The other day a friend and I were attempting to compile some Java code which we did not write ourselves. While we both are very experienced with the Java, neither of us had written or built any Java code in quite some time. Further we did not have Eclipse installed on the system we were working with, so we went about the daunting task of building the java program from the command line.
It took us a good ten minutes at least to get the code to finally compile. The experience reminded me just how frustrating it is to work with the Java build system. At one point in time, I knew the system in and out. I learned all the nuances of it just long enough to write a bash script to do it all for me.
When I come across issues like this I often think about how much some tools separate the programmer from what is actually happening with his code. Before I wrote the aforementioned bash script, if you had asked me to compile one of my Java projects without eclipse I would have had a very hard time, and I wasn't a novice Java programmer.
Java and Eclipse aren't the only examples of this, many many programming languages have complex build systems, and because we often use IDEs that build our software for us, we never actually understand how it works.
I can't decide if this is a good thing or a bad thing. Certainly automated building of software is good. But when I build software in C I write a makefile which runs commands that I understand (although there is some magic in the inference rules of POSIX make that I think most people gloss over). When I build Java in eclipse I am totally separated from the process.
Does the modern programmer need to know or care about this stuff? Or should he just spend his time on more interesting problems?
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