Why are there so many man-made edge cases in IT, and is there any hope for simplification / unificat
- by Hamish Grubijan
This question is meant to generate discussion and so it is marked as community wiki.
My observation is that the field of information technology grows so rapidly and randomly, that for many it takes a lot of time to learn many intricacies of some tools that will be obsolete in just short 3 years. If you look at the questions asked on StackOverflow ... at least half of them stem from the fact that some language / tool / API / protocol was poorly designed, is backwards and has gotchas.
There are so many things which distract developers from converting English into machine code; instead they spend their time configuring stuff and gluing together things that do not really fit. How many times do you pick up somebody else's project (or someone picks up yours :) ) and realize that this program does not need half of the dialogs that it has, and that the logic can be simplified a great deal? But, it had to be made and sold here before a better thing is made and sold elsewhere, and hence all this rush.
I often wish that things would just slow down. I do not want Microsoft Windows to run on my car's computer, my watch, my table, my toaster oven, and my toilet seat. I'd rather have Windows that DOES NOT HAVE WINDOWS REGISTRY, I'd rather have Windows that allows two different programs to work on the same file at the same time, the way it works on Unix systems. Microsoft is just an example.
I am looking forward to the day when I do not have to worry about Windows vs Unix new line break, when System32 actually means that this directory contains 32-bit binaries, and not 64-bit ones, the day when dll hell and manifest hell are no longer an issue, the day when it takes me a lot less than 3 months on a new job to learn the system. I do not mean learning the entire code base of a product (depending on the size of it, it can take a long time). I mean - remembering which build-assisting scripts are written in Perl and which version of it, and which ones are done through .bat files, when do I need to manually make every file in some directory writable before running a script, or else a critical step of a database maintenance home-grown tool will bomb, and it will take 2 days to clean that up. Makes me wonder if humans enslaved computers, or if it is the other way around.
The key is that improving those things will not bring extra revenue, and hence those taking the time to fix crap like that are not "business focused". However, these imperfections irritate me immensely, particularly because my memory is limited - I can hold only a small portion of that useless knowledge of a system in my head at any given point in time.
I must not be alone. Did you also happen to notice that a programmer can waste a lot of time on things that should have been a lot more straight-forward? Is there hope? Will things get better/simpler in the future, or will there be a lot more IT crap floating around?
I suppose I see diversity of tools, protocols, etc. as a bad thing.
Thank you for participation.
