Читать книгу The Art in Business System Design - Jeff Chapman - Страница 15

How much do our tools determine the temperament of our software: its look and feel, the aesthetics, presentation, and its interactive characteristics? As developers and artists creating works of response, data storage, and algorithms, the result of our efforts are as tied to our tools as a potter’s works are tied to her clay and glazes. Hence we share pretty much the same neuroses with respect to our tools as any artist.

With a few clicks of a mouse and by dragging some widgets around we can create full application frameworks as if we are gods commanding machinery. Then once inside the code we press “dot” and select from a list of actions. We love our tools because they allow us to accomplish in one hour what used to require a full day.

If you want a highly animated presentation then your tool might be Flash. If your application requires extensive analysis, dicing, and slicing of multidimensional data then your tools may include SQL and Cognos. And once you’ve chosen your tool and made your investment to learn its bells and whistles, woe be the day you need to develop something that your tool doesn’t support.

I suppose you can paint a portrait out of pottery, but it’s just not the same. It looks like a portrait out of pottery. The tools that you use define you nearly as much as your accomplishments. True artists practice a unique style by developing their own set of tools. A structure, a methodology, a bunch of accouterments seem to create themselves a priori out of thin air and then this drives the subsequent creating.

When you are developing you should always strive to increase the variety of tools at your disposal and leverage them by finding ways of blending them to make them work together. Work as if you want to become the next Jackson Pollack or Andy Warhol of code.