Everything that's bad for you is suddenly good for you!

In IT it seems that everything your lecturers once told you is bad and useless, turns out to be good and fruitful.

It's a reversal of the Woody Allen quote:

"Everything that our parents told us was good for us, turned out to be bad.

The sun. Milk. Red meat. College. Catholic girls."

(I'm deliberately paraphrasing)

For example...

We were once taught that dynamic sql is the path to poor performance and woeful security. And yet we now see that this is nonsense -- dynamic ORMs bring about increased performance and richer security models. Damn it!

We were once taught that permissive typing is bad and leads to buggy software. And yet we now see, with the rise of Ruby, Python and modern dynamic programming, the opposite is true. Permissive is expressive. Dynamic is productive.

We were once taught that significant whitespace is a relic of punch cards and poor computers, which all modern languages must eschew. Yet we now see that modern and future languages will support significant white space with a vengeance!

But most shocking of all!!

We were once taught that flat, wide, single-tabled denormalised data structures are the road to death, pain and -- worst of all -- slow, inconsistent data. Yet we now (maybe) see with google BigTable that in fact this is the future: this is faster and actually, sorry Jenkins, your rdbms is dead.

I'd love to be a stickler and a stalwart... but screw it. History is bunk. Bring out the learn!

And thus I'm left wondering... What else appears taboo and verboten? What else did our 'teachers' claim was 'bad' ?

Well - one thing was certainly frowned upon: the use of GOTO!

So....

I'M BRINGING HER BACK! WELCOME THE GOTO!

You may consider me a touch behind the times. But wiser heads will see me as preceding the curve.

What is a try...catch but a glorified JMP? (aka goto) Where would a switch be without an implicit goto, hey zooba?

What else do you see that's been besmirched too long? What other versatilities in IT have been marginalised far too long?

Bring out your dead.

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