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There was a tiny tweet yesterday, resurrecting a talk from Christin:

Here’s the direct link to the talk: “Hibernate should be to programmers what cake mixes are to bakers: beneath their dignity.”.

I’d like to emphasize that I would have maybe thought so some 15 years back, too.
Today I cannot understand this whole setup of patronizing so many things at once.

The tweet linked above cause many threads. You have to digg through them a bit, but the most interesting ones are the discussions around Gavins, Gunnars and Johannes’ answers.

I am not a Hibernate fanboy, I’m a regular Hibernate user though. I’m however very much a database fanboy, as long as there is a great, declarative query language (PSA: I work for Neo4j, use Cypher a lot to provide and work in a team that creates an Object Graph Mapper (OGM)).

I firmly believe in the fact that there are no silver bullets and having only one idea is a super dangerous situation:

Having said that, I actually don’t to take the discussion about SQL and Cypher vs ORM and OGM any further.

I’d like to point out that I find several things with the heated discussion yesterday more than odd:

We all started somewhen and somewhere. With no knowledge, some knowledge, good or bad intuition. But we started and learned stuff. As a matter of fact, I just wrote about it the other week. One very important step on the way of becoming a senior something is actually realizing that other people may have less or other knowledge and working with that, helping them, instead of condescending them.

Second: I like cake mixes. I also like fresh, hand made apple pie.

Most of the years, I take the time with the kids to bake a cake for my wife’s birthday. You know what: We go and buy a cake mix and the missing, liquidish ingredients, mix the stuff up and spent the time we saved on decorating the cake, our table and whatnot.

On the other hand, going out for a coffee, either in a café or visiting friends being great with baking: Most awesome! And sometimes, when I’m really in for the mood, I do bakery with all the things necessary myself.

Having the possibility to chose between these options is entitlement, not everyone has: There are enough people that don’t have these simple choices, for whatever reasons.

Leaving the analogies behind: In now nearly 20 years of working in IT, I always had choices and good options. I could try out various frameworks, far beyond the “getting started guide.” Not on my spare time, but on the job. This such a big advantage. Yes, I know there are voices that people have to invest their own time to learn, but you know what? Being able to do this… well is entitlement, too. It’s ok to only work a regular 8 hours shift.

Today I understand better that people just want to use things. Many people work in projects under such high pressure, there’s just no room to get everything used right and even less room to recreate all the stuff by themself.

I think we should be happy, that we can choose from so many actually good ready to use ingredients, being it Hibernate, Spring, Grails, Spring Data, Java EE or whatever these are called in the Ruby, PHP, JavaScript etc. worlds. We can even be more happy when we work in places that gives us time to get things right. Either using frameworks correctly or add the custom bells and whistles needed.

Feel free to rant about all the stuff you want. But rant about actual bugs and inefficiencies and don’t start from a patronizing analogy.

Featured image: Dilyara Garifullina