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Yes, but "components" as a concept actually works. Why do you think we keep seeing attempt after attempt to bring the concept into the browser UI ? Software d

Yes, but "components" as a concept actually works. Why do you think we keep seeing attempt after attempt to bring the concept into the browser UI ? Software development with components as building blocks maps well to our mental model of how you build things and is extremely productive. Despite the amount of grief that drag and drop GUI builders receive for being too simple, not being explicit MVC, etc., you won't find a better way to allow new developers to learn how to use a tool and be immediately productive with smaller projects. The Delphi and Visual Studio IDEs had it 100% right in this regard. That's why you see so many LOB applications from the late 90's, early 2000's still kicking around that used Delphi's VCL/Visual Studio's WinForms. They got out of the way and allowed people with in-depth business knowledge to create actual solutions. In the long run, isn't that the most important measure ? I will agree with you on ORMs, though. There's never been more of a case of "putting a square peg in a round hole". Sometimes, the best you can do with disparate systems is to just talk the language of the system that you're interfacing with and stop trying to make it be something that it isn't. Put another way: if your "avoidance" code ends up being 50% more complicated than your "direct" code, and prevents the developer from understanding how the whole interaction occurs, then you've committed a grievous error in architecture. There are ways to make such interfacing easier without making it be completely different. For example, with SQL one of the most difficult things to deal with is result set binding/retrieval, and this was solved rather early on with classes/components that eliminated the complexity of doing so with APIs like ODBC. We should have stopped there.

noir_lord 10y ago
I use an ORM with a popular web framework (Eloquent/Laravel) in the PHP space. What I've always done is use the Eloquent AR approach for simple stuff where it fits well but actual complex querying is done with 'raw' PDO/SQL since frankly writing complex compound queries using the ORM is more wordy and less understandable.
mikekchar 10y ago
Yeah, I'm not really arguing that it doesn't work. There are definitely use cases for it. The main thing is that the simplicity is a facade. Generally it's achieved by limiting scope. But as the scope creeps upwards, the complexity of the machinery starts to overtake the complexity of the problem. The biggest issue is that there is a considerable amount of technical lock-in. The solution is so specific that it becomes impossible to change your mind later in the project. Techniques like refactoring are impossible because you've already baked in the subsystem decomposition early, early in the process. The whole thing becomes a brittle mess. But for certain problems (or putting up a quick MVP that you might throw away later), it can be very useful. And as you said, it can be an excellent way to build projects of limited scope with people who are heavy on domain knowledge, but light on programming expertise.
- TimJYoung 10y ago
  There isn't anything intrinsic to the Visual Studio/WinForms or Delphi/VCL environments that prevents you from refactoring an application into a more structured manner as it grows. They simply don't shoehorn you into an enterprise development model for applications that don't require it (or don't require it initially). Thousands upon thousands of large business applications have been written in both, so obviously they were perfectly manageable for that purpose (2-tier, N-tier, web back-end). The point is to create reliable software that satisfies your business needs. One company that I'm familiar with built a beautiful application server/front-end UI in Delphi that uses SQL Server as the database server and serves 160+ concurrent users every day. The front-end UI was a ~16MB .exe, and the application server was a ~8MB .exe, both with no dependencies other than using Windows Vista or higher as the target OS. It was a very impressive application (I wish I had wrote it), and served the ~$45mil company very well.

noir_lord 10y ago

I use an ORM with a popular web framework (Eloquent/Laravel) in the PHP space. What I've always done is use the Eloquent AR approach for simple stuff where it fits well but actual complex querying is done with 'raw' PDO/SQL since frankly writing complex compound queries using the ORM is more wordy and less understandable.

mikekchar 10y ago

Yeah, I'm not really arguing that it doesn't work. There are definitely use cases for it. The main thing is that the simplicity is a facade. Generally it's achieved by limiting scope. But as the scope creeps upwards, the complexity of the machinery starts to overtake the complexity of the problem. The biggest issue is that there is a considerable amount of technical lock-in. The solution is so specific that it becomes impossible to change your mind later in the project. Techniques like refactoring are impossible because you've already baked in the subsystem decomposition early, early in the process. The whole thing becomes a brittle mess. But for certain problems (or putting up a quick MVP that you might throw away later), it can be very useful. And as you said, it can be an excellent way to build projects of limited scope with people who are heavy on domain knowledge, but light on programming expertise.

TimJYoung 10y ago
There isn't anything intrinsic to the Visual Studio/WinForms or Delphi/VCL environments that prevents you from refactoring an application into a more structured manner as it grows. They simply don't shoehorn you into an enterprise development model for applications that don't require it (or don't require it initially). Thousands upon thousands of large business applications have been written in both, so obviously they were perfectly manageable for that purpose (2-tier, N-tier, web back-end). The point is to create reliable software that satisfies your business needs. One company that I'm familiar with built a beautiful application server/front-end UI in Delphi that uses SQL Server as the database server and serves 160+ concurrent users every day. The front-end UI was a ~16MB .exe, and the application server was a ~8MB .exe, both with no dependencies other than using Windows Vista or higher as the target OS. It was a very impressive application (I wish I had wrote it), and served the ~$45mil company very well.