The Ex Factor. Chromatic on scalability vs applicability: “The distance between a problem and its solution—and the cohesiveness of the solution with the whole project—is an important and subtler point.“
What’s in a name. Cédric Beust doesn’t like dynamic languages because IDEs can’t easily rename method calls. But can any IDE do that? Can any IDE work all the time, substituting names in source files, XML files, database schemas, remote APIs, reflections, build files, HTML IDs, to name just a few? IDEs are easier than grep, but they both have the same scalability problem. The only solution I found is to simply have less mentions of each name. Clint Hill sums it well: “Enterprise systems suffer from good Refactoring tools.†(Via Tim Bray)
Lost relics. Ever seen this movie? Group of people land on a deserted island in the pacific, it’s hospitable, but then they run into a Japanese solider who can’t believe WW-II is over and tries to kill them? The lead characters in this movie are Mr. SOAP and CORBA-San.
The end game. Of course, this is just a war of words, with one reminding you the status quo is here for a reason, and the other side reminding you how they treated to Galileo. And everyone has a vested interest and their own position statement. Me? I only know that which I do, and I know I can’t move mountains, so I’d rather build hills. I like working with small creative teams over leading an army of developers, I take pride in what I produce, not how big the budget is. So I gravitate towards anything that scales up and scales down, software and people. And the only reason I passionately blog my point of view in response to other people is because I know I’m not absolutely right, I just need to do better than I did before. It’s the curse of people who can’t sit in one place for too long.
