The Case Against Extreme Programming



Given that XP has maxed out at 9 of 10 on the hype-meter lately, a certain level of 'backlash' is to be expected:



"XP is a symbiotic process: that is, you really need to do all of XP or none at all. There’s no in-between (with the possible exception of unit tests). The theory is that each of its individually flawed practices reinforces each other to produce something stronger... Unfortunately, as we will explore in this article, this can also work in the other direction - stop doing one practice and the chain unravels. In the real world it proves difficult to adhere to the XP practices for the duration of an entire project."



Software Reality



Scripters Paradise - not .NET?



One thing I love about PHP and Perl is the ability to slam together quick-and-dirty command-line scripting. Yes, you can build huge, n-tier apps with either (witness SourceForge or Slashdot)... but scripting as the glue for infrastructure makes a lot of sense. Thus, this missive about .NET and scripting...



"What about the scripters? Due to the benefit of my experience and a job and

supervisor that provide time for personal development, I'm slowly making the switch to ASP.NET. But what about the dozens of scripters at my (and countless other) workplace(s) whose responsibilities cover a variety of IT niches (desktop support, server admin, IT education, etc). They do not have the time or the background to move to an event-driven, object-oriented, significantly more complex development environment. But they still need to produce simple, procedural, functional web-based database applications. I'm talking here about HTML forms that post or retrieve data for editing.



So what is the problem? Where is the procedural .NET!?! Where is the scripter's version of .NET!?! My colleagues are giving up on Microsoft after years of effort to consolidate on the MS platform..."



DannyBoyd