Philip Rieck

Phil in .net

Why must change always be "revolutionary"?


Reading this entry in Paschal L's blog, and I get this message from the comment "Simple evolution is bad, and if it's not revolutionary then it's a waste of time.  No one has done anything to programming languages that isn't redundant since the early 70's."

Revolutionary changes force one to learn much more new information to do the same tasks. It may allow much more to be done, but it may just be "really different". Evolutionary changes allow us to build on a base that is proven and well understood.  Some may hate the fact that it's mostly the same with a few small changes.  To them I say "Stay with the old!".  If you think C# is just "another curly brace language", then don't learn/use it. Is this not an obvious solution?  If you find you must use it since it's so widespread, then perhaps you should look at why everyone else is switching; There must be some reason, right?

I've never understood the "Y is simply a few changes to X, so why bother" argument.  Simple - you bother if the benefits of the changes outweigh the investment to learn them. Same with any other change, revolutionary or not.

"For efficiency, we should all use the same language and tools" sounds like a manager I once had.  I responded "For efficiency, we should all solve the same problems and develop the same applications, too."

 

 

Posted: Jul 21 2003, 11:16 AM by philipr | with 4 comment(s)

Comments

TrackBack said:

Martin Spedding's Blog
# July 21, 2003 12:16 PM

Duncan said:

The changes in Java and .NET have been revolutionary but to the credit of the teams that wrote both of these the language changes were minor precisely to keep developers comfortable. The only people who profit from language revolutions are those seeking to hide their lack of knowledge in the fog of the new.
# July 21, 2003 1:36 PM

Philip Rieck said:

Duncan - I'd disagree on the last point. I think that anyone can profit from revolutionary change in languages, if that new language helps to make difficult problems easier to solve, assuming that you come across those problems. (lack of knowledge in the old language or not)
# July 21, 2003 2:14 PM

Scott Mitchell said:

A bit off topic, but interesting nevertheless (at least to me!) :-):

One thing that was particularly interesting in getting my Masters degree recently was seeing what was "cooking" in academia. While some may say there's a big disconnect between academia and industry, a lot of big things today started out as topics in academia long ago. Anywho, one thing that has been brewing in academia for a while that seems poised to break onto the industry scene is AOP.

Having gotten my emphasis in database theory and information retrieval, the professors I worked with were more interested on the data side, naturally. Their predictions are that XML data sources exposed via Web services will become a big thing in the future, essentially that a corporation will expose its data to other companies or internal divisions through this XML Web service interface. It'll be neat to see if in a few years these predictions come to fruition.
# July 21, 2003 3:28 PM
Leave a Comment

(required) 

(required) 

(optional)

(required)