I had a great time talking with Andy Clarke and Stephen Hay about tools, complexity, and making stuff for the Web. When Andy reached out to us about what to talk about on the show, I suggested this would be a great topic to tackle since Andy wrote a fantastic post a while ago and Stephen focuses a lot on simplicity in design in process.
I will say the podcast description language here is a little vague and maybe a little inflammatory:
…we get right down it and discuss why it’s dangerous to bring computer science principles and heavy development tools into web design.
We end up explaining that computer science principles aren’t dangerous, but that there’s a time and place for translating things from the traditional programming world.
There’s a lot that can be can be learned from computer science principles that have been around forever. Like Stephen you were just talking about the single responsibility principle. That’s a great computer science principle which predates the Web by a long shot. The notion of object-oriented programming, that’s great and we should be adopting that stuff. But at the same time, there’s a lot of misconceptions about what the Web is, and what it all does, and how it all works at a very fundamental level, that is dangerous to have people coming in from some other traditional programming language and just go “I don’t understand why it’s not like Java so let’s just rearrange everything and make it like Java. That’s dangerous.
We end up talking about frameworks, buzzwords, and dealing with complexity. If you want to skip over all the stuff about mugs (which Andy insists is the best part) you can get to the meat of the conversation at 33 minutes.