Innovation sucks

05/03/2006

In an upcoming article for SD Times, I noted that we programmers are a conflicted lot. On the one hand, we love change. We love shiny new toys: new technologies, new programming languages, new challenges. We eagerly anticipate and thrive on innovation. But innovation sucks.

The shiny new toy comes at a cost. The shiny new toy needs shiny new support: new books, new courses and workshops, new exams (if it’s in that wacky certification world), and so on. You’ve got to buy the new book and perhaps take the course over again. The authors and instructors likewise have to re-invest their time and energy to overhaul the material: rewrite the book, make new exercises for the course, and on it goes.

Now in the “old” days, we were kinda spoiled. C didn’t change that much until ANSI got ahold of it, and your investment in language support (books, tools, etc) was pretty static.

But watch as each new version of Java came out. Suddenly AWT was toast. Swing was the thing. New libraries, new capabilities— new books, new courses, new IDE’s. The pace was picking up a bit. I remember feeling a whiff of dissatisfaction when I had to purchase the latest Java in a Nutshell book because of all the changes to Java, the language. But I suppose that was still better than being condemned to write in AWT forever.

Now enter the new millenium. If you hadn’t noticed, things are progressing even faster. We first published the beta book for Ruby on Rails back in May of 2005, and the printed book in August. Now here less than a year later, we’ve got the 2nd edition of Agile Web Development with Rails going into beta already.

So much has changed that it’s literally a new book—a new ISBN number and everything. The authors are already hard are work tearing it up, rewriting, and adding content. It’s a lot of work. All over again. If you’re working seriously in Rails, you’ll probably want to buy the latest copy, all over again. Folks who enjoyed various training courses may have to pony up to take them again as well. Like I said, innovation sucks.

But on the other hand, I’m hearing some interesting stories from my friends who hire themselves out developing software. A year or two ago you could hear the crickets chirping where clients should have been—there was nothing going on and work was scare. Now these same folks are beating off potential clients with a stick because they are so overwhelmed with work—good, high-paying gigs. They are developing applications in Ruby, and using Ruby on Rails. And they’re enjoying large scale success. They’re wrapping up sucessful projects and moving on to the next client.

But what is it like for their competitors who are still slogging though the 15th month of a 6 month J2EE project? They’re looking over at the shiny new side and thinking:

Innovation sucks.