April 17, 2005
Sometimes sloppy is enough
Doug Pardee writes about computer science losing its influence on software development:
There seems to be a single key factor in what makes a CS technique survive: it has to simplify the programming process. A learning curve is acceptable, but once the technique is learned, it must make the creation of programs easier. A technique that complicates the writing of the program in return for a promised future value will not survive.
It might be time for us to admit that often "sloppy" is in fact enough. It might hurt the heart of a computer scientist, but people are nailing together planks and getting away with it all the time. Most of the more advanced techniques and processes tackle problems simply not relevant to those projects, so why do we expect these people to care?
Maybe some of the more sophisticated approaches are not inherently more complicated than their equivalent spaghetti hack, but simply ripe for better packaging. See the recent popularity surge of Rails among PHP developers. I bet that a major part of these PHP-to-Rails converts didn't initially give a damn about MVC or object orientation, but were lured over by the promises of Active Record (the object/relational mapping layer in Rails).
Beyond all the controversy that Rails has generated, little else has brought more developers to the needle of OOP and patterns, ultimately making the world a better place.
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