Programming in a Poorly Designed Language Without Tool Support Is No Fun
Who dares run this code?
Yoda, the wise teacher of Jedi apprentice Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars movies, knows that fear leads to anger; anger leads to hate; hate leads to suffering. Likewise, corporate IT’s fear of code and the love of configuration can lead it down a path to suffering from which it is difficult to escape. Beware of the dark side, which has many faces, including vendors peddling products that “only require configuration,” as
opposed to tedious, error-prone coding. Sadly, most complex
configuration really is just programming, albeit in a poorly designed,
rather constrained language without decent tooling or useful
documentation.
Fear of Code
Corporate IT, which is often driven by operational considerations, tends
to consider code the stuff that contains all the bugs, causes
performance problems, and is written by expensive external consultants (Chapter 38) who are difficult to hold liable because they’ll have long
moved to another project by the time the problems surface. Some IT
leaders even proudly proclaim that they are a “proper business” and
not a software development company, so they shouldn’t bother with coding
stuff.
Note
The most grotesque example of fear of code I have observed was corporate IT providing application servers as a shared service. Once ...
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