RE: RE: WDSC and Linux

> From: Joe Pluta
>
> > From: Michael Naughton
> >
> > Using your definition, I bet most of us are "application
> assemblers".  But
> >  I'm not sure there's anything wrong with that.
>
> I disagree.  In the old days of BPCS (and indeed most ERP packages), if
> something went wrong, you could debug the code line by line and eventually
> find the problem, even if it wasn't your program.  And in so doing, you
> began to learn what made that whole system tick.

And by the way, Mike, I know I'm being part Luddite, part Don Quixote when I
talk like this.  I realize that software has gotten so complex that nobody
can be expected to know all of it.  But I'm afraid that we're starting to
rely on technology we don't really know that well, and nobody really knows
anything about certain parts - crucial parts.

Is it good or bad?  Aaron would say good.  He thinks I'm a dinosaur.  You're
probably leaning towards good yourself because you see the direct benefits.
Me, I'm remembering the days of code generators gone bad, or screen scrapers
that only supported certain things, and we ended up with code we couldn't
maintain because NOBODY KNEW WHAT IT DID.

<shudder>

Maybe I am a dinosaur, I dunno.  But I do know that with the simple model II
JSP (that is a servlet calls business logic to gather data and sends it to a
JSP) that there's hardly a line of code in there that you can't debug
yourself, and that makes me real comfortable when I recommend it to my
clients.

Joe