Financial Cryptography

Going Binary, half a bit at a time

The Champion of NerdHerders points to the pathological habit of nerds-gone-binary to do either all of it or nothing. It's true, that we all face this inability to create a sensible compromise and to recognise when our binary extremes are unacceptable.

But I don't think it is so black and white. It's alright to say "why not use Jakarta this/that/other" but in practice it tends to hit up against some real barriers.

Firstly, what happens if you don't spend your entire life following the esoteric and mindboggling silly arguments as to whether this tool is better than that tool? How are you to know what tool to use?

In practice, in a big enough team, there is a role for tool-meister. Or package-tamer. But for most teams, that luxury simply isn't there. My own feeling is that any tool I know about, if I can't see the fit within an hour of reading, then that's it, it's all over, and most tools aren't set up to come anywhere close to that. (So to eat my own dogfood I spend a lot of time writing executive summaries to bridge that gap, but I also recognise how few times I've succeeded!)

My general strategy is to ignore all tools, all competitors, all everything, until I've had about 3 independent comments from uncorrelated sources. The alternate is to drown. My strategy gets about a 99%hit rate, as within a year, last year's flavour is gone, replaced, forgotten. (Last year it was all Struts, this year, Spring. Do I add to last year's wasted effort with another month on Spring this year?)

Secondly, it is my overwhelming impression that most tools out there are schlock. They are quite literally junk, pasted over with some sugar coating and lots of enthusiasm. Now, that's nice and I'd fight for the right to let those people do that, because some of them aren't, but in practice, I don't want to spend a month fighting someone else's schlock when I could do the same with my own code.

Sometimes this works out: the most extreme case was the accounting engine I wrote. It took a month to do the whole thing. I estimated it would take a month just to create the _recovery strategy_ for an off-the-shelf database engine. (It will still take a month, no matter what, I think. That's because it has to work, in FC.) So for one month's effort, we've got a free engine that is totally tuned to our needs. The next best thing is Oracle, and that starts at five figures. Per unit. And climbs...

Sometimes this doesn't work out: our approach to writing a website framework for payments was a costly 2.5 year lesson in how hard it is to create good frameworks. But, even when we wanted to replace our stuff, the choice was and is shlock. I spent some months learning the J2EE frameworks, and concluded they are not going to cut down the time by so much. Plus, they're Schlock, I have no confidence in the security of J2EE and no confidence in the manageability of it. (Now, 4 years after the fact, someone wrote a J2EE framework that does the job. Even that had to be rewritten by the first programmer on the job.........)

Thirdly, when you are dealing with other people's tools, you create an admin load. The more tools the more load. The more you have to install, the more that can break. And, this not only hits you in the cost-of-server shorts, it can blow you away legally, as some tools come with poison pills that just aren't predictable (and, I'm not just speaking of licences here, but needs for support, costs in programmers, etc etc). The same with languages; Java is a cost, because there is so little support for non-preferred platforms, Perl is a cost because it isn't 64bit compatible in all senses yet, PHP is a cost because every time they up the revision, the language shifts on you ... on and on it goes, always trouble, and it grows with at least proportional to the number of tools.

It's tough. I think there is a desperate desire in the programming world to churn out a solution so damn quickly it's as if it came out of a recipe book, and anything else is unacceptable. That's not a real picture of the world, especially if you are building software that has to be relied upon.

On the other hand, what is easy is when someone says "oh, you should use XYZ" and really mean it. It's extraordinarily rare that they know what they are talking about, and it's a great differentiator between some junior nerd who's still in slashdot space, and someone who's actually been stabbed by tools and knows stuff.

Posted by iang at April 13, 2005 09:55 AM | TrackBack