Through A Glass, Darkly

Although I get paid to write software, most of my time is spent understanding other people's software. I find that difficult: the available information is usually fragmentary, inconsistent, and more than I can hold in my head at one time anyway. It's like trying to read a mural on the side of a building, through the holes in a construction fence, as I drive by. I get little snapshots of partial information and I have to try to piece them together in my head. Sometimes the big picture I develop is entirely wrong, or missing big chunks.

Example: I've been working with Hibernate for more than a month now, but I still don't really understand exactly how it actually works. I only discovered tonight that it creates proxies to camouflage and control all my objects. This is sort of like wondering why your friends are acting a bit odd and then discovering that everyone on the planet except you has been replaced by space aliens.

Java has so dang many layers of obscurity that it is really hard to figure out precisely what code is actually being executed. The application code you write is just the tip of the iceberg. What with Spring, Hibernate, Terracotta, JUnit, the Hotspot compiler, and all the other frameworks and code enhancement tools we use, the program code itself is almost just a hint to the system. Maybe we're getting closer to the holy grail of being able to tell the computer what we want done, rather than how to do it.