libraries do C# offer that are not accessible from VB.NET? As far as I know, all C# libraries (at least those in the standard framework) are CLS compliant, and thus accessible from any CLR language.
Because programmers didn't test that much, XP stipulates that tests must be written before the code. In other words, just because something has a weakness you shouldn't do the opposite in an extreme form.
That's just crazy talk. Automated regression tests isn't intended to relieve those lazy programmers, in XP they're the de-facto definition of what the system is designed to. Not to mention that test-first design often leads to better design, in particular wrt coupling between classes and components.
The savvy love WAP. I monitor every network I manage with it, created WAP-based listing searches for one of my real estate clients, and wrote a system to put our local newspaper's stories into WML. The users who know this don't hesitate to pay Nextel $10 a month more to get it.
There's lots of useful content that can fit within WAPs limitations, and it's a snap to do. I blame the low acceptance on content creators who are not taking the tiny bit of time needed to make WML versions of their sites.
Until the content is there, it can't become very popular in the mainstream.
Promote civility: mod down any post starting with 'ummm'.
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).
Remain calm! All is well!
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!
That's an interesting point, and one that I have been having a hard time reaching an opinion on.
See, the hacker part of me demands that anyone who has a web page learn HTML: it's not that hard, and it's like having a driver's license -- it's a lowest common denominator of skill. I believe that if every dork with a GeoCities site actually knew HTML instead of exporting from MS Word, the Web would be a better place. So, from that perspective, XHTML is something I support -- though I support it from the sense of replacing HTML (which should die in the eternal fires of Hell) entirely. Making people learn XML would be nice, but it's too complex a thing to make "required reading" for GeoCities weenies.
That said, you are obviously correct in that XML is the way the world should be. In fact, I did some web pages in straight-up well-formed XML coupled with CSS stylesheets, and it worked just fine. The only problems are that with current browsers, you can't use inline embedded images (Mozilla and IE don't support this) or hyperlinks (basically XPath, which IE doesn't support.) So, it looks like the Promised Land is withheld from us, which forces us to use XHTML for a while yet.
So, as you can see, I am wishy-washy on whether I like XHTML, or if I do whether I like it better than XML.
Of course, now I feel like I just did an in-depth evaluation of whether N*Sync or Britney will be more successful in the long run.
Ah, and then there is the other fad - point to Microsoft and say - "That's crap. Never used it, never will, won't even look, but it's crap. It's a fad! Watch it disappear."
I suggest you get off the bandwagon and do a little of your own thinking...
p.s. Stop making me defend Microsoft, you insensative clods!
I was rooting for SOAP to be on their list of crap. I've had to work with it lately, and aside from the UDDI feature, I can't think of one goddamn use for it. I mean, unless your service is a commodity, each service is going to be different enough such that a UDDI search would be useless. Without the UDDI, there is no need for the common message format. I hope it dies soon. The upside is, that most SOAP toolkits expose a service bean...and you can expose that bean using other technologies...like oh...RPC.
Blar.
I don't know, we just tiger teamed on this same paradigm at a standup meeting, and frankly most of their suggestions violate ISO 9000 and show no facility for CMI. Perhaps if they'd used a quality circle to better evaluate their stance, they'd actually have action items that would be meaningful.
Fortunately, we here in the business world don't have the same 'fashion trends' problem you software blokes seem to suffer.
A.
The very worst fashion has to be EJBs.
EJBs complicate development. Where a single class would previously have worked just fine, EJB requires up to seven (!) classes to define things like the Remote Interface, Remote Home Interface, etc. And where a simple constructor would previously have served, EJB requires a long JNDI call. Not to mention, there are zillions of arbitrary coding restrictions that must be memorized and followed for EJB to work properly.
Furthermore, EJBs drastically impair performance. The "shopping cart" demo that comes with a major commercial app server brings my 1GHz 512M machine to its knees. Such a program could otherwise execute quickly on a 286 8MHz, a machine less than 1/1000th as powerful as the one running the EJB. I regularly encounter shops that have huge farms of commodity boxes to run very trivial EJBs that would otherwise execute on a single box just fine.
