A Few Good Memes

James Robertson talks about how we, as developers, tend to make software unneccessarily complex. I wholeheartedly agree with James on the point that we should make software only as complex as is necessary (hell, I wholeheartedly agree with nearly everything the man says). I do, however, have some sympathy for the rejection of the “quick Access front end” idea. Access is simply an unpleasant piece of software to work with. I’ve done a number of small systems with it and dreaded every minute of working with that tool. I would argue that it’s no more difficult to put together a simple LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySql/(Perl|PHP|Python) app than it is an Access app. Or better yet, a Seaside app instead of an Access app. Developer wise, it’s probably more efficient and you don’t have those pesky client update issues.

Access is about as modal as you can get for a development tool (aside from, perhaps, your average shell script), and we know how I feel about modal tools.