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Has Software Development Improved?
earnest_deyoung asks: "Twenty-five years ago Frederick Brooks laid out a vision of the future of software engineering in "No Silver Bullet." At the time he thought improvements in the process of software creation were most likely to come from object-oriented programming, of-the-shelf components, rapid prototyping, and cultivation of truly great designers. I've found postings on /. where people tout all sorts of design tools, from languages like Java, Perl, Python, Ruby, and Smalltalk to design aids and processes like UML and eXtreme Programming. I'm in a Computer Science degree program, and I keep wondering what "improvements" over the last quarter century have actually brought progress to the key issue: more quickly and more inexpensively developing software that's more reliable?"
There is no silver bullet, never will be.
Logic requires careful thought, and careful thought requires time.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Not too sure if it an improvement, but I know some people use languages in which programs can be proven to work like ML. Of course if you actually want to write a program which *does* something it is probably not for you.
I can say I honestly don't like Java.
Nowadays we've got great tools like Flash, scripting languages like VB Script, and markup languages like HTML.
Not every programmer these days is a old COBOL nerd, ASM coder, or C junkie.
I yearn for the days when Borland was great. The Turbo C++ and Turbo Pascal products probably got half of the programmers in the 80's, late 90's started.
I don't think there are any magic bullets. Software development (unlike most other engineering disciplines) is a build-it-yourself from the ground up everytime experience. Go read http://www.reciprocality.org/Reciprocality/r0/ (mentioned in the past on /.) to see a different view on what makes some folks way more productive than others.
Computers don't boot into a ROM BASIC anymore.
Welcome to termpapers.slashdot.org!
Programs that assist programmers in the development process by handling who changes what when, etc - are - IMHO - a huge improvement.
I seriously doubt that a program like Linux could flourish without programs like CVS.
furthermore - many of the programs that do this sort of thing can be used for any programming language... you could even use it for simple documents.
While I'm only in my mid 20's and I'm no veteran by any stretch, it seems like there have been huge leaps in programmer productivity made possible by things like OOP and off-the-shelf components.
However, I think they're equally balanced out by huger demands on programmers. Once it's realized that a programmer can do 2, 3, or 10 times as much work by using more efficient methods management is quick to pile on 2, 3, or 10 times as much work!
This isn't really unique to programming either. I think it's universally applicable to any area where technology permits greater productivity.
For example, look at all those ads from the 50's. Things like the microwave, the vaccuum, and the dishwasher were supposed to usher in a new era of leisure. Do we have more leisure? No, we have less, as those luxuries become necessities and we cram in more activities in out new-found time in order to stay competitive.
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
Probably the biggest improvement is due to the creation of software processes, whether it is the legacy waterfall or the latest XP.
The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.
But seriously, a lot of people develop beneath the "enterprise level" and some of the buzzword concepts just don't scale that well for smaller project.
In my opinion, the two things that have really made a difference are databases (as opposed to manually creating file formats) and the object-oriented paradigm.
My best advice is to use everything with a grain of salt because there is always something "better" on the horizon.
I'm in a Computer Science degree program
If you're in the U.S., GET OUT WHILE YOU STILL CAN - the tech job market (and the economy in general) are in horrible shape. My friends are coming out of college with CS/IS/MIS degrees and finding NOTHING!
And if you stay in CS, may God have mercy on your soul.
If I had a dime for every system I've seen where there was no planning, no logic, just brute force coding I'd be richer than those in the .com era.
This bring me back to the last slash dot post a few weeks ago of the 80 hour a week SW engineer.
True SW architects are hard to find and so is thier logic. A managment that understands the expense and time involved are even rarer entities.
Hardware Architecture keeps building on similar themes, no real inovation going on (I use that term loosely). SW requires a human factor.
more quickly and more inexpensively developing software that's more reliable
Based on the last 20 years either working in or supporting government efforts, I'd say yes. However (there is always a however), it depends on the sophistication of the developing organization. The cowboy shops still suck. Those who have embraced more formal processes have become more reliable. It is a 2-way street though and requires the customer to be more sophisticated as well. It doesn't do a damn thing to have a development shop at CMM-5 if the client doesn't understand the need for process and doesn't understand the software development challenges.
