Thank god it's friday. Right now, all I can think of is:
"I'm on a roll, said the Beef Patty to the Pickle"
So what does it mean? Beats me, but must have some significance, since the phrase started echoing in my empty head. Maybe I should start collecting whimsical sayings and philosophical musings for a book. Like Ambrose Bierce but without tons of talent (just attitude).
Yes, it has been busy busy week, after relaxing but short vacation. :-)
I usually try to avoid wasting others time by "+1" and "me too" posts. But here's something I feel strongly about: I really really agree in that "Build tool choices should not be transitive". Same can be said about many related issues (should your library dictate logging system choice?), but it's most urgently problematic with build systems. It is also related to "Principle of Concervatism for Foundational Libraries", that is, trying to be cautious about baseline JDK requirements imposed by low-level libraries ("why does JDOM not just require JDK 1.7-pre-alpha so we could use this thingamagic that looks reeeally cool?!?"), to allow applications choose their own upgrade cycles.
For a while I have tried to think of a concise but general definition of kinds of tools I like. Being a pragmatic person, I like things that "just work", the highest accolade any software library or application can get. I also eschew unnecessary complexity -- complexity is enemy of robustness; and while it is always possible to easily add more complexity, it is generally very hard to remove added complexity. And finally, the thing has to be useful to be of practical interest.
And then it occured to me: condensed to essentials, these are the 3 main properties that I like:
Taken together, it leads to acronym SISU (or, SiSU), which also happens to be a useful term in Finnish language (roughly translating to "have guts", the trait of a person who never gives up).
So let's hear it for "Sisu Principle": best tools are Simple, Sensible and Useful. They got Sisu, and form the backbone of good software systems. They are also things that can carry overhead of other of kinds of sisu-less components.
