Software Development and Alchemy
In several conversations recently with other software developers (yep, those are just as exciting as your wildest dreams) and their frustrations with the process, as implemented in modern corporate America, the same analogy kept popping into my head.
More and more, I feel like the things that businesses are after in their software development are similar to medieval alchemy. For 2500 years, the entire field that eventually became chemistry was obsessed with 3 basic questions:
- How can we change lead (or other metals) into gold?
- How can we create an elixir that will cure all diseases and prolong life indefinitely?
- Can we discover a universal solvent?
All of these strike us as goals that weren't even attainable. Yet, the underlying desires often did get met when the focus shifted to what eventually became modern chemistry. By dropping the focus on the single, universal solution and just figuring out how to treat individual diseases or how to dissolve individual compounds or just fundamentally understand chemistry, many advances did happen.
Many/most of the diseases that the alchemists sought to cure or treat are under control today. There's very little in the world of chemistry that we can't tear apart and we can do things like convert coal or corn into one of the most sought after substances on earth: liquid fuel for transportation.
One of the consulting firms I worked with had a project manager that was constantly pushing the developers to find and use "automagical" tools to build our solutions. What he was after was the kind of IDE or tool that, with a few clicks, would just spit out a nearly complete solution.
That would, of course, result in the sales force being able to sell expensive solutions that could be fulfilled in minutes instead of days and weeks. It didn't matter how often I pointed out that, as a consulting company, if our clients' solutions were so simple that a few clicks and config options could solve them, they wouldn't bother coming to us: they'd just buy the software themselves.
This same person wasn't very excited about things like loosely-coupled systems and/or Service Oriented Architecture unless they also came with wizards that let you choose 4 or 5 options and they'd just spit out a fully-realized application. Yet, those approaches keep working for me as a way of looking for patterns in companies' problems and solving them quickly and completely.
Instead of looking for the tool that spits out C#, PHP, ColdFusion and Ruby, I'm looking for repeating problems like managing queues of objects to be processed. Once you have an approach to that general problem, a good developer can probably implement it in whatever language they're most comfortable with.
That's due, in large part, to the fact that the bulk of the work as a software developer is NOT in typing in the text of the programming language in question. Douglas Crockford said in one of his Yahoo video lectures something along the lines of: a developer could probably type up all of their code for an entire year in a day or 2.
Yet, many of these automagical tools really only seem to automate the stuff related to typing code, not for solving problems. And, like I said a couple of days ago, if you're in the consulting game or just looking to stay employed as a developer, the money and jobs are where the problems are.
That's why, when I hear someone looking for that quick and easy tool that will "just" take care of it this afternoon, I tend to interpret it as, "Can't we just change this lead into gold instead of getting real gold?"
