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Hammer factory horrors

February 10, 2006 00:01:25 +0200 (EET)

Late last year there was a great piece of parody on software factories on Joel Spolsky's forums (tip of the hat to Software Chimp for spotting it). Note I said "software factories" without any TM or initial capitals: the parody was on megalomanic code frameworks for web apps, rather than anything out of Redmond. Still, that didn't stop Jack Greenfield from responding - or apparently from getting a little annoyed. His reply starts off with a *Sigh*, which looks like it's becoming the de rigueur response by industry luminaries to perceived criticism :-).

In other news, it's great to see VMWare server becoming free: I'm a big fan of Workstation, which takes a lot of the pain out of supporting MetaEdit+ on multiple Windows and Linux versions. Sad but hardly surprising news was Borland's leaving the IDE business. I got my first play with Turbo Pascal back in 1988, and whilst it's something I've only had to use for work a couple of times, I've always appreciated the clarity of the language and the well-thought out UI of the IDE.

That clarity of language and tools is something I sorely missed over the last couple of days. I've been consulting for a client who wants to generate C++ on Linux, using a framework that is decidedly from the last century and a development environment that I thought died out in the 1980s: basic text editors and compiler errors on stdout. To parody the parody above, if that's what using a hammer is like, I can see why our client liked the DSM nailgun we built with them!