The invention of pencil and paper.
The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.
If you look at how programming languages and sofrware evolve, the errors just get higher level. For example, Java keeps you from having memory leaks and buffer overflows. But a bad coder is a bad coder and will write buggy software where the problems are on a different layer. They will just arrange your off-the-shelf components incorrectly. With wherever there is still really low level C/assembly programming stuff going on, off the shelf just really isn't applicable so you still have the really low level pointer arithmetic problems. As time goes on nothing really changes... it just evolves. So our bugs are just evolving.
but HTML and Perl have probably set us back 15-20 years.
What's a sig?
The ability to create decoupled software components , combine them into a coherent, functional application, and deploy them into a standards-based container (i.e., an "application server") is a HUGE step in programmer productivity.
Silver bullets still do not exist. New technologies and methodologies are often hyped as such and naturally fail to live up to the hype. However, that does not mean they are useless.
These technologies and methodologies have allowed us to keep pace with Moore's law. The amount of software we develop today would simply be impossible using the state of the art in 1970. We routinely poor out millions of lines of code in mammoth projects that take sever hundreds or thousands of man-years to complete. The only reason we are able to do so is because of improvements in development methodologies and technology.
The (huge) research field that studies these technologies and approaches is called software engineering.
Jilles
High quality, reliable C and C++ compilers have emerged as defacto standards on major platforms.
Now you wouldn't think of developing on UNIX with anything but GCC and the associated build tools.
In 1990 you were stuck with whatever C compiler your vendor shipped, and there were more than a few dodgy compilers out there. Modern compilers with useful error messages have done more than anything else to make debugging and development faster and easier for me.
The focus has definitely shifted away from algorithms and toward abstraction. This was supposed to make things easier, by letting the software do what it does best and keep track of bookkeeping, while we concentrate on building models and governing interations between them.
Some of it actually makes sense - the object oriented paridigm, component models, virtual machines. (VM's, by the way, go back at least 20 years in the literature -- I studied them in college in the late 80's. However, like Pascal, they were originally considered as an instructional tool, and nobody at the time thought that anyone would be damn fool enough to actually try and *implement* such a thing!)
But just like letting grade-school students use calculators for their arithmetic, I'm not certain these things are best for students. Sure, you get usable code out quickly, but without an understanding of the underlying algorithms and logic. I doubt many modern 'c0derz' could properly knock out a simple quick-sort, let alone a fully ACID SQL DBMS.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
Now I'm sure that some people out there will rave about how great XP is, but reading the Mythical Man Month and working on any large, or even medium scale project with a long term life-span will tell you that while some elements of XP are good, these are the ones that existed before.
1) Write your test cases up front... this is ages old. XP isn't as rigourous as others who say "and make sure other people write them".
2) Pair Programming, works for two people of equal ability. The two headed surgical team from the Mythical man month is a much more effective way of using two heads.
Basically things like XP sum up how long computing has to go to become an engineering discipline. In every other engineering subject there are critical elements:
Requirements
Design
Testing and approval of design
implementation
testing of implementation (throughout implementation)
Delivery.
Maintainance
For a construction project all of these elements are mapped out well in advance, which is why the construction industry can work on lower margins.
To become better requires not a "Silver Bullet" as Brookes says, the technology won't make the improvement. Its actually about people applying the rules _rather_ than looking for the Silver Bullet. Some projects succeed, others fail, there are reasons for the failures and the successes. But rarely do we learn from either.
XP is the embodyment of the non-engineering approach to computing that pervades this marketplace. The idea that you can build it wrong and change, don't design "code and check", have a unit test written by a bad coder to check his own bad code.
Brookes is right. At the end of the day computing success is down to a realisation of the soft-skills allied to technical talent.
If you have 10 brilliant people leading 100 average people... fire the 100 and support the 10 to do the delivery effectively. Make sure they follow a process, and make sure that the requirements are defined and change as little as possible. Make sure designs are verified, make sure code is reviewed.
Sure its less exciting that "just coding" but in the end it takes less time, costs less to maintain and delivers what the customer wants.
Engineering is a discipline, XP is just glorified hacking, only by becomming disciplined will software improve.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
else how would commercial software company's make money ? They need to sell updates and support.
