Digressions

Two months ago I got a brand new Android phone from my employer. I asked for it to play around and get used to Android development and bingo - it was here :-) This is a major event compared to my prior experiences with employers. But I'm digressing.

So I've been using it for two months. I'm still not sure if it's good for people that just want to talk or text, but it's definitely great to access the internet on the go. So I started catching up with my backlog of articles in Google Reader. Currently I'm back in January 2010, so there is hope that the folder with articles to read will be empty some day. (Alas, it's just one of four, so it looks like I will stay busy for some more months.)

Today I came across Ted Neward's Predictions. I like to read Ted's posts because he doesn't take himself too serious. I especially enjoyed his busy Java developer's guide to Scala two years ago, but I'm digressing again. In his predictions he talked about different technologies and some well known companies. I will not repost his post, but he made some quite sarcastic and funny remarks that I need to share.

• "Cloud" will become the next "ESB" or "SOA", in that it will be something that everybody will talk about, but few will understand and even fewer will do anything with. --- Well another one in the list of useless buzzwords that lacks a clear definition. Last year I was working on some enterprise integration project and the Czech bank was using AquaLogic ESB. I asked our rock star enterprise architects what exactly defines an ESB. They were not able to give a proper answer. According to the German Wikipedia the term ESB was defined by Gartner in 2002. So it's no wonder that ESB is not proper defined.
  
  
• Being "REST"ful will equate to "I did it myself!"
  
  
• Agile has become another adjective meaning "best practices", and as such, has essentially lost its meaning. --- What does best practice mean anyway? Most likely it is a cookbook and a collection of things that work. According to Andy Hunt best practices are for people that need guidelines. But these guidelines never capture the whole context of the problem. And Ted really hates best practices.
  
  
• Try this: walk into a functional language forum, and ask what a monad is. Nobody yet has been able to produce an answer that doesn't involve math theory, or that does involve a practical domain-object-based example. In fact, nobody has really said why (or if) monads are even still useful. --- When diving into Scala two years ago, I tried to figure out monads. James Iry did a decent job explaining what they do, but I still have no idea what they are or why I should use them. (But probably that's different for pure languages like Haskell.)

How true. Ted, you are great.