lesscode.org

Stumbled upon this at InfoWorld (it’s the Alan Cooper interview) :

One of my assertions is that code is not an asset. A lot of companies say their job is to maximize the revenue from our code base. That reflects a kind of an Old World, industrial-age thinking. What’s interesting is the open-source movement is kind of our first proof that code in fact is not an asset. What is your company’s asset is the experience and knowledge that the people who have built your code have gathered during the construction of that code. But the code itself doesn’t have a lot of value. In fact, the code kind of anchors you down. In the traditional manufacturing business 30 years ago, if you had a warehouse full of spare parts and completed products, that was an asset that you put on your books. Today if you’ve got a warehouse full of manufactured goods, that’s a huge liability. In the world of software, it’s your relationships with your customers and vendors and the knowledge of your people that are valuable. This is part of the movement from a product-centered world to a service-centered world that we’re going to. I think the open-source movement is sort of like a moon mission. They went to the moon to see if we could go to the moon, not to set up a burger stand there. People who will come after will set up burger stands there. Linux may or may not be commercially viable. But I think that the people who follow in their footsteps will find that software is service. The software itself is not of value.

Sounds kind of extreme to me, but in actuality says a lot about the value of lesscode.

Now, I’ve been a Cooper-head since 1996. I’ve spent a lot of my brain cycles over the years honing my interaction design skills. And I firmly believe that Alan is absolutely right in his assertion that only desirable products and services make any sense.

As we already know (and agree), lesscode is all about agility. Since software code is not an asset, but rather a liability, the more we can reduce the deadwood, the better off we are. A side-by-side comparison of the code written in RoR with the code doing the same thing in Java or .NET reveals striking discrepancy in size. It is definitely possible to deliver high level of functionality, interactivity and sophistication by utilizing only a portion of code that would normally be used if we stick to the old school (morecode, or more LOC). And that’s a desirable thing.

Tim Bray warms up to Ruby, and had this to say about the value of static typing:

“Call me hidebound and conservative, but I think that ‘optimizing code’ and ‘helping IDEs’ (and it’s a whole lot more than just ‘tooltip help’) are awfully damn important. In particular, as James Strachan has often argued, the combination of a good modern IDE and a statically typed language mean that you hardly ever have to type out a full method or variable name, and even though you might have to write more lines of Java than you would in Ruby, you might get the code written just as fast.”

Yes you might get the code written just as fast. And in truth you can really bomb through Java code in a tool like IDEA. But after you ship, you will have more code to deal with, you will have more tools in the chain, you will have more technology to deal with. All that extra stuff and surface area is not neccessarily a good thing. And there’s no guarantee the system logic will be as flexible as the one written in some other language. “But my refactoring IDE will help me deal with all that” - yes, and this is what we might call a self-fulfiling prophecy ;)

On the other hand the most common non-idiosyncratic compliant I hear about Python is not being able to know what a function takes or returns without jumping out to the function source. This sounds trite, but it appears to really drive people to distraction - I suspect it has something to do with breaking flow.

But if this is the sole argument left against dynamic typing (and it appears to be, along with the human resources), then the dynamic camp have come a long way . Komodo and Eclipse PyDev shows what you can do in terms of autocomplete; not nearly as good as the features provided by IDEA and Eclipse java, but which might be good enough.

It is becoming increasingly difficult for me to envision why would anyone not consider lesscode much more desirable than morecode? Software code is like the headcount: you typically only hire as many people as you need in order to successfully run your business. Anyone that might suggest to you that it is much better to double or triple your payroll, ‘just in case’, is simply hosing you.

But I am getting mighty mystified by the fact that so many developers tend to lean towards and support the morecode way of doing software development. Why would anyone in their right mind embrace enthusiastically the proliferation of code? I see that developers are now cheering about the introduction of annotations (yet another extra conceptual space where code proliferation is bound to occur). Why would people celebrate something that is only going to make their lives more complicated?

