Nerd stuff

I’m entering a new phase in the product cycle at work so I get to think more about the current state of the way-behind-the-times while designing a new system.

Swing’s MVC design for tables and combo boxes and so on totally misses the point. MVC is about abstracting away the UI from the model; making the tables explicitly require a model that implements a javax.swing interface does nothing to reduce the coupling between interface and core code. What if I want a curses-based view instead of Swing on top of the same model? I am annoyed that Gtk2 seems to have picked up this misfeature.

Why did Java “5” introduce only an “enhanced for-loop” to go with generics? They should’ve taken a cue from STL and stressed algorithmic reuse. Where is a method like Perl’s map? Also, while we’re at it, I want real closures.

EJB is way too complex, and Sun figured that out, and released a new spec. So far things are looking much better. I don’t like annotations as they clutter the code and seem like a reinvention of #pragma: it looks like something the compiler shouldn’t know about, but does. On the other hand deployment descriptors were 1e15 times worse. The EJB 3 persistence model is a lot cleaner, and surprise, you can use your database code outside the container now. Way to finally support one of the basic goals of OO. In fact, I had a real-world problem to solve earlier this year: write a small application that reuses our DB backend stuff, all command line based, without hitting the EJB tier. This is harder than it sounds, and eventually had me writing my own datasource provider with connection and statement pooling that wrapped the JDBC drivers of our database. Ick.

I hate VMs. Operating systems are there for a reason. If I get another OutOfMemory exception because I didn’t pass -Xmx19201231230 to my leak-free Java program…

AJAX? A new name for what we did with javascript in hidden frames back in 1996? Okay, XmlHttpRequest, I’ll give you that. But it doesn’t deserve being thought of as a new technology. Same for “Service Oriented Architecture,” “Enterprise Service Bus,” and every other re-invention of RPC.

I still think Grady Booch is an idiot.

Kernel programming is fun: you can use goto, bitwise ops, cast pointers to structures, and it’s all okay. Also: don’t comment too much.