On 2 Aug 2006, at 15:04, Andrew S. Townley wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-08-02 at 14:35, Keith Harrison-Broninski wrote:
>> IMO, in a few years Eclipse will be the default programming
>> technology
>> - both as an IDE and as a framework for the code itself. And
>> since it
>> produces platform-independent code, Eclipse is the single biggest
>> challenge to Microsoft that I know of, Google included - I wrote
>> about
>> this in a blog post a while back, which goes into more detail about a
>> future scenario that may change the game for good.
>
> Not being an IDE junkie myself, such a statement scares the crap outta
> me. Maybe it'll be true, but I'll believe such a solution will result
> in not only quick delivery but high-quality, robust, maintainable and
> operational software intended to reduce the total cost of ownership
> over
> the entire lifecycle when I see it.
I agree completely, including being fearful that people will
actually act on the original poster's assertion. If history is any
guide, the growth and proliferation of Eclipse will result in
unnecessarily complex systems being written by developers who don't
understand the underlying technology, spend most of their effort
fighting their tools rather than delivering business value, and
frequently encounter nearly impossible to find bugs.
The core problem with IDEs is that they conceal complexity rather
than managing it. Developers need to more powerful abstractions and
domain specific languages, not GUIs that attempt to hide the inherent
limitations and problems of the core components.
> Maybe it's just me from bad experiences with dealing with vendor
> "customization" solutions using VBA, but if what you describe evolves
> the wrong way, it won't be much better for delivering production-grade
> applications than developing business-critical application
> functionality
> in a VBA environment. It may get you there "quicker", but you may not
> like where you end up.
Well put. Much as I enjoy a good bash at Microsoft myself, the same
problems are seen with J2EE. WebSphere and WebLogic lock developers
into their development environments and cause all of the problems I
listed above. Web Services are no better; the need to resort to
external tools in order to use an infrastructure technology is a
clear indication of poor design.
Large, distributed systems are, of course, complex. SOA
technologies should leverage our ability to manage that complexity,
not increase it.
The only advantage of the widespread adoption of IDEs as the next
industry silver bullet is that those of us capable of quickly meeting
business requirements by delivering clean, lightweight, flexible, and
appropriately simple systems will have plenty of opportunities
available.
Regards,
Patrick
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The experts in large scale distributed OO systems design and
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