Friday, July 04, 2008

Tool and reality blindness


There are ways of developing robust distributed applications that don’t require code-generation toolkits, piles of special code annotations, or brittle enterprisey frameworks.


Is the view of Steve Vinoski. Its a general rant against RPC (its really really bad BTW) and in praise of the wonderful programming language renaissance we’re currently experiencing.

Ummm I'm finding it really hard to think of something that doesn't require code generation as this is what any compiler does and as for "special code annotations" that is exactly what all "higher order" languages are about rather than the register shifting and low level elements of assembler and as for the brittle enterprisey frameworks... we all know how brittle the likes of SAP, Oracle and IBM mainframes are let alone the J2EE and other application servers that power the worlds largest industries and indeed the world economy.

Its really rather sad when people get Technology fundamentalism and think that a technology shift represents a genuine silver bullet.

One size doesn't fit all and no technology change will get IT out of this current mess. People have built robust distributed applications for years even decades which suggests that maybe this current trend isn't the only way of getting things done.

Technorati Tags: ,

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

while I agree that REST isn't a silver bullet and RPc ha its uses here and there ( I said local computing over there)

I really agree with his point that local/remote transperancy to the programmer is a mistake , and I guess thats what RPC does.

Anonymous said...

I am actually pretty saddened that you didn't do a nice point by point argument against the article.

Saying its a terrible article and that all these fall into the silver bullet trap is kinda exactly what you are angry at others for .. they aren't giving a well reasoned argument and just calling out a silver bullet .. your silver bullet seems to be your post on silver bullets.

Steve Jones said...

Okay, fair enough, expect the critique on Monday ;)