And EJBs do not scale any better than 2-tiered systems. 2-tiered systems allow you to horizontally scale the business logic by adding commodity machines to the second tier. Adding another tier does not help this at all.
...For this crippling blow to development, you get to pay Bea $40k/developer. Snake oil! Very expensive snake oil!
Software development resembles a foot race between you and your competitors, and using EJB resembles paying a surgeon exorbitant sums to cut off your left leg before the race. It costs craploads of money, it cripples progress, and it hurts!
You mean my micro-horse was just a waste of money?
anyways, here is a cool page I found.XML is a fad because the whole concept of universal interchange of data is getting locked down by the big vendors. Theoretically, yes, data in XML is portable, but, so are well documented binary structures and CSV.
To have real interoperability, you have to know how the software uses the data. To get that, you must have open source. Microsoft knows this, and that's why they are pushing XML as the "nirvana" of interoperability.
I'd invite anyone who argues against the above to look at an XMLized Word document...
This is my sig.
I've browsed the web on a PocketPC, and it's more a half assed, almost there solution. Some sites will detect the User Agent as Pocket IE and reformat accordingly. Some sites have a mobile version that's formatted for handheld screens, if you can dig around and find the link. You can also just browse the regular full size site. It fits what it can on that little 320x240 screen. Sometimes it fits and sometimes you'll have to scroll around a lot. Speed is decent with Wifi, but I imagine CDMA or GPRS would be painfully slow.
..all i can really do is echo the standard sentiment. Except the .NET hate. I mean, most of it's prolly justified (Though only heaven knows, it not exactly a software package/framework people cut their teeth on), but i get this feeling, mostly from using it this past couple of months, that it will be here for the duration, for better or worse. The fact that it has so much crap integrated into it, and not to mention (considering its STILL in an extremely immature stage, and its rather broad functionality) its actually one of the MOST (if not the most) stable/functional(if not practial) things ever to come out of M$, it just gives me the feeling that this is were they want to head (again, maybe not the best idea, hell maybe not even in top 100, but i digress). That, and i like my compilers/FW's to be just like me, simple (not right, not always rational, but simple ;P).
Of course, just like everything, I'm pretty sure that Linux will eventually die, morph into something completely different from what it was, or be replaced by a better implementation.
I think that Linux is going to last for a long time though. Given its open nature it can adapt much better to changing requirements than say, Windows. It looks like Windows is going to have to break the API soon, and become incompatible with older versions.
Meanwhile, Linux, not having such a closed and monolithic design will almost surely remain compatible with old versions for a long time. I wouldn't be surprised if 4.0 was still able to run programs written to run under 2.0.
And so of course, comically, tools came along that make UML diagrams out of code. Or try.
Absurd. As a programmer, why on earth would I want to look at a bunch of silly boxes when I could look at the source code instead, complete with comments and algorithms?? Even just vi with etags is more useful than UML.
What? You say there are no good comments in the code? Well, then the project is Doomed, and UML diagrams aren't going to change that. In the end, the code has to stand on its own two feet, and no amount of plastered-on "design methodology" is going to change that.
PS: I have a compsci degree and 20 years hardcore experience. If you choose to tangle with me, beware that I have a large bookcase of mostly useless fad methodology books here ready to throw at your head.
Interesting to call WAP dead, considering that it's supported by just about every cellphone released nowadays.
I'm a software developer for a company that delivers solutions over WAP. We have building, health, and fire inspectors pass or fail inspectors via WAP. It's simple, it's fast (as fast it would be on the web), and it's extremely cheap (existing cell phone plan + around $5/month extra for the WAP service).
The news that WAP is dead is surprising to me, especially because I've had meetings with higher-ups at three major cell phone providers in the past month about their continued support for WAP on their cell phones.
I personally use WAP constantly to check sports scores, plane schedules (and departure/arrival gates), and to check on my fantasy football team.
I also own a T-Mobile Sidekick, which is consistently reviewed as one of the best devices for web-via-phone, and frankly, compared to WAP, it sucks. It's useful for sites that aren't supported via WAP, and of course it's essential for emailing or using extensive form-based websites, but it's much faster to check sports scores and use our Inspector interface via WAP than with the Sidekick browser (or the Treo browser, for that matter).
