Most overhyped software engineering technologies of the last 20 years
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Most overhyped software engineering technologies of the last 20 years
1–10 of 41 posts
Re: Most overhyped software engineering technologies of the last 20 years
#2I agree with UML and CASE tools, it was always a time-waster that produce too many things and never used.
But I disagree with XML and OOP. XML was necessary for the first web APIs we had (they were called SOAP, in case you wasn't a developer that time). And OOP is everything you do, it's a way to write code more clear and maintainable (just forget everything about the 'reuse your code' and 'speed you development', OOP isn't just about this).
Re: Most overhyped software engineering technologies of the last 20 years
#3I agree with UML and CASE tools, it was always a time-waster that produce too many things and never used. But I disagree with XML and OOP. XML was necessary for the first web APIs we had (they were called SOAP, in case you wasn't a developer that time). And OOP is everything you do, it's a way to write code more clear and maintainable (just forget everything about the 'reuse your code' and 'speed you development', OO…
"XML was necessary for the first web APIs we had"
People were building systems that had APIs exposed via HTTP a long time before XML.
Re: Most overhyped software engineering technologies of the last 20 years
#4I agree with UML and CASE tools, it was always a time-waster that produce too many things and never used. But I disagree with XML and OOP. XML was necessary for the first web APIs we had (they were called SOAP, in case you wasn't a developer that time). And OOP is everything you do, it's a way to write code more clear and maintainable (just forget everything about the 'reuse your code' and 'speed you development', OO…
UML diagrams have one redeeming quality: when they allow direct full-code generation. I always saw jaws dropping when demoing ArchGenXML for making Plone products.
Re: Most overhyped software engineering technologies of the last 20 years
#5I agree with UML and CASE tools, it was always a time-waster that produce too many things and never used. But I disagree with XML and OOP. XML was necessary for the first web APIs we had (they were called SOAP, in case you wasn't a developer that time). And OOP is everything you do, it's a way to write code more clear and maintainable (just forget everything about the 'reuse your code' and 'speed you development', OO…
OOP is everything you do
OOP may be everything _you_ do, but it is not everything I do, and there are large vibrant software development communities using paradigms and tools that are not particularly object-oriented. Beware of making over-generalizations like this.
Re: Most overhyped software engineering technologies of the last 20 years
#6Smalltalk is now a "visual" language...
And, BTW, VB.NET is, according to Wikipedia, the only language about 60% of the .NET programmers use.
Re: Most overhyped software engineering technologies of the last 20 years
#7I agree with UML and CASE tools, it was always a time-waster that produce too many things and never used. But I disagree with XML and OOP. XML was necessary for the first web APIs we had (they were called SOAP, in case you wasn't a developer that time). And OOP is everything you do, it's a way to write code more clear and maintainable (just forget everything about the 'reuse your code' and 'speed you development', OO…
UML diagrams have one redeeming quality: when they allow direct full-code generation. I always saw jaws dropping when demoing ArchGenXML for making Plone products.
Some of the stupidest code I've ever seen was auto-generated from UML. People get all excited by seeing code generated from a picture and forget to check if the code produced is actually sensible or not - in most cases I've seen the code produced is abominable.
Re: Most overhyped software engineering technologies of the last 20 years
#8I agree with UML and CASE tools, it was always a time-waster that produce too many things and never used. But I disagree with XML and OOP. XML was necessary for the first web APIs we had (they were called SOAP, in case you wasn't a developer that time). And OOP is everything you do, it's a way to write code more clear and maintainable (just forget everything about the 'reuse your code' and 'speed you development', OO…
"XML was necessary for the first web APIs we had" People were building systems that had APIs exposed via HTTP a long time before XML.
And what's so special about HTTP? Communicating over the network is old - things like RPC have been around for a long time (first spec in 1976, according to Wikipedia.)
Re: Most overhyped software engineering technologies of the last 20 years
#9Some care is needed to not conflate "overhyped" with "useless". There are plenty of software engineering technologies who haven't lived up to the hype because expectations were set way too high. They are however extremely useful.
I was taking a master's level database course at the time of XML mania and we spent a massive amount of time on XML because the prof felt XML + XQuery was going to displace traditional relational databases. There were numerous reasons why this didn't happen, but a not insignificant number of people bought into it. Some database-y things are possible with XML, but you'd be crazy to replace a massive schema with it without good reason.
OOP is another great one. It is incredibly useful to write OOP code. However, the promise at the beginning of the OOP mania was that you could "snap code together as easily as Legos... even normal people will be able to write complex software!". OOP has certainly helped make code more maintainable and fostered a lot of code re-use, but the ease described by the early hype was hugely off the mark. It turns out it's really hard to write super-reusable code such that you can use it "as-is" in situations the original authors never envisioned.
Re: Most overhyped software engineering technologies of the last 20 years
#10I think the whole premise of this question is kind of... off. Just about every tool goes through a period of being hyped. That's why we use them. Show me a tool that hasn't been hyped and I'll show you a tool that not enough people know about.
Complaints that things are "overhyped" are dubious. Everything is overhyped to some degree. What would an "optimal" amount of hype be, and how would you regulate it? If you underhype your product, you are leaving profit on the table. To maximize the number of satisfied customers, you must ultimately run your product past many, many people who ultimately won't be satisfied customers.
Meanwhile, I can't help but fear that this poll is just another measurement of popular fashion: Once a technology has found its niche, can we really judge its ultimate importance without being experts in the niche? We can all tell when something becomes unfashionable, but it's quite hard to know just what its ongoing impact really is. Unfashionable technologies fade into the woodwork, but they do vital work nonetheless. Was COBOL overhyped? Was Perl overhyped? Can I really claim that XML was overhyped, even as I type words into a machine built largely out of XML-based config files? When I pound the table and declare that, say, Java was overhyped, am I really saying more about myself than I am about Java? I have a vision of myself, walking around the room while using my iPhone to compose a message claiming that tablet computers and robots are overhyped, and then tripping over my Roomba.