Then it dawned on me – we’re in the midst of vendor wars. It is a trivial observation, but software vendors are manipulating the situation in the attempts to - dare I say it? - rule the world!

From a typical software vendor perspective, morecode is not necessarily a bad situation. Pushing a platform/vision on unsuspecting population of developers, whereby forcing them to engage in the practice of morecode is not something over which software vendors are necessarily losing their sleep. At the end of the day, it will be us, developers in the trenches, who will have to wrestle with the morecode migraines.

I’ve always found it curious how easy it is to recruit foot soldiers for a particular vendor. There never seems to be shortage of Microsoft or Java or Oracle etc. apologists, who are canvassing the tradeshows, propagating the vendor of their choice. They appear as if they’re working for their sweetheart vendor, but what’s fascinating is that all these Herculean efforts are voluntary. No one pays them to do all the free marketing and advertising for Microsoft, Java, Oracle, IBM…

Why would someone sacrifice so much of their lives to serve some giant vendor? I must honestly say I really don’t understand the motivation behind that. However, it neatly explains why so many developers are happily embracing the morecode gospel.

I am indebted to Stefan Arentz (RoR Tunnel Vision) for helping me articulate better the issue with the impasse software development community is faced with today. His keen observations, while aimed toward explaining how no trace of crisis in the world of software development (and in particular in the world of Java-based development) is detectable on the radar, actually helped me tremendously in corroborating my initial hypotheses.

Stephan begins his rant by admitting how he couldn’t get a clear indication from my original post on what kind of complexity am I referring to when it comes to developing applications using J2EE platform. And here I admit my mistake, caused by my desire to be brief and to the point. I did use the J2EE moniker, but what I actually meant was ‘J2EE-flavored frameworks’. By that I mean any and all of the official and open source frameworks available on the market today. Frameworks such as JCA, JMS, JSF, Velocity, Expresso, Tapestry, Jetspeed, Hibernate, Spring, the list goes on and on.

Any of the above listed and implied frameworks would do; I’ve given a chance to almost all of them, only to turn away in disgust. There’s gotta be a better way! Come on, we’re battle-scared professionals, admit it, there simply has to be a better way.

Stefan tried to reassure me that Java didn’t sit still during its 10 years tenure here on earth (“Alex, you just have to be open minded and stop thinking that Java has not progressed in the last 10”). Yes, I am painfully aware of the fact that Java has progressed (there are days when, in desperation, I think how I wish it did indeed stand still, instead of turning into this Frankenstein that we have to deal with today). As an early adopter and a veritable Java evangelist, I’ve watched the language of my choice transmogrify from seductive little agile, compact product, into the monstrosity that it is today. Needless to say, I’m not amused.

I did buy into Java 10 years ago, hook line and sinker, because I really believed in the power of developing commercial grade business applications without having to depend on moronic, bloated IDEs and the surrounding environmental support (I’ve managed to successfully desert Microsoft’s ‘DLL Hell’, with all its implied complexities and monstrosities, back in 1996). Nine years ago (heck, even seven or eight years ago), only me and my notepad, armed with a small footprint JVM and JSDK on my laptop could walk into a giant corporation and get things rolling in a matter of hours. I could easily build agile applications in Java, quickly cobble up fully functional prototypes, deliver educational sessions on the fly, convert the crowd and talk them into abandoning C++, COBOL, what have you, and move to the new mistress, Java, all from my lowly little laptop. Not having to rely on any tool, other than a simple text editor, I could do high grade, high output work and get paid handsomely.

Then, one day, ouch! Along came IBM and started pushing this completely idiotic product called Visual Age on unsuspecting Java developers. Oh, how I hated the guts of that product! My company forced me to complete weeks and weeks of advanced Visual Age IBM courses, and that was one of the most painful experiences in my software development career. Right there, I knew they are pushing this ‘giant solution in search of a problem’ on people who really, really don’t need it.

Today, if I want to walk into a corporation and offer my Java skills, I need a fancy, state-of-the-art EDI, such as Eclipse (another incarnation of Visual Age, with a lipstick on it) with countless plug-ins and all the bullshit that I don’t really care for. That situation is actually laughable, if you ask me.