Currently, there's simply no substitute for WAP, and I'm glad that it's here to stay.
UML, EJBs, SOAP, XML, all fashion trends, you say? This may be true, but take a look at job advertisements in the software development field... a lot of them require that you know wonderful things like UML, EJBs, SOAP, XML, etc. This is why I quit my very well paying software development job and went back to school to pursue graduate studies. I realized my job was based on nothing more than fashion trends. It was just the same old stuff being rehashed and remarketed in a different way. In grad school, on the other hand, I get to explore problems from the perspective of real research and development, instead of being constrained by a bunch of marketing drones insisting that we include every latest piece of technology possible to make our product seem "cutting edge."
Well, that sentance pretty much sums up what wrong with the computer industry, doesn't it?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Is it just me, or does this strike you as sort of a fluff-piece? It seems like the author had little to say other than a vague concept that "Gee, a lot of once-popular software ends up not really having any staying power." and realized he could put together something somewhat eye-catching by relating it to the fashion industry.
To me, fashion is a term reserved for defining the look of a thing. If people stopped wearing shorts because the weather got cold, it wouldn't be correct to blame the lack of sales of shorts as due to their being "unashionable anymore". Maybe everyone WANTED to wear their shorts but just couldn't stand to do so anymore because they weren't practical for the conditions.
This is how I view most software. Things get hyped up initially, simply because they're new and different. (I.T. folks generally like variety. We get bored if we use the same old tools every day, for years on end, and no new challenges arise.) Then, as enough people put the new tools to use, they start coming to conclusions. "This product is far more efficient than the last one." or "This thing is bloatware!" The products that are too buggy, insecure, too slow, or just not as practical as they sounded on paper get tossed aside.
The only element of "fashion" I can see in software development is in user interface design. Even this tends to stay within a single product line though. (EG. Apple went through their whole "Aqua" stage - where everything had shades of blue. Now Jobs is fascinated by chrome, and even his new G5 towers have metal cases, to match the chrome look to most of the new Apple apps.)
A lot of these "fads" are natural progressions of computer science.
:-). Again, it's not Struts itself, but "Struts-like systems" which are highly abstracted.
You do realize that computer science is pretty young still, right? Stuff like design patterns are breakthroughs, and they are *discoveries*, not "methodologies".
Design patterns: "[programmers] shoehorn as many design patterns as possible into their design". Well, the author misunderstands patterns just as much as the people he is criticizing. Patterns are not "cookbooks". Patterns are simply names we use to describe stuff that our programs do over and over. You can't say you're not using patterns, because you are. The purpose of patterns is to think about your code at this higher abstract level, so you can recognize what's "the same" between every loop you ever wrote (and no "loop" is not in the GoF book, but it's still a pattern, because each loop is different but there are still similarities. learning to recognize those similarities is what patterns are about. Some people who've never read GoF have this ability).
Struts: in the old days (a couple years ago), I'd agree with the author: Struts makes code too slow and complex. But these days with big complex projects and super-fast computers, Struts makes a lot of sense. In my own programs, as they become complex, I tend to abstract stuff out over and over until it ends up looking basically like Struts anyway. Why not just start abstract? My Struts code is completely factored into simple testable objects and is much more reliable. If I had to hire a wizard JSP/Beans programmer and a mediocre Struts programmer, I'd think hard about the Struts programmer because his code will probably be easier to refactor (this an untested theory
Web service: Sure there's a lot of hype but I can throw together a remote procedure call interface in Perl that calls Java in about 5 minutes. Computers are fast, I don't care if they are burning extra cycles building SOAP envelopes (or XML-RPC which I prefer at the moment, easier to debug, SOAP is not stable and universal yet).
XML: say, why does he "flinch" at XSLT? XSLT is a great solution to a whole class of problems. I think of XML as the ASCII of this century.. not the most perfect representation for all data, but probably pretty close. How many times have I needed a format and just started using XML and not have to worry about 1) how to escape weird characters; 2) how to handle different character sets; 3) how to write and debug yet ANOTHER parser for MyLittleDataFormat23425, etc., etc. XML just makes life easier.
