You’re helping some people plot a route from London to San Francisco. You explain that because of Great Circles, the shortest route actually takes you over Greenland. They give you a strange look. Someone says

“But the world is flat”.

You take a deep breath.

A few years ago I got into Fit and spent a lot of time delving through the source; I found it really difficult to follow. It wasn’t that it was bad, more that the style seemed strange; for Java code, not very Java-ish.

I’ve just taken another look at the source and now I find it clean and elegant. It’s mostly the same code, so I must be a different programmer. Strange isn’t it?

When we take the J2EE stack and try and slim it down, maybe using Spring or something, we still end up with thousands of lines of XML. The only way to really change things is to pull the lever all the way over, set the dials to 11, no configuration, no XML, no flexibility. Alan Francis

I went to a Spring Talk the other week. Now, I have a lot of sympathy for Spring. And Rick Evans was good, even to being sane enough to prefere Intellij to Eclipse. One question was “What is the philosophy of Spring?, which could have been (but wasn’t) answered as

• configuration over convention
• unopinionated software