Where are they now?
Ahh, the wonders of hindsight! Remember yesteryear, when things were fresh and new, and the sweet sweet stench of innovation hung heavy in the air? Such promise, such hope! So many little API’s poking their shy little heads out of various birthing orifices. So many developers running around like cute little headless chickens hoping for a pat or nod of approval from an ignorant, shiteating-grin-wearing crowd.
Well, let’s catch up with some of those happy events and persons, and see what they’re up to now…
The first stop on this sordid little tour of the past sees us visiting the hapless Jon Tirsen. Once a promising young developer of dubious Swedish/Norwegian origins, he quickly found a home that could put up with his severe Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) at ThoughtWorks. Remember when he cooed and oohed and aahed and excreted happy juices rubywards? Remember when he managed to get onto the frontpage of TSS with his ruby continuous integration tool, DamageControl? Well, the poor kid’s ADD was so severe that even his employer thought it’s best if he’s just put away from harm’s way, and promptly shipped him to the penal colony down under, while defanging him by putting him to work on such menial tasks as build tools.
As for DamageControl, the only user is codehaus. In fact, it’s such a pathetic failure of a tool than even the incredibly undiscerning eye of the codehaus folks is becoming more and more annoyed at this tool that manages to fall over more often than crazybob in Vegas.
No pointing and laughing at Tirsen is complete without some measure of pointing and laughing at his cohort/sidekick/puppetmaster Aslak Hellesoy.
Poor Aslak’s only legitimate claim to fame is STILL only xdoclet. After stalling horribly on xdoclet 2, he went on to join ThoughtWorks and underachieve in a surprising number of projects. First we had picocontainer (remember THAT?!), then DamageControl, and finally a series of hilarious TDD tools in a sad and desperate last bid attempt for some kind of recognition. It’s so sad seeing great men fall so low, but a key part of playing this game is knowing when to quit. If you’re now writing silly TDD toys that delete code (and don’t actually work) then you’re well well past that point of quitting with dignity.
Of course, this being Java, we should visit some tools as well as persons of dubious character. The first stop is in fact somewhat of a happy note!
It turns out that after a year of whimpery sad death throes, Jakarta Avalon has finally given up the ghost. It’s so nice to see projects dying, a sign that out there in the great developer wilderness, a few lone voices of discontent and misery can in fact push through and get something (un)done.
Next up we have Maven. Remember when people were excited about it and thought it was some kind of competition to ant? Remember when people used to actually defend it? Well, the current state of play is that even jakarta hardcores are complaining and bitching about it. Maven 1 devs now flail about hopelessly on their silly plugins, while some make half-assed attempts in maven 2′s general direction. I’m sure The ADD crowd with piddly toy projects will soon move to this new version, and no doubt then join the huge mass of mavenmockers out there.
Finally, groovy! Remember when people thought it was cool? Remember when some smart people said they’d turn it into a proper spec? Well, those days are long gone. One of the few smart people involved in that ungodly tripe, Sam Pullara, has moved onto bigger and better things. James Strachan of course is still cursed with the attention span of a gnat, and is now busy churning out Active
So, what other spectacular failures have there been? Any news of other misfit hasbeens that should be made public and some more humiliation poured on their already quite miserable existence?
October 27th, 2004 at 12:44 am
I don’t think DamageControl ever made it to the TSS frontpage…
October 27th, 2004 at 1:47 am
It would nice if struts would disappear. What a misguided, bloated, simply awful piece of software ungineering.
October 27th, 2004 at 2:23 am
Hey Hani, good rant, good rant… Regarding Groovy, our informal discussions on the JSR mailing-list didn’t yield firm decisions or directions, though a consensus on certain points is already emerging. To get things going forward, Javanicus and I are organizing a JSR Expert Group meeting in mid-november, so that a face-to-face opportunity will help us make good progress in the standardization of Groovy as a JSR-ed language. I’d be glad to see you there if you fancy it. One more minor point to fix your claims: there IS a fantastic language expert from Sun (John Rose) who’s participating in this effort. Cheers.
October 27th, 2004 at 2:53 am
It would nice if JBoss would disappear. What a misguided, bloated, simply awful piece of software ungineering.
It would nice if XDoclet would disappear. What a misguided, bloated, simply awful piece of software ungineering.
It would nice if JSF would disappear. What a misguided, bloated, simply awful piece of software ungineering.
It would nice if Torque would disappear. What a misguided, bloated, simply awful piece of software ungineering.
October 27th, 2004 at 5:50 am
Eclipse, and especially WSAD are top of my list for culling. What an abysmal piece of toss WSAD is. The only reason that it exists is because WebsFear is such an unbelievable mare to set up and develop with that IBM had to integrate it into an IDE, lest any sane man convince his company that the increase in timescales that WAS causes just isn’t worth outrageous cost.
But which IDE did they choose? A nice one? Of course not. They choose the worst one in history of the universe. Just because it’s got support of every big name under the sun supporting it, and raft of plugins, don’t mean that eclipse isn’t an enormas pile of slowly rotting castrated sheeps testicles.
“Oh, but it helps you write enterprise apps”, I hear people say. Well, that depends on if you find giving up all you precious lifespan hunting through dialogue boxes, trying to if an elusive dependancy setting that is stopping anything from working, a worthwhile persuit. I suppose if you are thick as two short planks, can’t code for toffee, spastic, fuckwitted, braindamaged, moronic, wannabee, you might think that it saves you time, yes. But if you are, then you don’t count.
