[WARNING: I expect that I may get heavily flamed for this post... especially from my co-conspirators here on CodeBetter.Com... there are a bunch of C#ers here and I'm about to take a couple shots... Please don't take it personal... it's just an observation...]
So I read an interesting post today (I'm still trying to get caught up) on Scott Swigart's Tech Blender [yep, it's from the Feb. 26th, and yes, I'm that far behind in blog reading... right now I browse the Engadget posts and skim Scoble... no time for that kind of heavy reading]
Anyway, Scott got me thinking about something that I have noticed recently. But first, let's talk about something I'm doing currently. As many of my long time readers know I have a JSP project that is hosted on a Mac (running Mac OS X). Lately I have been trying to get some kind of content manager working. We're running Apache Tomcat 4.1 on that box (I'd like to switch to Tomcat 5, but I'm afraid to switch out and lose the very Mac integrated version of Tomcat from the Server Logistics)... Anyway, I recently downloaded the Windows install for Apache Lenya... This comes with a different webserver called Jetty... I really liked the Lenya, so I decided to try to get it installed on my local Tomcat 5.5 instance... OMG! What a nightmare... I had to download Cocoon and get it installed correctly then download Lenya's source which comes with hefty warnings that it is untested with Tomcat 5.x (hmm... I'm running 5.5.x which is considered stable... 5.5.x supports all the standards that 5.x and 4.1.x support... what gives)... anyways after lots of environment variable settings and monkeying with an XML config file or 6, I still don't have a solution...
I have had this problem with the Application Blocks as well. I told DonXML back in October that I thought that up until they created the Configuration block everything that they had created was decent... once the Config Block was created everything devolved into the same sort of XML hell that I receive in the Java camp. Scott's post accuses the C# programmers for the complexities in the Enterprise Library (which is what the App Blocks became).
[a noticeable pause for dramatic effect and to consider carefully what I'm about to say, so as not to have Brendan, Sahil, Eric, or one of the other bloggers beat the living tar out of me]
<attempted_humorous_rant>Why does all this have to be so complicated? I know that it can't be all Java and C# programmers.... Is there a rule that they give you in your secret "Screw the VB coder" meetings that states that all code was be overly complicated because you don't want some lowly VB coder being able to grasp it? I know you have the secret meetings... that's how your all able to come up with the same crazy ideas...</attempted_humorous_rant>
Anyway, it does seem that C# and Java (and for that matter C++) programmers tend to over complicate things... I also recognize that VB people (if they do try to architect something) tend to oversimplify (and take shortcuts...)
[Let the flame war begin]
After blog notes: BTW, I've gotten so accustomed to the squiggly bracket and semi-colon that when I read Brendan's post yesterday on Random numbers I had to go back and re-read it because I read it as VB code (not C# as it was actually written).