I think that the example you give is actually a very good example of a set of context switches that people regularly deal with poorly, even though they are, as you note, very common.
How many server side web developers do you know who can output standards compliant HTML/XHTML that also works on IE6? (In fact, I suppose this is one major reason why templating is so common---so you can separate the web development experts from the web design experts.) How many web developers will have a database enforce their integrity constraints rather than having the logic in their program? How many know how to write PL/SQL? How many compilers are there now from some source language down to JavaScript in order to reduce the number of languages that a developer needs to know and control interactions between?
The danger of these sorts of context switches seems to be difficult project coordination, code redundancy, performance bugs, and logic errors.
(On a side note, it's not that I think that developers are stupid, it's that writing code well in a given language seems to require not just familiarity with that often idiosyncratic language, but it also requires continued knowledge of standard idioms, libraries, frameworks, and sources of answers to common problems.)
How many server side web developers do you know who can output standards compliant HTML/XHTML that also works on IE6? (In fact, I suppose this is one major reason why templating is so common---so you can separate the web development experts from the web design experts.) How many web developers will have a database enforce their integrity constraints rather than having the logic in their program? How many know how to write PL/SQL? How many compilers are there now from some source language down to JavaScript in order to reduce the number of languages that a developer needs to know and control interactions between?
The danger of these sorts of context switches seems to be difficult project coordination, code redundancy, performance bugs, and logic errors.
(On a side note, it's not that I think that developers are stupid, it's that writing code well in a given language seems to require not just familiarity with that often idiosyncratic language, but it also requires continued knowledge of standard idioms, libraries, frameworks, and sources of answers to common problems.)