1. Cargo Culting
and Memes
Nicolas Fränkel
JEE Conf, Kiev, May 2014

2. Me, myself and I
Developer & Architect as consultant
 Wide range of businesses & customers
Teacher & Trainer
Blogger
 blog.frankel.ch
 morevaadin.com
@nicolas_frankel 2

3. Also an author
3

4. E-commerce company
Rocks
Sends employees to Oktoberfest
4@nicolas_frankel

5. Cargo culting vs memes
@nicolas_frankel 5

6. Cargo culting
Reproducing outer form in order to
get some benefits regardless of
contexts
@nicolas_frankel 6

7. Memes
Widespread ideas
 With no (or shallow) scientific proof behind
@nicolas_frankel 7

8. Disclaimer
“All characters appearing in this
work are fictitious. Any
resemblance to real persons, living
or dead, is purely coincidental.”
@nicolas_frankel 8

9. Do not believe me!
You are not getting sleepy!
I do not want to spread more cargo
culting & memes
 Try…
@nicolas_frankel 9

10. Cargo culting
@nicolas_frankel 10

11. Imagine living on a paradise island
Free from daily world contingencies
@nicolas_frankel 11

12. Then come some white people in
birds of steel
They build some stuff, and bigger
birds of steel come, with bunches
of people inside
@nicolas_frankel 12

13. And the birds of steel have plenty
of good food inside
With no need to go fishing…
@nicolas_frankel 13

14. When they all go away, what’s the
smart thing to do:
 Go fishing again?
 Or build the same stuff and hope to attract
more birds of steel?
Very crude summary of Cargo
Culting during WWII (in the Pacific)
@nicolas_frankel 14

15. The devil is in the detail
Once upon a time, there was a
young developer
He started using Java 1.3
And was taught that local variable
declaration was heavy on
performance
@nicolas_frankel 15

16. Some years later, he became an
« expert »
And wrote some good practices
guidelines
Including declaring local variables
outside loops
int nb = 0;
for (int i = 0;
i<n; i++) {
...
}

17. He was very happy
And all developers happily followed
his rules
@nicolas_frankel 17

18. Until… a new developer came in
town
And threw the gauntlet by claiming:
 « You shall declare your variables in the
narrowest scope possible »
This meant inside the loop
@nicolas_frankel 18

19. The « expert » accepted the
challenge
And coded a small snippet to assert
his claims
It failed miserably…
JDK 1.4 was smart enough to
produce the exact same bytecode
regardless where the variable was
declared
@nicolas_frankel 19

20. The « expert » was sorely
disappointed
But realized a very important fact
« There’s no universal truth, it all
depends on the context »
@nicolas_frankel 20

21. Also applies to:
 Food
 Religion
 Sports
 You name it
@nicolas_frankel 21

22. Facts
At this time, I don’t know if that was
ever true
 I suppose it was
I found nothing supporting this (or
the opposite) on the Internet
 Downloading and installing Java 1.3 sucks
@nicolas_frankel 22

23. Data Transfer Object
Once upon a time, there was
platform called J2EE
Which provided a bunch of API
@nicolas_frankel 23

24. EJB Entity - a real heavyweight
object, was bound to the container
So Sun crafted a magical artifact,
the DTO
To allow for data to go outside the
container
@nicolas_frankel 24

25. The birth of EJB 3 brought a new
Golden Age
And freed people of the tyranny of
the EJB Container
Sadly, many developers still flock to
the banner of the DTO
@nicolas_frankel 25

26. Alternatives
1. When no association required
 Use the entity directly
2. Use eager associations
3. Use the OpenSessionInView
filter
 …
4. Call getters to force load
5. Use JOIN FETCH
@nicolas_frankel 26

27. Data Access Object
Among other J2EE weapons of
power was the DAO
It was mighty indeed
As it could decouple your
application from persistence stores
of that time
 JDBC
 JDO
 EJB Entity
@nicolas_frankel 27

28. Agility was at your fingertips!
Change from JDBC to JDO
 And back again (?)
@nicolas_frankel 28

29. Back then, DAO had its uses
 Try JDO
 Then rollback if when something went wrong
@nicolas_frankel 29

30. The fall of the DAO
Nowadays, heroes use JPA!
 Already an abstraction
Or a concrete implementation
 For good reasons
But some fallen knights lies to
themselves in thinking they will
change their data store
 Or it will require such a major rework DAO
cannot insulate them from
 SQL to NoSQL
@nicolas_frankel 30

31. Alternatives
JPA makes the EntityManager the
DAO
Spring Data has a different
abstraction
 Repository
Only when using implementations
one might need DAO
 To migrate from one document-based
NoSQL store to another document-based
@nicolas_frankel 31

32. XML is BAD
10 years ago, it was all XML
 Can be validated against a schema
XML became evil with the coming of
annotations in Java 5
@nicolas_frankel 32

33. Critics against XML
Verbose
Are not compiled
 Errors (beyond grammar) are discovered at
runtime
@nicolas_frankel 33

34. Self-annotated classes
@Service
@Scope("prototype")
public class MyBean {
@Autowired
private MyRepository myRepo;
...
}
@nicolas_frankel 34