;-)
They code crap. My personal experience with not to big software company's is they like to sell crap if they can and most of the time the other company also sells crap and after wards you dont even own the software you buy. Software bussness sucks atm.
Until the world wakes up and start demanding that software needs to work just like material stuff or else they wont buy it. It wont get better in the near future aslong we except crap from even big company's like Microsoft, which is becoming more reliable and stable but still sells a awful design if you ask me. oke maybe start a flame here but most software is like throw a way dishes instead of a rolce roys. And i think company's like microsoft showed the smaller software houses that its oke to sell crap as long it sells and it bugs me cause software has a bad name, but i know good software exists, bla bla bla, you got me pissed again slashdot....i hate humans
Quazion.
You must be kidding.
Of course it is now easier to create software than before.
First of all, source management software wasnt available 25 years ago. Try creating a huge piece of software without any way to rollback changes, share the same source tree with other developpers, etc... (cvs/sourcesafe/starteam/etc)
Second, profiling tools. Hey, you want to know where that memory leak is? Where that CPU bottleneck is? Pretty hard to do when you were coding in cobol many years ago... Doing the same is way easier now with OptimizeIt and stuff like that.
I could go on and on but I must leave for work =)
I've always believed that one day some bright college kid is going to come up with a completely different style of computer language and interface, and when that happens we will all slap our heads and go "D'oh! So that's how we should be doing it! Obvious!"
Like the web and P2P, the most influential ideas are often quite simple, and "obvious".
Have you used the Microsoft Visual Studio? It makes your life amazingly easy by finishing your words for you, making it easy to find functions, it gives you hints about what the arguments to each function are. It is all around a great piece of work.
If Perl had an IDE that was as easy to use it would dominate the world. (more than it already does)
NO.
The project management keeps moving the target. The customer still says "I don't know what I really want, but keep coding and I'll let you know when you get it." Analysts can't analyze, designers can't design, coders can't code, testers don't test (enough), ad nauseam.
Methodologies and philosophies of software development can only make up for so much. Sometimes, they are counterproductive. They "lower the bar", leading management to believe that the methodology can fill in for cheaping-out on hiring good developers. But we /.ers know the truth, don't we: Quality software comes only from quality developers--people, not methods or schools of thought or books by really smart people. Since quality developers are rare (like Leonardo DaVinci rare), quality software is correspondingly rare.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Off the shelf components have helped a LOT.
perl is ugly to code in, and perl OOP is obviously a hack. I had a graphics/OOP professor who said, "nobody likes to program in perl, but it gets the job done." Obviously he lives in the land of language theory, where perl doesn't, but it gets the idea across...
perl gets the job done because of its massive collection of components.
I think I'd go further to say that the big improvement there is in repositories where you can get massive collections of components, as there have been languages like perl (in terms of having lots of stuff - PL/1 comes to mind) in the past.
Places like CPAN, Sourceforge and Freshmeat really make the difference. So ultimately, the internet is the means through which software development has sped up (at least when you're not talking about RAD-GUI development, which is another thing entirely).
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
We've impoved the software industry.
As Engineers, we didn't sit around all day debating on whether or not we should got o base-3 computing instead of base-2.
We spent our days solving problems. Also, we learned how to do this in a timely fashion. Get it right the first time, or fail the test because you run out of time.
Engineering discipline.
I've been using CVS for some time now - even bought a _great_book_ to assist me in understanding it better.
I was recently discussing this sort of thing with some friends and got into what I would love to start as a project - something to the effect of "fvs" or function versioning system - which would allow me to keep tabs on "just-a-box" functions which i use throughout my programs.
I think any programmer who sees the benifts of CVS would understand where im going with this concept. We all have functions we use again and again - and realizing that there is a potential flaw in a given function at one point is always followed by exasperation because one realizes that the function needs to be changes in X number of programs.
No need to haul out references to books or count buzzwords...just look at the software world and the question answers itself.
Since the early days of computing in the late 70's, we've seen systems grow more larger and more complex. Whereas entire OSes used to be written by a single person (granted, a gifted person like the Woz or Bill Gates), these days we have companies like Sun and Microsoft with literally hundreds of developers and testers for a word processor, let alone the thousands of folks around the world who contribute to Linux, Apache, or KDE.
