I wouldn’t be bothered all day by marketing folks asking could the forms be mauve, I wouldn’t have to worry about the wording of some field label on some feature that no one even knew how to get to, I wouldn’t have to deal with icons that were too Anglo-Saxon, too masculine or too feminine, I wouldn’t have to worry that some important VP wanted a new button that would confuse 90% of users. I would just write code. […]

Quelle: Formula Engine Rewrite

Das Ziel:

The engine needed to be rewritten from the ground up, it needed to be made maintainable, it needed to be faster, and it needed to be completely backwards compatible..

Alles tönte super – bis zum letzten Teilsatz. Genau diese Rückwärtskompatibilität hat den OpenXML-Standard krepieren lassen sowie zum Flop Windows Vista geführt. Rückwärtskompatibilität wird Microsoft diese und nächste Dekade das Leben verflucht schwer machen … Und somit den Entwicklern, die bei Microsoft (und anderen riesigen Software-Unternehmen) arbeiten.

Iris was a lot like most engineering organizations, most of the good work was done by handful of talented people, the others often produced barely functional crap that would need to be cleaned up someday.

Ich habe Lotus Notes noch nie benutzt, doch die Beschreibung der „Notes templates“ lässt mich aufhorchen:

Describing how Notes templates work is a difficult thing, there is really nothing else quite like it the software world, but I guess I’d describe Notes templates as sort of like web applications. As a template developer, you must deal with back-end storage issues, you are writing in scripting languages for both the back-end and front-end functionality and rendering stuff, it’s sort of like working with ASP, HTML and JavaScript…sort of.

Ich bin mir fast sicher, dass SAP etwas Ähnliches mitbringt … ABAP und so.