05
Feb
Users don’t care whether you use J2EE, Cobol, or a pair of magic rocks. They want their credit card authorization to process correctly and their inventory reports to print. You help them discover what they really need and jointly imagine a system.
Instead of getting carried away with the difficult race up the cutting edge of the latest technology, Pete concentrated on building a system [in COBOL] that works for him and his clients. It’s simple, perhaps almost primitive by our lofty standards. But it’s easy to use, easy to understand, and fast to deploy. Pete’s framework uses a mixture of technologies: some modeling, some code generation, some reusable components, and so on. He applies the fundamental pragmatic principle and uses what works, not what’s merely new or fashionable.
We fail (as an industry) when we try to come up with the all-singing, all-dancing applications framework to end all applications frameworks. Maybe that’s because there is no grand, unified theory waiting to emerge. One of the hallmarks of postmodernism— which some think is a distinguishing feature of our times— is that there’s no “grand narrative,” no overarching story to guide us. Instead, there are lots of little stories.
