In-Depth

Tool talk

• February 1, 2004

Programmers Report is a companion e-mail product to Application Development Trends. Observations from industry luminaries that were quoted in its pages follow:

On programmer productivity tools: “A lot of tools get it correct 90%, 95% of the time . . . If you can’t trust a tool all the time, you have to spend an enormous amount of time learning.” -- Anders Hejlsberg, Microsoft

On auto-generation: “An example of protocol problems occurs when people rely on tools to auto-generate WSDL. While these tools may appear to be working, they can create protocol mismatches.” -- Gary Brunell, Parasoft

Security-conscious programming: “The number one thing for developers to realize is that you need to treat input as evil.” -- Steve Orrin, Sanctum

Finding things: “Finding what we already have is our biggest challenge.” -- Duncan Dwell, Accuchex

Jobs: “Software services employment fell by 146,000 jobs between 2001 and 2002, compared to 2002 to 2003 where that number dropped 30,000. Hopefully, we’ve turned the corner.” -- Michaela Platzer, American Electronics Association

Worst programming error today: “If I had to choose, I would say the ‘not-invented-here’ syndrome is the worst.” -- Brian Hawkins, author

The Big Bang: “There used to be a ‘Big Bang’ approach to development. Now [people] have moved to incremental or iterative approaches.” -- Paul Raymond, Telelogic

VB to .NET migration: “There are some developers who developed in VB 4, 5 and 6 the same way they did in VB 1, 2 and 3. Those are the programmers that have the most catching up to do.” -- Deborah Kurata, InStep Technologies

Semantics-Objects: “The Semantic Web models real things, not documents. It models words, not software objects.” -- Tim Berners-Lee, inventor

Please see the following related stories:
“Do tools matter?” by Michael W. Bucken and Jack Vaughan