Joy of Programming

 

The past four weeks have been very rewarding for me. After spending eight years as a Siebel consultant, and the last one year on various Oracle cloud technologies (Taleo, HCM) , I somehow ended up with a pure coding project. No packaged-application-configuration nonsense. No composer-nonsense. No fast formulas, and no flex fields. Just pure windows programming, in dot net C sharp (C#), and REST apis. I was tasked with exploring some new cloud apis, and how they can/should be leveraged via integration. After almost nine years away from pure programming language projects, I was sceptical if I could pull it off. But the last many weeks I have been tapping away in Visual studio's IDE, googling the interwebs for code snippets, and going back to the watch window in debug mode.

Boy I missed it.

I am going back to pure programming after more than 10 years now. And a lot of things have changed. I only recently learned that Microsoft have become generous with their tool offerings, there is now an express edition of Visual studio or the community edition. It is more than enough for you general coding needs, and it is completely free. All you need is an outlook email address to register. And the Visual studio system too has had multiple facelifts. You can now develop mobile apps for Windows on it. The IDE does on the fly syntax checks and even pretty prints the code as you type. The language itself has grown, now you can code a windows application with very few lines , its leaner than ever ! I remember when used the Win32 api bible to code things…and then was relieved to see MFC reducing the final code. And today even VB.NET has new functions borrowed from C languages…like local exception control..try catch. Code written in VB.NET is very easily convertible to C#.NET , this was never the case. And even support for integration standards like REST has never been better. Developers today can achieve much more writing very few lines of code, and therefore focus on the application design, instead of worrying about type casting variables and handling database cursors.

Even on the open source world, new languages are coming up designed for simpler and leaner code, which can achieve more functionality. And the community support is awesome, every problem I faced was solved looking at community code.

Now I have to check whether Oracle was able to keep up with the others, I am going to try Oracle PaaS services, their Java Cloud service and Integration Cloud service. Personally I hate the creepy world of Java, the multi-line error codes still scare me. But there is no denying that there is a special Joy in Programming, when you are able to create things without constraints.