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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.
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.
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.
Whats next? A front page story post with the goatse guy?
I've been submitting those, but for some reason, they keep getting rejected.
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
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.
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.
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!
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.
She is more scary. I mean, she could EAT the goatse guy
Or, she could climb in goatse guy.
If she did both at the same time, you'd have a wicked MC Escher drawing.
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.