One of the problems developers face is handling non-trivial feature requests for a product.
FR: Please support UML in your tool.
Me: Sorry, but that would take many months, if not years, of work!
FR: But it’s just boxes and lines, right? Can’t you just copy and paste the code?
Me: Well, not really, have you looked at the code base?
FR: No, but surely it’s just a case of re-using existing code?
And on it goes – “can’t you just…” or “surely you could just….”
To solve this problem, I propose an extension to the Java language – just.
The syntax is:
just implement feature;
Where feature is the feature that you “just” want to implement.
Simple and beautiful.
Some examples:
just implement uml;
just implement bpmn;
just implement native-web-interface;
Future directions
This is just a start. Even this implementation might be too complicated for users who just want to get things done. Perhaps multiple features could be aggregated into a kind of “super” just action.
For example:
just implement (bpmn, uml, archimate, plantuml);
Thoughts
It would have been useful to have had this extension years ago when I was working on software projects for UK HE. Instead of wasting time and money developing actual software we could have “just” written a few easy lines of code and time could have been spent gaining PhDs and publishing academic papers which, as we know, is the real reason for these projects, the actual software being an inconvenience.
