Tuesday, March 16, 2010

[Misc] Programming from Scratch- Rareness

When you learn a programming language you usually develop small applications to analyze the pros and cons of the language. Another important part is to check the offer of available libraries, frameworks and last but not least the tool support.

Programming from scratch is the unusual way when you develop a software system. In Mike Taylers blog is a very interesting discussion about "Whatever happend to programming?". In former times we wrote compilers, operating systems and cool stuff like that. Today, the programming world is busy to look for libraries for any kind of problem and paste them together.
We did all those courses on LR grammars and concurrent software and referentially transparent functional languages. We messed about with Prolog, Lisp and APL. We studied invariants and formal preconditions and operating system theory. Now how much of that do we use? A huge part of my job these days seems to be impedence-matching between big opaque chunks of library software that sort of do most of what my program is meant to achieve, but don’t quite work right together so I have to, I don’t know, translate USMARC records into Dublin Core or something. Is that programming? Really?
Read more about this topic in his blog. I thing, especially in the Java and Open Source area, Frameworks help you to concentrate on the business case. Through to the adoption of such frameworks decrease the initial development time of new applications. But it also depends on your knowledge about the used technologies and libraries. Often it will be better to write parsers and utilty classes from scratch instead of using a open source library.

According to this blog the JaxCenter provides an online quick vote in German.