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by James Robertson.
Original Post: Simplicity and RPC's
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Patrick Logan linked to an interesting article that's ostensibly on XML-RPC, but contains the following quote: "Python is one of the more popular languages for XML-RPC apps, because it has a very flexible way of creating remote procedure calls that look much like local ones." To me, this is interesting in that it highlights how people like to write code. First of all, there's the question of whether I even want to write RPCs. Then, there's the issue of programming language design. I feel like XML-RPC and SOAP were designed with curly-brace programmers in mind, where there's all this effort to generate proxies that look like LPCs, but totally ignore support for message style communications.
That's dynamic typing in action. I was doing CORBA with VisualWorks years ago - and while all the C/C++/Java guys complained about how complex it all was, I always found it to be pretty easy. Now, there's complexity to RPC development - checking for failure is never an entirely simple operation. However, there's all this extra baggage over in curly brace land. This goes back to the code generation thing - part of why the curly brace crowd is enamored of code generation is that they have to be - no person could stay sane and have to write all that proxy code....
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