On systems, software and salesmen

've been doing systems and software for 15 years. At times it's been a rodeo ride a river raft a cliff dive a drag race an under water breath-holding contest a space walk and dogfight. It's never quite been a hot-air balloon ride for long... Things happen - often. If you pick the wrong road or get stuck in a comfortable spot you may be dead sooner than you think.

I've seen the rise and fall of many a paradigm (did they really rise - or fall?; were they not just repackaged, renamed, repositioned?). Dumb terminals and mainframes, client-server, container based ala MTx and EJB and Servlet, services of all kinds. Procedural, OO, aspect-oriented, component-based, object-relational mapping, service-oriented, dependency injection, monolithic, service bus, distributed and on and on and on...

Unix was big, Windows flexed its muscles, DOS died, Linux was born and has come of age at the expense of all types of Unices and all kinds of Windows OS's. I did serious development with Ada, C, C++, C#, Python, Pascal, Object Pascal, Delphi, Power Builder and Java. I played with Objective C, D, Eiffel, JavaScript, CLOS, TCL, Perl and Lisp. The benevolent forces spared me exposure to COBOL, Fortran and Visual Basic.

I witnessed the demise of WordPerfect, the rise of Microsoft office, the death of Netscape's browser. I've lived through the software notation wars. I saw Coad-Yourdon, Shlear-Mallor, Booch, Objectory, OMT and some others cooked into UML. I witnessed some great work by Gamma, Helm, Johnson and Vlissides. I am now standing on the slow moving tectonic plate that is called open source and open standards. Who knows what will happen - will we see the Himalayas form? The great divide? Will we see the birth of Pangaea?

You used to pay for everything. Now it seems that we may end up paying for nothing - hmmm, we'll see...

The big constant in all of this is the lies of the marketers and salesmen. Over and over I've heard the drum-beat; better, quicker, easier, cheaper. With the advent of every new technology I see pretty people pushing pretty glossies from high profile companies stating that the slog is over, that the easy life has arrived, that the hard stuff has become easy. What bothers me no end is that the exact opposite is true. Technology becomes more and more complex. Things takes longer. It's harder. Integration is tougher. You have to absorb more. Things gets slower in the age or super fast processors. Gains in productivity is negated by the arrival of the next best thing - as soon and you know something it is obsolete. Chaos reigns, mostly.

How do we stop this? Can we stop this with the forces of profit driving systems and software technology? My views at a later stage...