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RE: Good Enough

Grant Fritchey — Tue, 11 May 2010 05:37:58 GMT

[quote][b]Jeff Moden (5/10/2010)[/b][hr][quote][b]dbowlin (5/10/2010)[/b][hr]The more tools you have in your toolbelt the better off you will be.[/quote]There is such a thing as carrying too many tools on your "toolbelt" and has the same effect if you can imagine a plumber bent over under the sink. ;-)[/quote]But i NEED my laser guided beta beam dissasembler...

RE: Good Enough

Jeff Moden — Mon, 10 May 2010 20:22:23 GMT

[quote][b]dbowlin (5/10/2010)[/b][hr]The more tools you have in your toolbelt the better off you will be.[/quote]There is such a thing as carrying too many tools on your "toolbelt" and has the same effect if you can imagine a plumber bent over under the sink. ;-)

RE: Good Enough

Daniel Bowlin — Mon, 10 May 2010 11:27:54 GMT

The more tools you have in your toolbelt the better off you will be. Regarding the making simple things simpler...sometimes that can be useful, but other times not. Using the tool analogy, if I have a shingle to replace on my roof, I am going to use a razor knife, a hammer (the manual kind) and a regular roofing nail, if I have a new roof to install I am going to use more automation ( a nail or staple gun loaded with all the hardware I need) to do the simple thing over and over.Regarding hiding the complexity, I agree completely. There are many times I recall having trouble getting far enough into a hidden complex task that would have been easier to do the hard way because at least that way I knew how it worked and why it worked.

RE: Good Enough

Jeff Moden — Sun, 09 May 2010 17:21:17 GMT

[quote][b]wldhrs (5/6/2010)[/b][hr]Edited ... oops curly { on a url doesn't make it look like a url :-(Jeff, you're sounding (reading?) almost as jaded as I am.[/quote]Heh... if you mean tired of the deprecation and removal of useful features in favor of pretty GUI's that have a 10th of the functionality then yeah... I'm real jaded. :-D[quote]... and sql server are going to have the best marketing around 'cos I've sure as hell invested a lot of my life in what I consider a technically very good set of solutions...[/quote]Spot on and ditto... I couldn't have said it better myself. Let's hope we don't go the way of the Dodo bird (or is that the DOH! bird ;-) ) and the FoxPro programmer. :hehe:

RE: Good Enough

wldhrs — Thu, 06 May 2010 18:40:24 GMT

Edited ... oops curly { on a url doesn't make it look like a url :-(Jeff, you're sounding (reading?) almost as jaded as I am.However, quoting from our esteemed editor where this list started, "I'd have to say that it's when you see a decent future in the new technology. When it appears that others have proven savings, like a task takes less time or you get better performance."I'm not sure anyone could prove that that MVS wasn't just the coolest and fastest aproach to re-entrent program execution ever. But that just didn't cut the mustard 'cos MSFT had better marketing for a ***-awful OS and and compilers that worked most of the time.In all my time with IBM systems I once found a genuine bug with the PL/I compiler.And for those nerds, who had an anti-M$FT fixation then Linux was the coolest thing out, it just could never support as much hardware as MSFT could, ... oh, maybe that's why MSFT were charging for their products, 'cos they would actually run on just about any hardware on the planet .. well,well, never did think that was a problem until I bought a chinese knockoff of ...Oops, off the subject. The best marketing wins, not the best technical solution.I'm sort of hoping that .net (based around c# not vb or x#, he,he) and sql server are going to have the best marketing around 'cos I've sure as hell invested a lot of my life in what I consider a technically very good set of solutions, leaving aside some of the aberrations like asp.net mvc where a forced solution to bad programming has introduced some really weird results. Maybe not wrong, just weird.And these solutions are evolving very quickly on both a technical language path and a hardware implementaion path, so let's be vveerryy careful about what we define as less time to get better performance.How many times has everyone out there seen a solution that make the simple stuff simpler but the hard stuff harder.[url]http://www.artima.com/intv/simplexity.html[/url]When you take something incredibly complex and try to wrap it in something simpler, you often just shroud the complexity. You don't actually design a truly simple system. And in some ways you make it even more complex, because now the user has to understand what was omitted that they might sometimes need. That's simplexity.- Anders Hejlsberg, Lead C# architect

RE: Good Enough

Jeff Moden — Wed, 05 May 2010 23:37:13 GMT

In just about anything I've seen having to do with software, 99% of the people only know how to use 1% of the functionality. A lot of the new flash-in-the-pan software is to try to get the next generation to buy the latest version (gotta keep up with the Jones' :-P) with 1 or 2 "slick" things that can usually be done without the "slick" if you just take the time to learn it.I've seen a whole lot of good functionality in SQL Server simply go away along with some of the good stuff they added... I wonder when they'll add some of it back in so you can buy a new version to get it and think its new and "slick".

RE: Good Enough

SQLRNNR — Wed, 05 May 2010 16:03:12 GMT

It is nice to have some of the old stuff in the old toolbelt - sometimes that just isn't enough or the correct tool. Time to learn the new stuff and possibly become more efficient.

RE: Good Enough

Frank W Fulton Jr — Wed, 05 May 2010 14:11:03 GMT

Having been in the computer business for 30 some odd years, the only constant I have come across is that everything changes.But, then again that is one of the things I love about it, there is always a new challenge. For me that currently is VS2010 & .Net 4.0, with SQL 2008 R2 just around the corner, the fun never ends!

RE: Good Enough

Grant Fritchey — Wed, 05 May 2010 12:06:53 GMT

I'd say it's time to learn it. There is just so much capability built into it now from MS plugging it into every product they're turning out these days... It just seems crazy to not develop a good skill set in it.

RE: Good Enough

Trey Staker — Wed, 05 May 2010 09:11:02 GMT

I jumped on the powershell bandwagon awhile ago but still go back to other tools (scripting languages). The way I look at it is that it is just another tool on my tool belt. Having more tools on the tool belt allows you to solve more problems or to look at it differently. "When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."

RE: Good Enough

Steve Jones - SSC Editor — Wed, 05 May 2010 09:06:20 GMT

Is it going backwards? I'm not sure about that. I think that PWS, and Python, are actually moving forward by bridging some of the programming concepts that were missing in DOS. It's more like making a korn or C-shell for the Windows world.The big thing for me is that the tools have to be built in. When I'm recovering a server, or rebuilding one, I like having stuff built into the OS and stack. Or easily integrated into an install. PWS does this on newer systems, and as those become mainstream, it becomes more likely that PWS is available.VBS works well for me, and the big reason I moved away from Perl is that I could always count on VBS being on every server.

RE: Good Enough

OCTom — Wed, 05 May 2010 07:01:31 GMT

Ha. I still do things with good old DOS commands. Powershell is just a rehash of command line processing and scripting. Be it DOS and batch files, VBS, AS400, Unix/Linux, etc, command line processing has been a quick and easy way to get certain things done. Learn Powershell... sure. But, don't think it's anything new. A command line based on .NET is going backward not forward.

RE: Good Enough

Henrico Bekker — Tue, 04 May 2010 23:29:24 GMT

Hi Steve, I think "abandoning" VBS and PWS might be a bit harsh. Moving on to new technologies is a definite yes, but still using your "legacy" knowledge is never a bad thing I reckon.I say, whichever is quicker and more efficient to use, is usually the best way to go.

Good Enough

Steve Jones - SSC Editor — Tue, 04 May 2010 20:10:54 GMT

Comments posted to this topic are about the item [B]Good Enough[/B]