Thursday, May 18, 2006

Morts, Einsteins and Elvis...Oh My.

In my career world, there are some who I really think are Rock Stars. One of those is Rhocky Lhotka. I have been to several conferences to hear him, and even had my picture taken with him once upon a time. I have a classic picture of Katie reading one of his books. I came across a Guest Opinion that he has written for the Visual Studio magazine entitled Software is Too Darn Hard. The opinion was adapted from an article on Rhocky's blog.

I tend to not express my opinions about programming too much, but my number one pet peeve is summed up by Lhotka:

Software development is too darn hard. As an industry, we spend more time discussing "plumbing" issues like Java vs .NET or .NET Remoting vs Web Services than we do discussing the design of the actual business functionality itself.

And even when we get to the business functionality, we spend most of our time fighting with the OO design tools, the form designer tools that "help" create the UI, the holes in data binding, the data access code (transactions, concurrency, field/column mapping) and the database design tools.

Does the user care, or get any benefit out of any of this? No. They really don't. Oh sure, we convince ourselves that they do, or that they'd "care if they knew". But they really don't.

Couldn't have said it better.

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