Stefan continues with a reasonable observation: “Interestingly, complexity is not something tied to a specific platform. It happens everywhere with all kinds of code.”

True, very true. Everybody knows that complexity is a fact of life, and thus it is unavoidable.

What I was referring to, however, was unnecessary complexity. And my grievance with Java is that it is, as a language and as a platform, unnecessarily complex today.

Here, however, is where we get to the essence of the problem – Stefan writes: “Yes there are a lot of choices, but we are talking about people here who are smart enough to pick Ruby on Rails, so why can’t those people also do a bit of research in the Java world and pick a good framework there.”

You see, Stefan, this is exactly the name of my pain. ‘Do a bit of research’. I’ve spent exorbitant amounts of time in the past six-seven years doing endless research around Java community, relentlessly chasing the elusive dream of the possibility of developing apps in a simple, straightforward way. I’ve tried all the latest and the greatest Java hype, followed religiously every Javaworld and The Server Side and Artima article, but only to in the end throw my hands up in the air in utter desperation. After all was said and done, at the end of the day, all I have is an enormously bloated, to the point of bursting at the seams, Eclipse platform. I am currently nursing countless frameworks, plug-ins, SOA and EMF bullshit is coming out of my ears. My 60 GB laptop with 1 GB main memory cannot take it any more.

All these wonderful frameworks and plug-ins are supposed to turn me into this Super Developer who can crank up incredibly powerful and complex solutions in a matter of minutes. But guess what – instead of being this mythical uber-developer, I can barely get off the ground under the weight of enormous amount of idiotic infrastructure code.

I feel extremely uncomfortable with this situation. I don’t think we, as a community of Java developers, are standing on the solid, firm ground. I think the ground on which we stand is bound to give in under our feet, sooner or later. This is why I’m trying to defect to the Ruby camp, where life is simpler, the air is fresher, and the movement is truly, not nominally, agile.

So, my bottom line answer to your question above is: if Java were truly capable of offering agility, simplicity and power, then the search for a suitable framework wouldn’t have to turn into a multi-month, open-ended wild geese chase. The agility, simplicity and conciseness would be right there, at our fingertips.

Stefan continues with: “Alex, that you cannot be Agile with Java does not mean that it is not possible at all. Many people are extremely agile with Java development. People even wrote books about it. You obviously don’t know what is going on it that world. Is that why you make a straw man argument?”

I am not disputing that it is possible to be agile with Java. Anything’s possible, given sufficient resources. I’m only complaining that, in order to get to be agile with Java, one is forced to invest inordinate, almost astronomical amounts of effort. And that, not surprisingly, comes with the astronomical price tag.

And that is precisely why I say that business computing is in cahoots today, as every move implies astronomical costs. The businesses simply cannot afford to operate in that fashion, regardless of how much fun the developers may be having in their cubicles.

Towards the end, Stefan throws all caution in the air, not being able to resist bragging a little: “Heh. Dude. Who cares that my EJB3 application needs 12MB of jar files. I can now convert a complete persistence model to working code by just writing plain old java objects and adding an annotation here and there to specify the relationship parameters.”

Stefan is obviously proud of the latest and greatest Java crutch – annotations. I’m not going to rain on anyone’s parade here, so I’ll just leave it at that. But it is a vivid example of what usually tends to go wrong with the Java tunnel vision.

I’ve enjoyed Stefan’s parting words: “I invite you to take a second look at Java. Talk to people. See how they are getting more productive. Look around what is going on. You might discover some Really Good Stuff.”

Thanks for the invitation, Stefan. Java is my bread-and-butter, that’s how I make my living these days, so willy-nilly, I am forced to take a second look at it and to talk to people. They are indeed attempting to get more productive by being forced to constantly toss out some old paradigms that were new six months ago and adopt some shiny new paradigm pushed on them by some group of raving developers (like, the aforementioned annotations), that will become old and rusty six months down the road. Last year it was aspect-oriented bullshit. This year, it is annotations. Next year – anyone’s guess.

