RFC on range design for D2

[Bruno Medeiros]

Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> Bruno Medeiros wrote:
>> Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>>>
>>> This is because I make next to no money so I can afford to work on 
>>> basic research, which is "important" in a long-ranging way. Today's 
>>> computing is quite disorganized and great energy is expended on 
>>> gluing together various pieces, protocols, and interfaces. I've 
>>> worked in that environment quite a lot, and dealing with glue can 
>>> easily become 90% of a day's work, leaving only little time to get 
>>> occupied with a real problem, such as making a computer genuinely 
>>> smarter or at least more helpful towards its user. All too often we 
>>> put a few widgets on a window and the actual logic driving those 
>>> buttons - the "smarts", the actual "work" gets drowned by details 
>>> taking care of making that logic stick to the buttons.
>>>
>>
>> Well, didn't you find a "real problem" right there (and also a very 
>> interesting one), in trying to make 
>> code/libraries/methodologies/tools/whatever that reduce those 90% of 
>> work in boilerplate details?
>> An example could the years of investment and research in ORM 
>> frameworks (Hibernate/EJB3, Ruby on Rails, etc.), which despite ORM 
>> technology having existed for quite many years, only recently has it 
>> reached a point where it's really easy and non-tedious to write an 
>> OO-DB persistence mapping.
>> Another possible example, regarding GUI programming like you 
>> mentioned, is data binding. I haven't used it myself yet, but for what 
>> they describe, it's purpose is indeed to reduce a lot of the 
>> complexity and tedium in writing code to synchronize the UI with the 
>> model/logic, and vice-versa.
>> Learning and building these kinds of stuff is, IMO, the pinnacle of 
>> software engineering.
> 
> This hardly characterizes or answers my point. Of course wherever 
> there's difficulty there's opportunity for automation, and research in 
> software engineering is alive and well.

I was just pointing that things don't have to be way you described.

> My point was that much effort in 
> the industry today is expended on dealing with effects instead of 
> fighting the causes.
> 
> Andrei

But that's quite true nonetheless. :/


-- 
Bruno Medeiros - Software Developer, MSc. in CS/E graduate
http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?BrunoMedeiros#D