4 ms·
"Tangible examples? I remember well the insistence of one boss that we use TFS because some developers would find it hard to use git. I remember the steadfast c
by UK-AL 9y ago
"Tangible examples? I remember well the insistence of one boss that we use TFS because some developers would find it hard to use git. I remember the steadfast committal to ASP.NET web forms because the "new concepts" in ASP.NET MVC were going to take too long for the team to become productive in."
I've gotten this on EVERY stack. Not just .net.
I thinks it's more do with age of the project your working on. There is tons critical business applications in .net and java and they don't want to break anything and prefer stability.
If your developing something new, the technology is up for grabs.
- NoGravitas 9y agoYeah, it's definitely a culture problem, not a platform problem.
- Deinos 9y agoAgreed. The type of culture that gives us classes like "AbstractSingletonProxyFactoryBean", etc.
- fishnchips 9y agoI never did C# or Enterprise IT but I think that ridiculing explicit naming misses the point.
- douche 9y agoI don't think it's the explicit naming that's being ridiculed, it's the bingeing on design patterns and baroque enterprisey design that Java, especially, is infamous for.
- fishnchips 9y agoI don't know the first thing about C#, but in Java, you can't sometimes avoid fancy design patterns - eg. using Observer where in C++ you could just depend on late binding.
- moomin 9y agoThe culture that leads to Cobol programs running banks with expiring developers.
- juliangoldsmith 9y agoHow exactly would you rewrite a 10M-line codebase in a new language, without any sort of bugs? More importantly, how would you convince management to allow you to do so?
- moomin 9y agoThat's the whole point: you shouldn't get into this situation in the first place, and the reason you did is that you've got a culture of short-termism that doesn't place enough weight on maintainability. This disaster's been 40 years in the making, and everyone thinks they made the right call. I have exactly zero solutions to this. If I did I would be rich beyond the dreams of Bezos. But let's not pretend that this isn't the end game of a short-term, low investment, low innovation culture.
- juliangoldsmith 9y agoA culture of short-termism isn't the problem here. The problem is that the business rules that the code needs to implement are ridiculously complex. Keep in mind that the sort of organizations that use large Cobol systems (e.g. banks) are typically subject to very large amounts of regulation. Their code has to meet all the relevant regulations at all times, plus handle internal business rules. The laws for all of the regions a large bank works in would likely be tens or hundreds of thousands of pages. There isn't a way to condense that into a small amount of elegant code.
- moomin 9y agoWell, it pretty much is. Everyone's concerned with how many eggs they're dealing with. But the basket's falling apart. It's not like we haven't already had situations where banks have found themselves completely unable to process payments for weeks at a time. And it's only going to get worse.