It's not Rocket Science...

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It seems almost everybody has already chimed in on this:

http://fullcoverage.yahoo.com/s/cmp/20051120/tc_cmp/174400424

It's not the Ajax is rocket science thing that bothers me so much (I spent 40 minutes last night putting together a workable Ajax framework for most applications I would want to write. Granted it's rough around the edges in a lot of ways, but I can't imagine getting the basics real rocket science, like thermodynamics, in 40 minutes) but the implied message in the interview that a great majority of software developers are dumb. Hell, if I was in management and I thought the majority of my development staff thought Ajax was rocket science, I would outsource development work in about 10 seconds flat.

Really, instantiating an xmlhttp object and populating the contents of a div tag (or another html element) with results from a serverside page is not "incredibly difficult" as the interview states. I'm guessing this is the same type of thought process that makes everybody say "wow, cool" when the .NET training folks wave their .NET magic wands to tell developers they can develop web applications without any knowledge of how the protocols work. Somebody actually said that to us in a training session a couple of years ago. He went on to say how he "hated writing code". I couldn't help but think "no wonder you are doing training sessions instead of developing software." It was really, really painful to hear. I have always, at some point, found it necessary to learn how things work under the covers.

I certainly don't want to discredit Microsoft's impact on this technology, but the current opinion that it is rocket science? I think that is a good litmus test for whether you should consider yourself a serious practitioner of software development. If you think Ajax is rocket science, you are NOT a serious software developer. This is not to say that it is not difficult. Depending on the type of functionality you are trying to cull from your application, it may be hard. But at its core, Ajax is pretty simple. And its not even that new. Well, except for the pretty new acronym.

- Mike