Bob On Development

In my last post I mentioned that powerful forces are working to bend software development to the needs of mass production. It’s only partially successful, compared to, say, the mass production of automobiles, but it’s successful enough to have a big impact already on software developers. Consider the following things we already do pretty much without thinking about it:

• Use a set-oriented query language that specifies what to find, not how to find it (SQL)
• Use designers to create user interfaces (e.g., WinForms, WebControls)
• Use code generators to produce the skelton of things like components, services, and data access layers.

Quite awhile ago in one of my most popular posts, I made gentle fun of the goals Charles Simonyi’s company, Intentional Software. I was very skeptical that Intentional would succeed in capturing business rules and requirements in a way that would allow useful, maintainable, performant, quality software to be generated from such a captured spec.

On the other hand, it is possible that Intentional’s initial blue-skying has been tempered enough by reality to reconsider. It certainly has Microsoft’s attention, because Oslo, their road map for the next release of Visual Studio (2010?) appears to contain very similar technology.

Indeed, some of Microsoft’s other trial balloons, such as Volta, seem to be heading towards similarly higher levels of abstraction.

It is incredibly ambitious to invent a world where you and I will be writing XML documents describing what an application does rather than how it does it. But Microsoft has the billions (and the brain trust) to pull it off, if anyone can.

That said (ahem) I’m still a skeptic. Is it just me, or is this description by Charles Petzold of a new XAML-like version of C# that’s apparently gestating over at Intentional just making matters worse? Petzold describes three simple lines of C# as a “notorious syntactical absurdity” and then replaces it with something he says “can almost induce the modern programmer to weep for joy”: 45 lines of XML! Lord have mercy.

I’m sticking with my mantra that I’ll look into these things when I can see that they make business sense. It’s not ready for prime time yet!