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by James Robertson.
Original Post: The wrong stuff
Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants
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Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general.
Enter Ground Hog Day on a grander scale. Those of you who are old enough to remember have seen this before. A long time ago, when we thought we 19d taken procedural programming as far as it would go, we hit that unrunnable rapid. People wrote books like the Mythical Man Month and Death March. So we innovated. Object oriented technology was born. We started playing with it in the 1970s, with Small Talk. A few joined the band wagon, and used the technology to good effect. They are like the guides that led Mike and I to the dangerous river. And they had fun, and were incredibly productive. And like Mike and I, other lesser equipped paddlers in the industry followed enthusiastically, but they were in over their head. And they crashed and burned. They heard the roar (inheritance? CORBA? #define?) And they flipped, tried to recover, and swam. Some wailed, "This is truly a river that is too mighty for the layman to run. Let us build a sign, and a wall, to keep the public safely out. Let there be no more good people drown here."
Hey - there's a reason that the Smalltalk guys made it look easy (heck, CORBA is easy in Smalltalk, for goodness sake). The answers are explained here. Unfortunately for the rest of us, neither Sun nor Bruce have learned anything:
And that, finally, brings me to the point. We 19re in a similar place today. The early guides are putting in on the roaring river, and their kayaks have AOP (Aspect Oriented Programming) all over them. And a few of us are going to foolishly follow them down the river, and maybe even get killed. We 19ll hear that AOP really isn 19t a seventeen-foot rubber raft that is immune to capsize. But what happens next? Can that particular river be run? I, for one, think so.
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