The Software Architect Elevator

Chapter 11. Code Fear Not!

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 ...