Open Kosmaczewski

I think I found the most violent and vivid, the most honest and Earth-shattering blog entry about software engineering I’ve seen in 15 years of programming:

I’ll give you the capsule synopsis, the one-sentence summary of the learnings I had from the Bad Thing that happened to me while writing my game in Java: if you begin with the assumption that you need to shrink your code base, you will eventually be forced to conclude that you cannot continue to use Java. Conversely, if you begin with the assumption that you must use Java, then you will eventually be forced to conclude that you will have millions of lines of code.

Is it worth the trade-off? Java programmers will tell you Yes, it’s worth it. By doing so they’re tacitly nodding to their little compartment that realizes big code bases are bad, so you’ve at least won that battle.

But you should take anything a “Java programmer” tells you with a hefty grain of salt, because an “X programmer”, for any value of X, is a weak player. You have to cross-train to be a decent athlete these days. Programmers need to be fluent in multiple languages with fundamentally different “character” before they can make truly informed design decisions.

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