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The Whiz of Silver Bullets
ChelleChelle writes "In an entertaining yet well thought-out article, software architect Alex E. Bell of The Boeing Company lashes out at the so-called 'Silver Bullets' and those who rely on them to solve all their software development difficulties. From the article: 'the desperate, the pressured, and the ignorant are among those who continue to worship the silver-bullet gods and plead for continuance of silver-fueled delusions that are keeping many of their projects alive.'"
I know this is nitpicking but how can one have an article that uses superscripts for references but not links?
Do I fault the author or the publisher?
I know this is kind of off-topic, but since we're talking about Python anyway...
The reason I thought to make that joke about Python in the parent posting is that in reality, I really *am* tons more productive in Python than in Java or C++. I found that when I went from C++ to Java, I got maybe a 1/3 reduction in the time it took to complete comparable projects. My Python projects probably take only 50% as long to complete as comparable work in C++.
Have you guys had similar experiences?
I suspect it has to do with the following issues:
(1) I don't need to think about deleting objects properly, in most cases.
(2) When debugging, most things have a string representation that I can
print with very little programming effort.
(3) A very useful set of of built-in container types: dictionaries, lists,
sets, etc. And unlike C++'s STL, it takes very little code to use them.
To be fair to C++/Java, as my codebases get bigger, I do sometimes start to wish that Python cleanly supports the notion of "interfaces", so that I can use them to document what methods I need a class to provide. But in general those problems get shaken out pretty early in testing anyway, so it's not that big a deal to not have explicit interfaces.
Thoughts?