97 Things Every Java Programmer Should Know

Chapter 60. The Necessity of Industrial-Strength Technologies

Paul W. Homer

Java may have been called the next COBOL, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

COBOL has been an incredibly successful technology. Reliable, consistent, and easy to read, it has been the workhorse of the Information Age, managing the bulk of the world’s mission-critical systems. If the syntax requires lots of extra typing, that is offset by the sheer number of readers that have had to ponder its behavior.

Trendy software stacks sound cool—and, as most are quite immature, there is always plenty to learn—but the world needs reliable industrial-strength software to function. A new clever idiom or slightly obfuscated paradigm can be great fun to play with, but by definition they are shrouded in unknowns. We’re obsessed with finding some magical way to just snap our fingers and will the next enterprise-class system into existence, but we keep forgetting that over three decades ago Frederick Brooks Jr. said those kinds of magic bullets—silver or otherwise—just can’t exist.

We don’t need the next trendy toy to solve real problems for people. We need to put in the thinking and the work to fully understand and codify reliable solutions. Systems that only work on sunny days, or that need to be rewritten every year or so, don’t satisfy our growing needs for managing the complexities of modern society. It doesn’t ...