altnetconf - Cool Tools Don't Make Cool Software

I'm pretty sure that Jimmy Hendrix could make awesome music with a cheap guitar. Likewise, I could drop $5000 on a beautiful vintage guitar and I still won't be going on tour with anyone. The artist makes the tool work. While good tools make the artist's life a bit easier, they don't make the artist.

Likewise, it is perfectly possible to write clear, maintainable software without the use of things like inversion-of-control containers and mock frameworks. This weekend at the Alt.Net conference, I spoke with some very smart developers that don't use these tools that I take for granted. Tools that I even view as a necessary item. One developer that I spoke with stated that he has yet to find a need to use a mocking framework. Instead, he prefers the Testable Object pattern. I was completely taken aback until I grokked what his explanation. While I'm not going to drop my use of easymock, I see that this is certainly a valid way to do things.

I had the opportunity to speak with another developer this weekend - a brilliant developer and the second person ever added to my feed list. When the table at lunch started talking about IoC containers, he said that he's never seen the need for one. I found this to be very surprising. Once a couple of us explained why we like and use tools like StructureMap and Guice, he quickly grokked what was going on, and I think he could see why some find them to be useful tools to have. However, it also became clear that he had found other ways around the pain of supplying dependencies when using Dependency Injection.

All of this is to say that I was reminded that I don't have to pull in every tool under the sun. It's good to keep my head up and take a look at what others are doing to alleviate problems. However, there are also other ways around problems that may not involve pulling in yet one more tool.

It's not the tools that make the software good. It's the developers that apply sound judgement and experience - regardless of what tools they have.