Presenting fetish: logging
The one thing you can say about the intarweb that we’ve all come to know and love is that it’s full of some very very bizarre people. Said people will more often than not manifest their deepest dirtiest wishes in the form of midget sex, goatse collages, lemonparty, horses doing unspeakable things to a variety of human orifices, and the shiny white boots of tubgirl. The content in itself isn’t necessarily that disturbing; more disturbing is those who find such material personal fetishfodder.
Of all these fetishes though, none are as freaky as our dear old Ceki’s logging obsession. We’re coming up to the 10th year anniversary of his initial logging spasm, and the little rumpranger shows no sign of tedium nor flagging of unmentionables.
Most people think that the freak just sharted out log4j and saw his creation, and pronounced that it was good. Most people are also exceptionally stupid, ignorant and naive, which perhaps explains the earlier perception.
So what is slf4j? Well, it’s a….facade for other logging systems! It’s a replacement for clogging! Now here’s the clever bit, instead of all that magical dynamic discovery mumbo jumbo, the binding from slf4j to a concrete implemention is done at….compile time! Want to switch logging implementations? Simple, recompile your app!
Of course, having written a logging api, the next natural step is to write a logging api api. slf4j of course does nothing by itself. Instead it has two implementations, nlog4j and SimpleLogger. By now, even the most hardened logging chozgobblers are likely suffering from serious shrinkage.
It’s amazing that after all these years, there are still some people who think that time and effort should be invested in more implementations of the same tired old ideas. Is this guy at all in touch with what goes on in the real world? Exactly how many cloggings does the world need anyway? Why oh why oh why do we need wrappers around logging libraries? Has anyone, ever, in the entire history of java, and in all the millions of projects out there, ever, ever switched a logging implementation, and thought ‘using clogging was such a good idea after all!’