Given this incredible change in how software is developed, we'd expect to see systems collapse into instability and mayhem, but save for a few exceptions (Windows 9x, anyone?) this has largely not been the case. Windows XP, Mac OS X, and Linux 8.0 have proven, if anything, more stable and reliable than their predecessors. For an even more dramatic example, look at NASA's software or popular video games. It's clear that not only has software development expanded in scope exponentially, but it has become objectively better in the process. Development has never been better, and I see no reason why this trend shouldn't continue.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
Let's say you're trying to improve the work of a painter. Give him a better brush, his strokes look nicer. Give him better paint, his colors look brighter. Give him a CAD system with a robotic painting arm, his paintings look crisper. However, nothing you've done can change the fact that he's still doing velvet Elvis's. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but he isn't churning out a Mona Lisa anytime soon, or ever. You haven't been able to affect the input to the process - his brain. You know the adage, garbage in, garbage out. Well that is the fundamental rule in software.
The big improvement in software productivity will come when we are able to successfully clone human beings. Corporations will create a stable of uber-programmers who they will then clone to be able to mass produce software. In the future, the open source war will be about peoples' genes, the software will be just a downstream product.
There are definite improvements to programming. Tools, concepts, etc. have evolved. There are no true silver bullets, but we've got a good selection of choices out there.
The problem, however, is threefold:
One of the real challenges for IT professionals today is to find the good tools and ideas out there, the ones that really have improved programming, and then actually get them into use. A good IT person is a good researcher and good at justifying their ideas to people.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
what "improvements" over the last quarter century have actually brought progress to the key issue: more quickly and more inexpensively developing software that's more reliable?"
I've only been programming for 19 years (not 25) but I can say that I've seen absolutely no progress in software development givin your contraints of defining "progress" as being able to achieve the three goals (speed, cost, robustness). HOWEVER, I don't really blame the tools, rather the nature of the end result. The software we have to write has become significantly more complex, and at a rate that has surpassed our abilities to effectively create tools to deal with their complexity. "Back in the day" when a "good" business level word processor was 100KLines of code and written by a small group of dedicated and bright people, you could get very good results. Now, something like Word is significantly larger than 1MLines of code being worked on by programmers with 15+ years of experience to those who just got out of school to those who you wouldn't trust to add up your grocery bill let alone write a line of code.
It's like we still have hammers and nails, but the "market" wants us to build steel skyscrappers. So we come up with even better hammers and whiz bang processes to "better" utilize those hammers and nail together steel girders, but the fact is that those tools are woefully inadequate to truely make a dent in improving that which we build.
Languages are definitely better. But there are also a greater number of software engineers, many of them mediocre. So overall I wouldn't say quality is better.
Think about it. 25 years ago, it was extremely limited. How many people did you know, in 1977 with a net account? I remember coding on a C64 in my cousin's basement for days on end just because we had scrounged enough money to get into town and buy some new books/magazines that helped us overcome some bug. Now, if you're being bitten by the same bug, whaddya do? Hit the net! Some of the responses above, like the sharing of source through GPL wouldn't be as viable an option without the access we have today. The biggest aid to programmers today. Net Access.
Don't park drunk, accidents cause people.
In my opinion, object technology has done more to allow developers to re-use effort than any other paradigm in development. That isn't to say that the potential of OOP has even been approached. It is rare to find large development shops that have a consistent base of knowledgable OOP developers, and it isn't always necassary; it is very important to have OOP concepts influence the architecture of any system that maintains re-use as a design objective.
Design patterns also play an important role in allowing for a given design to be re-used, consumed, whatever the case may be. OOP related technologies such as UML, Corba, and now many XML based solutions are beginning to mature the field.
I am not as experienced as I would like to be with OOP, but I can say that I have been in the procedural world long enough to realize that there seems to be a divine power in OOP. It makes you *think* entirely different about problems, and by breaking a very large, very complex problem into approachable components. Allowing not only a single developer to build more complex systems, but systems that are well suited for re-use in future or existing systems.
Coors Light. Its done wonders for my hacking skills. No wonder its called the Silver Bullet.
