Changing attitude to technology
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For those of us who have been in the industry a long time I was wondering what changes in yourself have you noticed with regard to attitudes towards technology.
I have reached the point when I am thinking "stop changing things for the sake of change, that is not how you define progress".
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I myself feel the same way. I have been at this for over 15 years now…I have seen the bleeding edge and the not so bleeding edge of technology….I have even received a patent in the process. I’m at the point now where I will not change when something bigger and better roles out. I have enough problems worrying about government legislation and how it affects process, than to learn and develop in the latest and greatest.
It was a different story when I first started out….When a new program/software it the market …Beta or not, I wanted it….I wanted to be the first to know it…now I would just like to maintain what I have.
Our main business is not to see what lies dimly in the distance but to do what lies clearly at hand. - Thomas Carlyle
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I'm of a similar opinion. I think much of what we use, should be, and is in many cases, a tool. A commodity. The closest analogy I can think of is the telephone. Much of the technology we use should be as easy, reliable, and simple as a telephone. There are some changing areas that are worth investigating, wireless is one of htem, but for the most part, not much has changed in the technology area. I think there are lots of marketing efforts underway to "convince" you that the new way is better, but new languages, new things like web services aren't really new. They are evolutions of old processes.
This is from a guy that's not sold on OOP as being much better than procedural programming.
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I have to admit that I still look at an XML document as a posh version of a COBOL data division.
I quite like the ideas behind OOP and when it is done well it is a thing of beauty. Lets face it, programming is as much art as science.
I would say that to get the most out of OOP the design and analysis phase needs to be absolutely top rate.
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I feel that I must post a dissenting opinion.
After ten years in the industry I look forward to new technologies even more than I did four or five years ago. The reason is much the same as the one Steve has for preferring the tried and true. In recent years, new technologies (or rehashes of old ones) have been aimed at making things easier. I can build a solution faster and better today than I could a few years ago because the tools are better. I am eager for the release of SQL Server 2005 mainly because the tools are better and SQL Server will become easier to use.
Bryant's case study: Ages ago, I wrote a simple game in VB4. When it came time to learn .NET and C# I took it upon myself to rewrite the game in C# during my spare time. When I first wrote the game in VB4 it took my about four weeks of spare time. The C# took me about the same amount of time. The big difference though, was that I had about a year of experience with VB4 and about two weeks of experience with C#. At least 80% of the learning curve was negated through the combination of my limited OO knowledge and productivity enhancements in Visual Studio .NET.
I also disagree with the telephone example. I think that we're stuck with poorly designed cell phones because people are used to their phones being a certain way. How many of you can hold one of these tiny cell phones in one hand and press the # key with your thumb (or the * key if you're left handed)? I can, except when I am walking, driving, or doing anything else that requires any level of concentration. If they designed cell phones with the screen on the bottom and the buttons on the top, I could comfortably hold the phone with one hand and even dial without looking. Well, at least I don't have to crank it up before I use it...
The moral of this
novelstory is that people and companies working on new software are thinking about ease of use and they know that a huge learning curve or cumbersome user interfaces will cause their products to fail in the marketplace. Now, if the Linux-based developers figure this out and work on their GUI apps a little better we'll see Linux take off on the desktop![font="Tahoma"]Bryant E. Byrd, BSSE MCDBA MCAD[/font]
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