chromatic at the O’Reilly Network has published his interview with Andy and Dave. They covered several topics near and dear to the Pragmatic Programmers’ hearts, including the self-published Pragmatic Bookshelf titles and the need for continuous learning on the part of pragmatic software developers, but the point which especially hit home with me was their call to “cut the clutter” and reduce the growing complexity in software development.

J2EE application development was singled out, and is surely the poster boy for runaway frameworks, but I think the problem’s evident in a lot of the latest technologies. My first question after looking at the state of the W3C’s Semantic Web project, and specifically the now-official OWL specification, was, “Who is it that actually needs this level of complexity?” In a widely-discussed article from last November, Clay Shirky observed that “… the Semantic Web imagines that completeness and correctness of data exposed on the web are the cardinal virtues, and that any amount of implementation complexity is acceptable in pursuit of those virtues.” I’m curious to see how (or if) all of the effort expended in developing standards like OWL (and the growing number of OWL-based ontologies) will lead to useful applications in the coming years.