Oh, ban it. Please ban it. Get rid of it, and all that horrid SWT dribbling insanity. Oh, please God, please make it stop…. please… please…
October 27th, 2004 at 6:01 am
And if you think DamageControl is pathetic, you’ve obviously never had the dubious pleasure of setting up CruiseControl…
October 27th, 2004 at 8:23 am
Hey, Jimadilo. Here’s a thought. If it hurts when you hit yourself on the head with a hammer, don’t do it. If you don’t like Eclipse, don’t use it. Either way, shut the f*ck up you annoying gobshite.
October 27th, 2004 at 10:33 am
Arsene Wenger,
don’t you think that, given the choice, Jimadilo wouldn’t so much as touch any of the tools he mentions with a stick? Your comments says a lot more about your abilities than anything else. How tf do you manage to use WebsFear for anything useful? You host it on clustered Cray boxen?
October 27th, 2004 at 4:42 pm
While I’m not suggesting Websphere or Eclipse/WSAD are perfect, I’m always astounded regarding the hammering WAS still gets by the pseudo cool kids (Hani’s groupies?). Yeah, it only started to get usable in v5, but being “unbelievable mare to set up and develop with”? I think that says more of that dev’s skill than his psychotic ramblings against a product. I’ve been productive with intelliJ/ant/orion2 combo, but just as with wsad/was at my current place o’ employment. Adaptability, what a novel concept.
October 27th, 2004 at 7:53 pm
Cruisecontrol is a bit of a pain in the arse to set up. But so is Damagecontrol. The difference is that CC actually does something afterwards.
October 27th, 2004 at 8:56 pm
I have never had a problem installing, setting up, or operating websphere app server, on either Windows or AIX. It’s performance has never been an issue either.
However WSAD is a sad piece of bloated crap but Eclipse is perfectly fine.
I often wonder what’s wrong with people who constantly bitch and moan about webs’fear’ as they say. All complex software has particular issues with particular things. Websphere’s never failed me, for high availability distributed applications. Why it fails you, perhaps the craftsman should stop blaming their tools.
October 28th, 2004 at 1:08 am
I don’t know about you guys. But I’d rather be on the beach in Sydney than writing build tools in cold Europe.
October 28th, 2004 at 12:26 pm
Hey gobshite. Who said I use WebSphere? You’re clairvoyant, I suppose, since you can tell so much about me from one post. I just hate whingers, that’s all. And wtf is a “boxen” anyway?
October 28th, 2004 at 1:37 pm
Hani, are we to deduce from your failure to bile JBoss AOP that it’s actually good? Or is it just that you can’t face downloading it? The people should be told…
October 28th, 2004 at 1:48 pm
Listen Wenger, you fear everything and you’re selectively blind as well.
October 28th, 2004 at 3:00 pm
Right on Jimadilo !!!
Feature wise WAS and WSAD both really do kick ass – I have to admit that.
But usability wise – The IBM folks are just brain dead morons. This is why they will fail as with every other software product they puke out – and go back to sucking the life blood out of corporations that were moronic enough to buy into their filthy Mainframes and AS/400s.
But in the meantime, I’ve gotten used to its quirks and even kinda gotten fond of some of em. I remember pulling my hair/teeth and cursing at every man/woman/child when I had to first learn “vi” – but after much pain and suffering i came to love it to a point I couldn’t live without it. I’ve moved on from vi since then – but there are still tons of vi hardcores.
October 29th, 2004 at 7:54 am
I throw my soup in your general direction, you scottish racehorse-owning type person.
October 29th, 2004 at 10:01 am
Soup, pah, I through Ruuds at your Ashleys
October 29th, 2004 at 10:02 am
OK, throw, god it’s early yet.
October 29th, 2004 at 10:12 am
Geez, I feel like a school board member observing a classroom of 2nd grade boys who all forgot their Ritalin on the same day.
Things hani forgot to bile:
JBoss
Jakarta Commons
Netbeans
Jonathan Schwartz’s Weblog
Proliferation of JSF implementations (all sucking)
St Louis Cardinals
BEA’s brain drain
Java Developers
And as a rare new treat, maybe hani could praise somethinig as he talks about the farting robot. Oh so cool. http://www.theregister.com/2004/10/25/robot_breaks_wind/
October 29th, 2004 at 10:35 am
Jesus,
If you’d ever used an AS/400 then you’d have a clue what you were talking about, you haven’y, so why not shut the fuck up?
October 29th, 2004 at 5:06 pm
Ahh, the sweet stench of innovation. And deficit disorders. A mild, moderate, and servere problem. Poor impulse control. Hyperactivity too. And confluence. CTO on a leash.
-All rights reserved
October 29th, 2004 at 7:24 pm
Yes, poor impulse control…
http://anon.salon.speedera.net/anon.salon/media/2004/10/BushUncensored.mov
November 4th, 2004 at 8:00 pm
Fuck you Jesus. <—Only me has the power to say that :)) You don’t freaking understand a thing about what you’re saying.
And to those who hate Eclipse, Fuck you all!! Mind your own freaking business A-holes.
November 10th, 2004 at 8:11 pm
Eclipse… It’s so good I don’t even bother trying other IDEs!