ABAP_to_the_Future

Introduction
and then, once the boom dies down, gets a permanent job at one of the former
clients. For a while, all is good, but afte r 10 years, the developer realizes that he
knows nothing about any of the new technology SAP has come out with, because
it was always possible to get by just using the same techniques that worked in the
year 2000.
Sure, if I had a dollar for every time I read the words “game changing” or “inflection
point” in the IT press, then I could use that pile of money to build a ramp to
the moon. But what cannot be denied is that in recent years SAP has been coming
out with radical new ideas at a faster and faster pace. A lot of this new technology
does not use the ABAP language or SE80development environment, and the pace
of change has moved from getting used to a new version of something every five
years to getting used to a new version of something every 12 weeks. Either of
those things in isolation would be enou gh to scare people who aren’t used to
change, and the combination gets them hiding under the sofa and hoping all this
will go away. (It won’t.) Like it or not, it’s probably a good idea to, at the very
minimum, have a rough idea of what all these scary things—like SAP HANA—are
all about. The alternative is crossing your fingers and hoping really hard that they
won’t affect you for another 10 years.
Of course, trying to keep up with the nonstop stream of innovations coming out
of SAP these days is like drinking from the proverbial fire hose: Since SAP
adopted the agile methodology, the time between releases of various products
has decreased noticeably, and SAP is such a large organization that the new features
come at you from all sides at once.
Still, if you try to push the latest and greatest SAP invention onto your colleagues,
you may hear the following: (a) you should not use this just because it’s new; and
(b) because it’s new, it’s risky, and it probably won’t work anyway. As always,
there is no black and white position on this. A lot of developers do in fact like
using new things because th ey are new, regardless of whether it is appropriate.
And some of the new things really are good!
Regardless of the specific technology being discussed, you’ll notice two major
themes that run through this book: object-oriented (OO) programming and antifragile
programming. To get you ready for this, I want to say a few brief words
about these concepts.
24