Please email me…let’s DO something!

To paraphrase Einstein: “As simple as possible, but no simpler”.

This is also my point.

I mean, those NASA dudes made the shuttle - without the help of modern super-computers-in-a-box (aka powermac G5! SWEET!). They planned everything, built it… and it WORKED!

But, now we can’t build a big enterprise system? No amount of planning works?

I guess maybe it does work… if you have NASA-sized budgets and timelines.

Software engineering - still a major work in practice. Struggling to love it. Stupid work
-ryan

If you haven’t heard yet, Mr. McGovern wrote an entry in which he stated among other things the Ruby doesn’t have regular expressions or instance variables. This proved he was not qualified to discuss Ruby at all.

THEN HE CHANGED HIS POST. He removed the proof that he didn’t know what he was talking about. Changing the points that proved he had never looked at a line of ruby into some other gibberish. Check the comments to see what he originally wrote.

They (37S) have never called their practices “gospel”, nor their book a “bible”. Those are terms you’re introducing.

You also quote them out of context when you say:

“But HH’s response is not so shocking when you consider that he’s part of 37Signals, the firm that brings us the idea that ‘you shouldn’t write a functional specification document’ and that ‘functional specs subvert the hierarchy of nature.’”

Then you go on to say:

“I haven’t studied their Bible or prayed over it, but my sense is that their principles may work great for some Web 2.0 startups aiming at individuals and small to medium-sized businesses and not so well for situations of greater complexity.”

Well, it’s more than “your sense,” it’s along the lines of what they’ve stated many times; both in their book and on their blog.

They’re sharing principles that they believe in and have worked for them. However, they acknowledge that they may not work for you or your organization. Take what you will and leave the rest. No hard feelings.

Appreciate your comments, for sure… am enjoying the dialectic!

James: thanks, glad it came across as sane… found your position polemical, but not in a bad way; I’m not opposed to stating a position strongly. I’m learning a ton from your blog and getting a lot of traffic too!

My take on it is, if your performance improvement is only 50%, sure, you can easily get swallowed up by all sorts of other factors, and a 50% lead now becomes a 10% lead. Especially if you spend all your time fending off people like McGovern.

Now, if you take a technology that gives you a 10x lead, then, even if you are nickelled and dimed to death, you can still kick some serious butt.

The other thing is, what exactly is McGovern saying? That change is bad? That change is your enemy? That we should be developing enterprise systems in C++ (we do at my work, it sucks, but no Java performance nightmares)? Or perhaps C and Cobol? Or what?!

Clearly Java and all its enterprise frameworks give you an edge on C++ and its… really awesome STL library. But have you tried to program in Java? The verboseness just kills me!

My current project is in erlang

-ryan