The Disco Blog

At a recent copasetic conference, I had the pleasure of being a member of a panel discussion moderated by one of our industry’s hippest dudes, Ted Neward, where he posed a question something like this:

Imagine a developer coming up to a manager/CTO/CIO and asking if they could create the next version of the company’s application with Haskell (or some other hip language/tool/framework)– what should the manager say? What should the manager ask or look for when it comes to all these neat-o options?

There are, of course, a few answers to this question; however, my answer to this is simple– speed.

If [insert your buzz word here] can produce working features with an acceptable level of quality (meaning that one can maintain it) faster than [insert establishment tool/framework/language] then the answer is yes. Note, I’ve stressed the notion of quality and thus maintainability, but it’s secondary– speed is everything in a competitive market.

Think about for a second, man. Why has Hibernate essentially dethroned EJB to become the king of Java persistence? Is it because Hibernate is better? Hibernate is arguably “better” than EJB, but the truth is, better rarely wins; plus, better is hard to define. The reason why Hibernate won the battle is because at the time when EJB was the “Enterprise Choice” you could more quickly knock out a working persistence layer with Hibernate. What’s more, Hibernate is easier to test and deploy, making the choice an obvious one. Have you seen the latest EJB spec? Looks a lot like Hibernate, doesn’t it?

Why has Rails obtained so much tripping attention? Is it because Ruby is a better language than Java? If you’ve ever had the pleasure of writing Ruby code, you’ll probably say yes; however, once again, better doesn’t win over crowds– if so, we’d have all been programming in Ruby 10 years ago. The reason why Rails is so hip is because you can knock out a working web site in short order. Try that with Struts. If you’ve ever developed a Struts application (based upon recent polls, that’s just about everyone), frameworks like Rails (and Grails for that matter) are a breath of fresh air. Not only do Rails and Grails enable rapid turn around of features, they do it with tests in mind– every time you generate some artifact in these frameworks, a test skeleton is also generated (it’s up to you to actually fill it in) but a large part of the effort has been taken care of.

Why is Agile hip these days? Is it because Agile is easy to adopt as a process? (If you answered yes to that last question, you’re probably doing something wrong.) Easy isn’t what’s selling Agile– heck, Waterfall is a much easier process to adopt, believe me, man. No, the reason why Agile sells is because Agile methodologies facilitate speedy feature development. And, remember, Agile methodologies absolutely stress quality– TDD and CI, are, for example, the brainchildren of Agilests.

Some will argue that it is a safer choice, to say, develop an application with Struts, Tapestry, etc rather than Rails or Grails because there is a larger base of talent that knows the established “standard”– this is certainly true in the beginning for early adopters, but as we’ve seen time and time again in our industry, the tool that produces working code quickly eventually becomes king. How many people do you know have worked with EJB? How many have worked with Hibernate? I’m willing the bet the answers to those questions can be swapped depending on when you asked them (and how long that person’s been in the industry!). How’s that for an Acid flashback, baby?

Besides, the safe choice is rather short-sighted; in fact, the safe choice may end up costing a lot of money in the distant future– because it’s their bag, COBOL programmers will command high dollars in the near future. The opposite is also true– bet too early on a technology and you’ll pay out the nose as well– bill rates for Rails programmers appears to be quite nice these days. It’ll level off, albeit slowly.

Speed without quality kills, but speed with quality sells, baby. Frame your answer (or for that matter, question, request, etc) around speed and people will listen– frame it around features or worse, quality, and prepare to meet blank stares. Dig it?

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