Justin Etheredge Why Do We Keep Building Tightly Coupled Software?
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A good friend of mine, Kevin Israel, said on twitter today:
"how freakin long are *we* gonna keep building tightly coupled software that needs to constantly evolve!?"
At first I wanted to say "until programmers stop sucking so much", but unfortunately, there is often much more to the picture than the usual "you're surrounded by idiots" response. Many of us do continue to build tightly coupled software, and we do it for a variety of reasons. Some of us just don't know any better, we've never been exposed to or experienced what exactly people mean by "loosely coupled" software. Others see creating loosely coupled software as another layer of complexity that they just don't need inside of their applications. And yet others, have seen and experienced it, but still don't understand how to implement it effectively. Unfortunately, at this point I think that majority of developers fall into the first camp, they just don't know what it means to build "loosely coupled" software.
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Comments
Christian Posta replied on Mon, 2009/07/06 - 2:40pm
I agree, although I would take it a step further. Most developers might take action without considering the reasons or implications because 1) they don't want to invest the time to learn 2) it's easier to not. A lot of developers show up to work 8 hours and collect a pay check. Pushing themselves to better their skills and improve their understanding of software construction seems not to be on their 'to-do' list.
Adam Carbone replied on Tue, 2009/07/07 - 11:45am
in response to: christian.posta
I think that a huge portion of this is caused by the managers not getting it. If you do get the rare few that do get it, there bosses putting them under pressure to just do what works to get it done now. We will worry about later when later is here, and you get a balance of when you can do it the right way vs when you jsut use bandaids and bubblegum. Then you get a ton of technical debt to payback...