VB.NET: haven't had much experience with this but people seem to like it....
XP: XP is definitely faddish, but beneath the fad is solid basic computer science best practices. For instance testing: is there any idiot out there who DOESN'T think testing is important? Unit testing catches so many stupid errors it's not even funny. And test-first development means the tests actually get written. Psychologically, it's a lot more "satisfying" to write the test, and then the code that passes it, then the other way around. etc. etc. etc... the author is right, XP stuff will be integrating into other "traditional" methodologies. But that means XP is not a fad, doesn't it! XP is basically the only methodology that I've seen that works, even if you don't do it right, and it makes programming FUN. I can't say that for anything else I've tried or seen.
So in summary, the author seems like an old-timer who doesn't like this new-fangled stuff, and doesn't realize that yes, after the fads die down, we'll be left with the best parts of each "fad", and we'll be the better for it!
This is XML as well, but is it any easier to pick apart once you've deserialized it into a tree?
Just having XML syntax just gives you a tree. You need some way to process Microsoft's model of something into a model your program can understand.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I would like very much to have a tool like UML to explain my designs -- I am a very visual/graphical type person. The trouble is that UML has so many kinds of lines, arrow heads, and connector icons that I can't make heads or tails of it. Even if I could learn the UML iconography and calligraphy, the representation is so busy that it seems to be useless.
For the most part you should substitute the JCF HashMap and ArrayList, which roughly replace Hashtable and Vector with non-synchronized versions (which add overhead which is frequently unnecessary).
The poster might be referring to the fact that the routines tend to provide Objects instead of strongly-typed objects, which leads to so much casting that I do frequently end up writing specialized collections classes just to avoid the cast. JDK 1.5 (when and if) should have a new collections framework designed to solve that problem.
Flavors of the week, past & present:
DRM: Right now every big software company is considering it, and many of them will stop using it when they realize just how much it pisses off their customers, and how little it does to reduce piracy.
Push content: How many of you still have a push client on your systems? /me listens for responses, hears nothing but chirping crickets.
.NET is also a flavor of the week that will be yesterday's news once Microsoft force-upgrades their customers to the next flavor of the week.
Cameras in every gadget, starting with cell-phones. Most people don't care enough to use them, don't want to have to check themselves in the mirror every time their phone rings, and have little use for them outside the normal uses that a dedicated camera is usually used for. In the end, it's an expensive gimmick.
Virtual reality. Visions of William Gibson's matrix have danced in the heads of thousands of developers and marketers, but that's not going to happen in real life. The problem is that VR interfaces are far less intuitive than the good old fashioned screen full of windows with a keyboard & mouse. Can you imagine donning VR goggles & gloves to write a letter or buy airline tickets? It's just plain easier & faster to do it the way we do it today.
Meldroc, Waster of Electrons
A method that proposes comments that don't live in the code is broken. It requires programmers to have a second file open, and to update two things every time they make a change. A system that requires an extra annoying step for absolutely no gain is defective.
For absolutely no gain? Yes. There are better ways, such as putting any needed documentation into the source code itself. That way not only are they more accessible when reading the code but they're easier to change and harder to forget about.
Check out doxygen (at sourceforge) for a pretty cool system.
Yikes! I can't imagine that screen size is useful unless you're into midget sex.
I get better resolution out of the memories of pr0n in my head than you probably get on that damn phone.
Besides, who's holding the phone for you while you're...umm...
Shame on Google.
This is your fashion: it is cheaper to outsource, at least in the short term. This is here to stay (is not even a fashion, it has been common sense since the early 90s). If your company makes doughnouts why should it devote resources to accounting, IT or cleaning? All this can be done by specialists in the respective fields. And if those highly skilled specialists happen to live in Gujarat and charge you substantially less for the outsourcing, you, as the person responsible for increasing shareholders value (and you own stock options) would be mad not to take the oportunity.
End of the history. In an economic system where quarterly reports are king you did not expect long term vision, or did you?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.