35. Pros Cons
Everything in the same place Couples code to Spring
Compiled Prevents reusability
Allows bad design
@nicolas_frankel 35

36. Alternatives
XML
JavaConfig
 Compiled
 With no con of self-annotated classes
@nicolas_frankel 36

37. Javaconfig Example
@Configuration
public class JavaConfig {
@Bean
@Scope(SCOPE_PROTOTYPE)
public class myBean() {
return new MyBean(myRepo());
}
@Bean
public class myRepo() {
return new MyRepository();
}
}
@nicolas_frankel 37

38. Related to Cargo Culting
Copy-Paste Driven Programming
Reverse Cargo Culting:
 Forget the form because the context is
different
@nicolas_frankel 38

39. Spotting Cargo Culting
“We’ve always done like that”
“It’s always been working”
@nicolas_frankel 39

40. How not to Cargo Cult
Question reasons behind decisions
You cannot always be up-to-date
 Listen to others and their arguments
 Admit you’re wrong (when you are)
Yes, it’s hard and time-consuming!
@nicolas_frankel 40

41. Memes
@nicolas_frankel 41

42. Memes
Cargo Culting can be remedied if
the cultist is rational and willing to
listen
Memes are way more pervasive
Based on faith
And you never can convince a
faithful to renounce his faith
 Only if he’s not a true faithful
@nicolas_frankel 42

43. My Illumination
The Leprechauns of Software
Engineering
@nicolas_frankel 43

44. The 10X productivity rule
“A good programmer can be as 10X
times more productive than a
mediocre one”
@nicolas_frankel 44

45. Sackman & al. 1968
“exploratory experiments (...) to
compare debugging performances
of programmers working under
conditions of online and offline
access to a computer”
Ratio of 28:1
 Subject 7 required 170 hours to program the
algebra program in a batch environment in
machine language
 Subject 3 required 6 hours to program the
same problem in ALGOL in a time-shared
environment
@nicolas_frankel 45

46. Ref. Direct? Task
type
Sample
size
Pop. Measure Variation
Curtis 1981 N Debug 27 Pros Time-to-
compile
22:1
8:1
Mills 1983 Y ? ? ? ? 10:1
DeMarco &
Lister 1985
Y Program
to spec
166 Pros Time-to-
complete
5,6:1
Curtis & al.
1986
N N/A N/A N/A N/A Various
Card 1987 N Project ? Pros LOC per staff
hour
Not
claimed
Boehm &
Pappacio
1988
N N/A N/A N/A N/A Various
Valet &
McGarry
1989
N Project 150 Pros LOC per staff
hour
Not
claimed
Boehm 2000 Y Project 161
projects
Pros Manager’s
evaluation
Not
claimed@nicolas_frankel 46

47. Productivity in software
Which metrics?
 LOC?
 Any is trivial to game...
Which task?
 Must be the same in order to compare
Which population?
 Pros have other things to do
@nicolas_frankel 47

48. My experience
There’s a difference in productivity
 But I never could quantify
I can only say if one developer is
more productive than another in a
specific area
Software is a team effort!
@nicolas_frankel 48

49. But rejoice!
Other domains are not free of
memes either
 Project Management
 Graphical Design
@nicolas_frankel 49

50. @nicolas_frankel 50

51. The source of “truth”
Software Engineering Economics –
Boehm, 1981
Made famous in Rapid Development
– McConnell, 1996
@nicolas_frankel 51

52. It makes sense that uncertainty
decreases with time passing...
Does it make sense that:
 It is symmetric?
 It follows f(x) = -a/x?
@nicolas_frankel 52

53. My experience
@nicolas_frankel 53

54. Images are read LTR
When I was younger (a long time
ago), I was told that images should
be designed to be read left-to-right
 And right-to-left for native Arab / Hebrew
speakers
@nicolas_frankel 54

55. Then came a device to follow eyes
movements
And they made an experience on
the TV
@nicolas_frankel 55

56. @nicolas_frankel 56

57. RELATED TO MEMES
“No True Scotsman” Logical fallacy
Ideology
@nicolas_frankel 57

58. No true Scotsman
“Scotsmen do not put sugar on
their porridge
- I’m a Scotsman and I put sugar on
my porridge
- No true Scotsman sugars his
porridge”
@nicolas_frankel 58

59. Code is self-documenting
“Yet I cannot make this code clear
without comments.
- Then it’s bad code!”
@nicolas_frankel 59

60. Agile delivers
“Yet my last Agile project went
wrong.
- Then it must not have been truly
Agile”
@nicolas_frankel 60

61. Ideology
Memes and ideologies are based on
faith
 Memes are largely shared
 Ideologies are more restricted
 Counter-ideologies
@nicolas_frankel 61

62. This is crap
It’s not proper:
 Object-Oriented Programming
 Functional Programming
 You name yours
@nicolas_frankel 62

63. Those are ways!
My goal is to achieve those
properties:
 Readability
 Testability
 Maintainability
So long as I get them, I don’t care
 Better to have a unique paradigm in an
application
@nicolas_frankel 63

64. Spotting Memes
@nicolas_frankel 64

65. Thank you for your interest
@nicolas_frankel
@learnvaadin
@itfromtrenches
http://blog.frankel.ch/
http://morevaadin.com/