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James Robertson

Posts: 29924
Nickname: jarober61
Registered: Jun, 2003

David Buck, Smalltalker at large
Complexity and development Posted: Dec 18, 2003 9:07 AM
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This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by James Robertson.
Original Post: Complexity and development
Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants
Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rssBlogView.xml
Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general.
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Charles Miller points out one of the rarely talked about complexities of J2EE development - the need to know multiple development languages. It's all just Java? Not exactly, says Charles:

A coworker and I once tried to work out just how many different languages you had to know to understand all of a J2EE project. Between programming languages, markup and templating languages and a thousand different flavours of configuration files (each a language in its own right), the assumed knowledge for a pretty simple project was pretty daunting.

Now to be fair, most application development will involve at least 2 languages - the main one for development, plus C/C++ (for any linking down to platform capabilities you need to do). Also, if you do web development, you can count things like XSLT and CSS as languages to learn in that regard. Still, the point holds - Charles is saying that J2EE development forces an awful lot of complexity at you without regard to the type of application you build. Here's where the problem hits:

You don't see nearly so much of this with other languages. Not just the proliferation of different languages, but also the proliferation of configuration files. Everything that's optional or that needs to be easily changed (scripted) gets dragged out into something that isn't Java code, where in other languages it would much more likely be written in one language, and programatically configured.

A configuration/scripting file makes sense when it's one component and one config file. But when you start gathering components together, you end up with one or more configuration files per component, and things start to get brittle and fiddly: especially if you want to make regular switches from one configuration mode to another (for example testing and production), in a way that crosses a number of different files.

Charles explains this tendency as not being a Java thing per se, but a cultural thing - a legacy carried forward from the C development mindset. That's interesting, because it gets right into something Joel was on about the other day - cultural differences between Unix and Windows development. I think Charles is correct, and there are cultural differences between groups of language developers as well.

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