Re:Fighting Complexity in Software Development
by taeric on Friday July 05, 2019 @11:05PM
(#20367518)
Apologies for the slow response.
I honestly can't compare to a rails app, as I don't have the experience. I can say that modern dev practices worry me with the constant upgrade train on api standards. On the one side, progress is quite nice. On the flipside, what you describe in "all your dependencies have completely changed their APIs" is just as annoying in Java as it is in any language. More so if someone has helpfully split your codebase into as many supposedly independent parts as they can.
More than that, it is amusing that many of the refactoring tools that you reference actually began in more dynamic languages. I've seen that folks that rely on their IDE to be able to refactor have a habit of making codebases that they have to use an IDE to refactor. I grant it could just be confirmation bias.
I honestly can't compare to a rails app, as I don't have the experience. I can say that modern dev practices worry me with the constant upgrade train on api standards. On the one side, progress is quite nice. On the flipside, what you describe in "all your dependencies have completely changed their APIs" is just as annoying in Java as it is in any language. More so if someone has helpfully split your codebase into as many supposedly independent parts as they can.
More than that, it is amusing that many of the refactoring tools that you reference actually began in more dynamic languages. I've seen that folks that rely on their IDE to be able to refactor have a habit of making codebases that they have to use an IDE to refactor. I grant it could just be confirmation bias.