Monday, November 14, 2011

Objects In The Rear View Mirror

Not sure this will ever go anywhere, just like probably 75% of the blogs that launch, but here it is, my own little corner of crankiness.

Let's open the bidding with a link: Steve Yegge posted an essay about noobs vs. old-timers that I found rather interesting

I've noticed the same trends Steve comments on, plus a few that he touches on briefly if at all. The one I want to mention is the tendency to worship at the Temple Of Structure, a Procrustean tendency to cut all systems to match the Pattern Of The Gods.

At work, (no, I'm not naming names), we have folks who do this. It is Received Wisdom that all projects have a Data Access Layer, a Business Logic Layer, a Service Layer, and an Application Layer, if not more. This is not in itself foolish, by any means, except when you apply it to even the most trivial systems, which can plausibly be described by, say, three classes.

In such a case the "teenagers" of the type that Steve describes create a copy of each class, one for each layer which does absolutely nothing except call the next lower layer in the stack.

This is in contrast to the 'real' model, where you model a database table in the DAL (say, ACCOUNT_HEADER, TRANSACTION_MASTER, and TRANSACTION_LINE) then load them into actual journal entries and T-accounts in the BLL, then prompt the user for the variable parts of various stereotyped transactions (like an Accounts Payable system.)

Attempts to point this out have been dismissed.

(And don't get me started on the 'one non-punctuation token per line' style that drives me absolutely insane as the type of old-fart that Steve describes in his article.)

1 comment:

  1. And yes, that is a Meatloaf reference, and no, I'm not going to make a habit of it.

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