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Discussion on: On the Occasional Misdiagnosis of "Not Invented Here Syndrome"

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Peter Harrison

This raises the question of whether code is the best place for business logic. One of the things we have done as developers is feather our beds by raising barriers to certain tasks or roles, such as specifying business rules, data structures, user interfaces.

In many ways we retreated from tools like Delphi which made design more accessible. Developing basic business apps requires substantially more skill sets than they ever have. My own thesis is that we should write software that decouples from the domain as far as possible, just as databases have, and allow people without development skills to leverage technology to solve their own problems.

The spreadsheet is perhaps the best example of this approach, where managers can create their own solutions without knowing how to code. Most development tools follow the orthodoxy of domain binding, forcing you to statically link to data structures at design time.

We already accept the wisdom of domain decoupling when it comes to databases or email, or even TCP. With all of these the payloads are a separate concern. Obviously there is a domain, so I'm not suggesting that it does not exist, only that developers need to release their death grip over it and give it back to users.