Code Monkeyism

Programming is hard by Stephan Schmidt

May 21, 2006

Ever more complex software stacks

In the last 30 years the software stack has grown from year to year. When I started coding in Z80 machine code, there was no software stack. Just the programmer and some hardware registers. No other software involved. Direct access to the machine. From there software stacks grew, to compilers and libraries. With Java the stack grew to JIT compilers, virtual machines, garbage collectors, byte code compilers and plattforms. To close the gap between the machine and the customers requirements one solution for many seems to be to grow the software stack even further. With MDA and containers the software stack grows to unprecented complexity. From PIM with transformations to PSM to a Java EE container, with AOP and compilers to Java, with byte code compilers to the VM with GCs. Then with JIT compilers to machine code (and from mc to microcode). Where will the stack move next?

Customer and Machine Gap

About the author: Stephan Schmidt is currently a team manager at ImmobilienScout24 in Berlin. Stephan has been working as a head of development and CTO. He has used a lot of different technologies in the last 20 years including Java, Rails and Python. Stephans main field of interest is maintainablity and productivity in software development. Want to know more? All views are only his own.

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Comments

Klaus Meffert

You are absolutely right about the increment in complexity of software development. And this is although current approaches try to abstract things away. It seems to me that coding is an activity that should be abolished in the opinion of many methologists.
To make things better a bit, I claim that MDD or even MDA is not present in most of the commercial software projects happening today (MDA unequal UML of course).

BTW, I also began programming Z80. It was about 1989 on a Schneider CPC 6182 (later on Amstrad CPC). It should be valid to conclude that with Z80-assembler it was a lot harder achieving a goal than it is nowadays with higher languages such as Java. And even former Pascal compared to Java loses any competition, IMO.

Klaus

PS: Maybe you fix the word “Maschine” in your picture ;-)

May 22nd, 2006
stephan

Starting with a VC20 and some computers later a CPC 464, I think the requirements and goals were easier/simplier back than, so the goals could be accomplished with Z80 machine code without libraries. But as the software stack grows, the expectations of customers grow too. So yes of course, with the current requirements and goals, you can’t use older stacks to achieve them. Just compare a J2EE replicated server with something handwritten in C .

PS: I saw it the moment I finished the post, but didn’t know how to overwrite the image in wordpress, so I thought what the hell, noone will notice ;-)

May 22nd, 2006

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