DevHawk (Harry Pierson) has written an interesting post about "vendor oriented" versus "developer oriented" languages. I agree with his remark that
Projects don’t fail because developers can’t change the language’s concept of
inheritance. They fail because the gap between the abstractions provided by the
language and the abstractions needed by the solution are enormous. Modern
software development is like building skyscrapers with Lego blocks.
Certainly, in order to build the abstractions to bridge that abstraction gap, all the proper lower level building blocks and abstractions need to be in place (that’s an argument for adding "int?" to C#, for example). But those lower level building blocks do not need to be modifiable! Changing the concept of inheritance, huh? Sure, that could be nice at a research institution, but not in industrial software.
Filed under: Software Development