Let me tell you – people are getting mighty tired of that particular brand of a rat race.

I finally broke down a few days ago and decided to make Firefox my default browser. I’ve tried to move away from Safari a few times in the past but never made it longer than a day. Safari is a better OS X application in some very fundamental ways but I’m encouraged by the Firefox/Mac activity slated for Firefox 1.5 and beyond.

My reason for switching and my reason for holding off for so long are the same: my browser contains significant customization and personalization. I’ve built up a nice little toolset on top of Safari that includes bookmarklets, extensions, and URL searches, not to mention all of my cookies, passwords, and history. Once you’ve established a normal workflow around these customizations, it becomes hard to go without them. It’s not unlike trying to switch from Emacs (with a ~5,000 line .emacs file crufted over years of use) to vi.

But, as I said, the ability to customize the browser has become so important to me that I’m willing to take the hit to productivity and Macishness now to get ramped up on a platform with far greater support for customization. In other words, Greasemonkey. I’ve only just begun diving in but my experience thus far is promising. The ability to automate tasks and extend basic web content with simple scripts seems so insanely obvious that I’m having a hard time understanding how this wasn’t a built-in feature of the 3.0 era browsers. Greasemonkey may be the first signs of a long awaited convergence between Emacs and The Browser :) Now if I could just get an M-x prompt, we’d be in business (YubNub anyone?)

As with Emacs, I will now begin building an embarassingly unorganized collection of hacks. I spent an hour or so combing through the massive repository of user scripts just to get my feet wet. Notes and pointers to stuff I found useful as follows…

Auto Login Everywhere

The AllowPasswordRemembering and AutoLoginJ scripts can be used to get almost reliable automatic login anywhere that Firefox puts up the “Remember this password” dialog. When you hit a site that Firefox has login information for, the AutoLoginJ script goes ahead and auto-submits the form. I’ve tested it across a couple of different sites and it seems to work about half the time. My banking site, O’Reilly Connection, and Vonage seem to work well but none of Yahoo, del.icio.us, or flickr.com worked.

Video URLs

I hate multimedia on the web – especially video. There’s a special place in hell for whoever is responsible for the tiny embedded players with format/bandwidth selection and shite controls that are so common. I promise the experience would be dramatically increased if all video was reduced to a thumbnailed image linking to an actual real video file.

The Unembed user script gets me half way there by inserting a link to the video file under the video display. My first hack will be to have it replace the <embed> with an <a>.

If you’re looking for somewhere to test this script, I highly recommend This Spartan Life.

A Whole New Google

There is an immense set of useful Google specific scripts. I’m using Google Access Keys and Google Search Keys for quick keyboard navigation of search results. The Google Image Rewriter makes image search results link directly to the image instead of that weird framed thing.

Holy Crap, I can use Slashdot

The Slashdot Single Page View script provides thread expansion without requiring a page refresh, xSidebars removes the butt-cheeks, and Add Mirrors puts nice little Coral, MirrorDot, and Google Cache links next to every single link on the page. There’s more Slashdot specific scripts I haven’t tried yet.

Misc.

Other scripts I’ve found useful:

• BetterDir beautifies Apache directory listings. It’s really not that big of a deal but it shows the types of interaction a user script can have with a page.

• CookieMonster puts a little thing in the bottom left of the page that shows raw cookie data for the current page upon hover.

• Nofollow display strikes links having a rel="nofollow" attribute. Mildly interesting sometimes.

• SourcePlease removes some of the insanity of SourceForge file listings by linking directly to a specific mirror’s copy of a file, removing the need to wade through five pages of ads.

• TextareaResize sounds cool but doesn’t seem to work.

• SearchTermHighlighter gives you Google cache style highlighting of pages entered through a major search engine. The highlight is non-intrusive.

Come on, I know you guys have some gem recommendations – what am I missing?