I've just signed up to be informed when Sun's Project Rave is released. From what I've read, it's either "programming for retards" or else Sun is lying. :)
But seriously, I hope it's not like Visual Basic. The existence of VB is solely responsible for the huge amount of people who think they are computing professionals because they know how to put together simple apps, and nothing more.
Maybe I'm overreacting, but there are an awful lot of people like that in Spain. At least I keep on running into them. The other day at work, we were asked to install a webapp on a server we manage. The first thing that looked off was that the package was in a .jar, not a .war. Upon inspection of this .jar, we find a collection of classes - and nothing more. No WEB-INF, no web.xml, nothing. Thinking that this must be an oversight, we got in touch with the "coder" and asked for the web.xml file. No problem. Five minutes later we're staring at the following file:
<web-app>
</web-app>
Seriously. And the guy swore that it was correct. So the next few hours were spent reading the code and working out what servlet declarations had to be done (incidentally, the servlet-mappings were all the same as the class names).
Here is what I think happened: The guy started out writing VB programs, and thought he was good. Sometime during 1998-2000 he got a job in the computing industry, taking advantage of the dot-com boom. So that's how he got his job. Now one day he was asked to do something in Java. So he gets JBuilder (or something) and starts reading one of these cheap-ass (and crap) spanish computer books printed by these gentlemen. Armed with not nearly enough knowledge about computers in general and his chosen subject in particular, he starts doing stuff in JBuilder. He uses wizards, he copies public-domain code from the net, and in a couple of weeks has come up with a web application that seems to work. Great, except he doesn't know it's a web application, he doesn't know how it works internally, he doesn't know what an application server is, he doesn't know about .wars, etc, etc. And this is where we get a bunch of talented and qualified people wasting time arguing with this guy about his web.xml and then reverse-engineering his code to make it work. Thankfully we were charging by the hour for this.
And that is the danger of VB. It makes the novice think that what he sees in the IDE is all there is to his program, because in VB it *is* all. However when he has to use something a little more complex, he's not even lost because he's not aware that there is so much more to know. And he just goes merrily on his way, oblivious to all the problems his code may be causing, thinking that if it doesn't work it's someone else's fault for not knowing how to set it up. "They must be so dumb", he thinks. "It's so simple".
What does all this have to do with Project Rave, you ask? Well, imagine for a moment that it is "programming for retards", as I mentioned before. This would mean that suddenly a whole bunch of people who don't know Java would end up thinking that they do. A whole bunch of clueless managers would believe them.
Now, where is Java used that VB isn't? Think small unimportant places like financial institutions, insurance companies, etc. So the risk is that suddenly you're enabling this calibre of programmer to do some *real* damage instead of limiting it to some stupid little desktop apps.
Does nobody else find this scary?
Posted by Dave at September 17, 2003 03:22 PM