Nice post! I don't know how many times I've seen this syndrome myself.

I think in my mind, I actually divide this into two syndromes. The "I must make a contribution" syndrome (aka corncob anti-pattern), and the "Whiz-bang" syndrome. I think your earlier problem with SCC system was the corn-cob problem, where the guy felt he had to contribute something, and useful code was just too much work.

The Whiz-bang syndrome is more of a juvenille love of features. "Hey look, it's different and cool!" I think these people belong in underground music scenes, not teams of programmers. I also like to refer to it as "Trade-magazine stupidity", since some of these people find the latest and greatest in a trade magazine and then say "HEY! We need this!" without demonstrating a compelling need.

One of the worst languages for that is Java. Ugh, the number of wierd useless 'innovations' that occur in the Java world is revolting.

Just as a funny, aside anecdote, I remember being in a bookstore and seeing a book that said "POJOs." Wanting to figure out what the latest and greatest buzz-word was, I had to look. The book was rather thick, and then it took some digging to figure out what they were talking about.

Then it hit me: POJO means Plain Old Java Object. I started laughing out loud in the middle of the store at the fact that a book on the order of 350-450 pages was sitting on the shelf with a new buzzword to spin the old technology.

I'm just glad that I get to use a language that's pretty much immune from trendiness. Heck, I think it has the opposite problem where useful things take a long time to get adopted! :-)

I think your earlier problem with SCC system was the corn-cob problem, where the guy felt he had to contribute something, and useful code was just too much work...

I suspect about half of the drive for EJBs arises from this ("I have to put this on my resume!") but this guy was quite sincere about it. He went on about it for years, and was doing real programming work at the same time.

Ugh, the number of wierd useless 'innovations' that occur in the Java world is revolting.

There are equally weird things going on in the VB world (and J++ was initially a pretty strange beast) but you probably don't hear about them as much. They're more obscure.

I can't tell you the number of times I've heard MS was releasing the end-all be-all new programming technology or framework. Java's just hotter, so there's more innovation, more publicity -- and yes, more stupidity.

POJO means Plain Old Java Object. I started laughing out loud in the middle of the store at the fact that a book on the order of 350-450 pages was sitting on the shelf with a new buzzword to spin the old technology.

Sad and hilarious, isn't it?

I worked with a guy who apparently couldn't help but say "POJO" every ninth word. The correct word is "object". I think the problem is that EJBs were such a detour (and they utterly defeated OOPishness) -- and so many non-talented people have entered the profession -- that most "developers" have never learned (or have forgotten) the basics.

It's like the current fever for IOC. IOC is great: why should every object know about the whole world? But you don't need a complicated tool like Spring (or even a simpler one, like Guice) to take advantage of it. You just need constructors and setter-methods. It's not all that tricky.

But people are forever pushing: "How come we're not using Spring?" (Because you can wire it together yourself in a few lines of code, that's why. And XML doesn't catch syntax errors. Geez.)

I'm just glad that I get to use a language that's pretty much immune from trendiness.

Yes indeed. Long live COBOL!

(Oooops? Did I say that? My bad. ;-))

Just kidding. I used C back in the days when it was a hot language. Rather than having incompetent developers push for meaningless toys, you had incompetent developers defacing memory and the heap in every cruel and horrifying way imaginable. And demanding to know why we weren't using "Hungarian" variable names.

I'll take ignoring the meaningless toys, thanks.

A popular software-test-running product, called "JUnit" recently introduced annotations. In the ("bad") old days, you marked a method as being a test by starting it's name with "test". In the ("good") new days, you now can name it anything, and put the annotation "@Test" right before it.

It was still, somehow, a more organized way of doing things. And we should all hurry to adopt this latest version. Sigh.

Separating data into atomistic components seems a good heuristic to follow since it makes your code more adaptable to unforseen circumstances.

The units of code don't change here. All that changes is that:

void testXyz() { ... }

Can now become:

@Test void makeSureXyzWorks() { ... }

(Read "..." as being identical in both cases.)

That's it. A possible name change and an extra do-dad up front. Same exact chunking of functionality.

(Caveat: there might be some other benefits to the new version of JUnit. I can think of one minor one. But this seemed to be the strong selling point from what I was hearing.)

Or perhaps your profession just attracts an inordinate number of aspies?

I'm no expert, but it sounds like a lack of social skills might be helpful in preventing such silliness: as it seems a lot of desire is to do what all the other "cool" kids are doing.

Perhaps we need a few more, instead? ;-)

Just kidding. I used C back in the days when it was a hot language. Rather than having incompetent developers push for meaningless toys, you had incompetent developers defacing memory and the heap in every cruel and horrifying way imaginable. And demanding to know why we weren't using "Hungarian" variable names.

Now you just have incompetent developers leaking memory everywhere, and arguing about EJBs vs. POJOs! :D

I actually understand your objections though, fixing bad C code is kinda like editing a novel written by a schizophrenic. Java, at least, tends to encapsulate the madness better.

...Spring... ...Guice... ...IOC...

And throw in GlassFish, and you have my big question:

Who names this garbage?

I'll take ignoring the meaningless toys, thanks.

You have my vote on that too!

Or perhaps your profession just attracts an inordinate number of aspies?

My personal take on this came from an Onion headline*: "Most Self-Diagnosed Asperger Cases are Really Just A**holes!" I've been told that I have aspie like symptoms by people**, and it makes me believe even more in the Onion headline.

* I think, I remember seeing it in print, but I can't find it online...

** Who don't actually know much about the disease, but use it as the cool new buzz-word/opressed minority of the day.

Who names this garbage?

According to the experts at pleasegivememoreinformationifyouwouldthankyou.com, we're running out of legible words to use for product and domain names.

But what would they know?

That appears to be a dead link... ;-)

One parallel which comes immediately to mind is the ordinary accessories with grand-sounding names that were so popular with car salesmen in the 50s and 60s. (For example, "Super Turbo-O-Matic Aerodynamic Styling" - i.e., the car has a 1cm lower front bumper. And it would cost a lot more than it was worth.)

I think the Japanese have an art of creating apparently useful objects that turn out (on closer inspection) to be not that great - the solar-powered torch (flashlight), the double-headed toothbrush, the baby clothes with strands around the edges (so your baby can clean the house as it crawls around) - but I forget the name they have for it...

In any case, thanks for a wonderfully amusing article. I need to show this article to some of my programmer friends; I'm sure they'll love it, too, and it's some more readers for Random Observations! ;-)

-TCG