Saw Ole's blog entry on how many of the new .NET technologies are being presented as cool, or even mystical as part of the hype gearing up for the PDC.
Don Box alluded to this idea before as well - controlling surface area requires a significant shift in attitude for people who thrive on complexity.
This resonates with me. I've always viewed the Microsoft technology culture as one that thrives on complexity. (i.e. COM put the COM in COMPLEX). .NET seems to have changed attitude quite a bit, at least perceptually. I hope it sticks, its why I'm interested in .NET after generally avoiding Microsoft technologies. I taught several of those 2-day Microsoft seminars on .NET in 2002 while I worked for Infusion, and I quite enjoyed talking to the developers I met about their concerns and excitement surrounding the framework.
On the other hand, I think Java's initial enormous popularity had a lot to do with its fall-over simplicity. Parts of J2EE seemed to really lose that. I think it's because distributed / parallel / concurrent development actually is quite naturally complex, and no one yet (save for perhaps David Gelertner's Linda) has come up with an elegant general solution to it. To me, elegance is Einstein's paradoxical statement - be as simple as possible, but no simpler.
On another note, before people start rampantly quoting Greenspun's theory that Java/JSP costs 5x more than a project in Perl as fact, remember this wasn't based on any facts, studies, or experiments - it was a number pulled out of the air for rhetorical purposes. I've made comments on this before on Slashdot, but in a nutshell, I think Java certainly CAN be as productive as Perl, the question really becomes whether the horde of consultants and "experts" actually encourage this or not, and whether the myriad of framework choices help or hinder this.
The problem to me seems to be the J2EE community got run over by the "design patterns" idea, where many inexperienced developers-turned-consultants decided that every project needed design patterns to make their systems more maintainable. They lost sight that usually less code == more expressivess == more maintainable. This as opposed to "pretty UML bubbles and lines" == more code == $$.
This is why the .NET PetShop was such an embarassment, in my opinion. It was faster, smaller, and my observation: it wasn't that you COULDN'T write something that small & fast in J2EE (as much as some may like to imply) - it was that no one wanted to! "BUT BUT - stored procedures are hard to maintain and proprietary! Proprietary bad!" That's knee-jerk dogmatism, that's not objective thinking about software design!
If a beginner was pointed in the right directions with truly productive modes of working in Java, I think there's a good comparative story. It's what I try to do when I teach, I move away from the Sun-standard J2EE marketing stuff and look at what real people do to get productivity.
It's a sad and ironic tale: a community so prided on simplicity has so lost its way, and it's taken Microsoft to point this out.
Posted by stu at September 25, 2003 07:13 AM