I am a very emotional and 'colorful' person and tend to rant quite a lot about things that I deem important. Lots of those happens to fall inside an body of supposed knowledge called 'software engineering'.
I am often talking about the importance to find ways to cut down the time being spent when developing a program that is not actual programming. Currently, I'm using 'find . -exec grep ..' in various parts of various repositories trying to understand how server-side templating is causing subtle bugs in a pedestrian, yet important web service, for a customer.
But never mind that. What I want to write about today is a simple rule to follow if you want to weigh your language and/or platform of choice in terms of complexity.
Assertion: Every step that produces an intermediate file creates complexity.
Example: A compiler takes source code files and generates binary files.
Why: Each step that converts files between formats must be managed and maintained.
This is pretty hard to object to. Really. If you use Java, you need to manage compilation by either an ant file or maven, or perhaps a custom shell-script. These need to be maintained. They will not be maintained. This will lead to grief.
If you need to package your generated files before deployment, the script for that needs to be maintained. See above.
These operations are hard to duck, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try. Every time you get one extra dot between yourself and the final, running application, that dot needs to be maintained. And that means documenting it, integrating it into other subsystems, referring to it, checking it in, adding it to a repository, what have you. Every point.
Also, frequently, they will become stop-blocks that makes it impossible to do things, until they guy that does packaging comes in, et.c.
One of the simpler ways to minimize yak-shaving of this kind is to adopt a scripting-language as your server-side language. Whether it is Groovy, SSJS, Ruby, Python, PHP or anything else is beside the point, because the main point is this;
- A scripting language gets compiled inside the VM.
- A scripting language has at least two steps less complexity than a compiled one
So whatever you do, for future generations of programmers: Never, ever again use a compiled language, for any project, for any reason.
Just Say No! :)
Cheers,
PS
PS