Yes. Unfortunately, the cure can be worse than the disease. At least spaghetti code _does_ something, even if it does it more slowly and more resistant to change than something theoretically might. I'd estimate that half of my career has been spent fighting with "enterprise architects" who want to roll out "enterprise solutions" (i.e. third-party software products with questionable support and nightmare licensing conditions) in a misguided attempt to avoid writing even one line of code.
Well said. I spent hours yesterday setting up a bunch of ORM make-work, rather than getting a connection to the DB and just doing a bloody query, for a "spell check" function.
All I needed to do was get the intersection of the set of user provided words (candidates) and the set of approved words (a text column in a dictionary table). Conceptually, I needed a prepared statement or query build to do something like:
select dict.word
from dict
where dict.word in ( ... candidates ... )
(the difference of the candidate set minus the result set being the unrecognized words)
But I had to drag in entity models with magic incantations, er, annotations, and repositories and a predicate factory class and multiple config files -- for a dictionary table that is rarely if ever updated, manually; it exists for this query. Sadness.
If I knew the Spring/Hibernate/JPA stuff better, it of course would have been easier, but what a pile of tripe to have to read through for the life of the project.
Also, good point about the seeming terror at the prospect of EVER deviating from the proscribed Enterprise Design Patterns (embodied in crappy trendy library of the day) to do such "crazy" things as perhaps write your own abstraction / wrapper (line of code) that better fits what the given app actually needs to do.
Yes. Unfortunately, the cure can be worse than the disease. At least spaghetti code _does_ something, even if it does it more slowly and more resistant to change than something theoretically might. I'd estimate that half of my career has been spent fighting with "enterprise architects" who want to roll out "enterprise solutions" (i.e. third-party software products with questionable support and nightmare licensing conditions) in a misguided attempt to avoid writing even one line of code.