SmoothSpan Blog

For Executives, Entrepreneurs, and other Digerati who need to know about SaaS and Web 2.0.

We Are Using Tools That Simply Were Not Made For The Job

Posted by Bob Warfield on September 20, 2007

So says Albert Wenger on the Union Square blog.  Albert has written an excellent variation on my 70% of the software you write is wasted and Multicore Crisis themes.  Key areas he brings up as “wasted” work that should be handled by the tools include:

– Database tuning

– Hosting

– User Management

– The relational database model doesn’t scale nor make it easy to build apps

– Web servers aren’t set up to make horizontal scaling of apps easy, you have to add “load balancers, reverse proxies, caches and all sorts of other paraphernalia just to make stuff work together”

He points out that most new tools like Ruby are more focused on adding features rapidly and do little to help, or worse interfere with scaling.

The list goes on, and Wenger is right.  Most of the tools we’re using have their roots in the 70’s, when C was invented, 1972 to be precise.  How many of the Web Wunderkind were even around at that point?  C++ appeared in 1983, and Java in 1995.  I read recently the ASCII emoticon is 25 years old.  Mashable talks like its ancient and nearly obsolete, but its on a par with our tools.  Why are we surprised they don’t do the job so well any more? 

One Response to “We Are Using Tools That Simply Were Not Made For The Job”

  1. […] barry@rustybrick.com (Barry Schwartz) wrote an interesting post today!.Here’s a quick excerptMost of the tools we’re using have their roots in the 70’s, when C was invented, 1972 to be precise. How many of the Web Wunderkind were even around at that point? C++ appeared in 1983, and Java in 1995. I read recently the ASCII … […]

 
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