Quote:
Originally Posted by
mikemazz
Please, I beg you, “Stop!” Yes, stop writing scripts and instead build workflows.
[...]
To put it briefly scripts:
1) Have little or no security
2) Lack of reuse
3) Not cross-platform
4) Hard to maintain
This argument seems to be flawed from the beginning.
"Scripts" is just a certain form of the more general "program". You either can explain the difference between these two (which is hard to conceive, because any commonly-used programming language today is Turing-complete or Turing-equivalent) or you have to admit that your assertion extends to "stop writing programs". While this may or may not convey a
cultural benefit*) it certainly will not help the IT business within the parameters of its todays operation.
Workflows can never replace programs, for the same reasons why programs cannot replace workflows: programs are ways of automatically executing certain actions in a predefined way
within computers. Workflows are quite the same but
within organisations. They work on different (and ideally complementary) levels. While they regularly work hand in hand - given, with more or less success in attuning to each other - there are things a workflow cannot do (because it is happening inside a computer) and things a program cannot do (because it is happening in some organisational part). To try and replace one by the other is futile.
You might want to try and replace the OS on your computer (which is just another program) with a (any) workflow if you do not believe me. Chances are you end up with a non-functional computer and a non-functional workflow as well.
Just my two cents.
bakunin
__________
*) Programming, once considered to be and practised like
an art is done like a
craft today. This has an IMHO negative impact on programs and programmers alike. Compare the masterpieces of, say, Beethoven and the jingles used in commercials, compare a statue of Michelangelo to the design of a disposable bottle to understand the difference between something done as an art and something done as a craft.
Once we had programmers like Donald Knuth, who took a ten-year sabbatical just to create an adequate typesetting system for his book "The Art [sic!] of Computer Programming" - we all know TeX. Compare this way of dealing with emerging problems in completing ones task with the usual "we have to meet the milestone deadline next Tuesday"-approach. That does not only take different types of persons and different types of mindframes, that also results in different types of programs. Arts versus crafts....