If you’ve been here before, welcome back! I hope you like what I’ve done with the place. The reason for the death of NPF 1.0 is that through its lifetime I’ve come to reevaluate and even reverse some of the positions I’ve laid down on its pages. I don’t want to beat the same dead horses in this new incarnation but just to lay down the baggage:
- Contracts: good. Overspecification: bad. A prime example of what I mean is the SOAP spec – there is so much there, that I don’t think any one implementation is 100% complete or 100% accurate. The whole point of a contract is that it is adhered to – if it’s near-impossible to follow the contract, does that not defeat its purpose?
- Windows PowerShell. I was really enthusiastic about PowerShell in time gone by. I adored the concept of an object-oriented shell, to be able to get the fields I want without all that grepping, to have nice data structures like we do in C#. Unfortunately, this means that all the CMDlets, scripts, functions, and so on end up tightly coupled to these data types, thus limiting the scope of their application. When everything is text, everything can work on everything. This is very reminiscent of the SOAP vs. REST debate – in fact it is exactly the SOAP vs. REST debate. When things have to be very interoperable or “mashable” such as with a web service or a shell command, imposing fine-grained contracts on everything just won’t do.
- Much lip service in NPF 1.0 was paid to the No Fluff Just Stuff conferences. After all, they were an infusion of “the latest and greatest” into the the lives of engineers stuck on the “not-so-latest”. Well, some time has passed – but not much has changed, materially, in the session listings of the conference (at least in its Boston-area incarnations). Dynamic languages, agility, REST – all have become old news by now, if not before, and no drastic new currents have come to take their place… so if, like me, you’ve been to one or two of these conferences, there is no point attending (or discussing) them again.
Ok, the baggage has been checked at the door. Onward!