Yeah, as a PhD student you get paid practically nothing (at least when compared to corporations), you have to work silly hours and possibly teach as well.
Yet, if you pick your topic carefully, you'll be working those hours on interesting and intellectually challenging bleeding edge stuff and not on some YAMC (yet another moron client) project that was handed over to you. In a nice group you can also choose whether you want to come in to work early in the morning or at around lunch time. Furthermore, teaching experience can never hurt a nerd. I used to hate teaching and I still don't like it. However, positive teaching experiences and the very act of confronting a group of smart, young people for four years improved my self-confidence, presentation and public speaking skills tremendously.
but in my world, Java is the single largest memory hog and memory-leaking piece of crap I have ever seen.
you're kidding yourself if you think Java keeps you from having memory leaks, and I have enterprise code to prove it
A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
I can't say that Java is a significant programming advantage over C -- it's the Java libraries that beat the snot out of calling the raw Windows/Mac/X APIs.
That's not the only one: The depth of CPAN, the Python library, even MFC/ATL are worlds ahead of hand-coding the guts of an app.
When I started programming, the Mac SDK had to be handled raw, and GDI was brand spankin' new. APIs such as DEC's FMS were considered heaven-sent(talk about dead ends!). Shortly after, class libraries were available, but expensive for an amateur. With Java and Perl, it's part of the (free) package.
I'm sure there's garbage code in those libraries -- there's always going to be bugs. But they're going to be relatively smooth to use, and they're already written, letting me focus on the business logic, instead of the presentation.
Design for Use, not Construction!
If you're coding an app and you are spending time on the GUI you are just creating a maintenance headache for maintenance programmers later on.
Most documentation is horrid if it even exists (learn a human language first and use it to actually write meaningful comments, specifications, test scripts, internal and user documentation.)
Most of this industry doesn't know dick about SLAs or optimization for time (first) or space (last.)
Most of this industry doesn't know dick about configuration management, capacity planning or correctness.
The difference between duffers (most of this industry,) and the pros is that the pros don't "paint little master-pieces" in a a guild-like cottage industry. They generate "art by the yard" in industrial settings for mass dispersal, distribution and "invisible" use.
Good luck and remember, computing is nothing but a problem in N-Dimensional topology. If anybody tell you different, they are part of the problem, not part of the solution.
ALL objects have states and state transitions, code for that first and the rest will follow. Start from a thorough, correct and complete meta-model and you won't get into trouble later.
As for languages, CASE tools, GUIs, IDEs and the rest. Learn to do it the long and hard way first so you'll:
a) know what's being optimized and abstracted out,
b) appreciate it,
c) know what happens when it fails.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
What I have observed in the course of software development, in various companies, is that the management dictates that "thou shalt follow said process" and there will be the obligatory design reviews, spiffy diagrams, an all the huffing and puffing. But when the smoke clears, it still comes down to 9 months of work compressed into 3 months of actual work time, and everyone shifts into a hack 'n slash mode. The processes in place fail because of a lack or adequate time and inflexibility of deadlines.
Be excellent to each other. And... PARTY ON, DUDES!
Having been at the software development game for about 20 years, I've been through the structured programming/data flow design/yourdon/OMT/UML methodologies at various levels of expertise, tools from vi/cc, borland turbo pascal/C on 8086, dec 10 and vax/vms fortran, visual C++, Jbuilder, etc. I haven't seen it all by any stretch, but I've seen enough to know that it hasn't all changed that much. In my time, we've just moved from designing libraries to looking for patterns, which has the side effect of resulting in somewhat useful code. Bottom line is the stupid little detail that was forgotten, or a missing key piece of info from the spec or customer causes endless havoc. If anything, the situation is worse because what we do has gotten more complex and the tools that we work with are essentially leaky abstractions (see Joel on Software) and if you didn't work at the low levels when your latest whizzy development environment doesn't produce code that works, you'll have a pretty difficult time figuring out the problem. Its still a black art, experience counts, and don't believe everything (anything?) the buzzword compliant managers or sales rep say.
Now I am not saying that you still don't need to have a good understanding of the language, or use good design, implementation, testing, etc. But I have worked at SEI CMM level 3, level 2, and am currently going through the process of evaluation where I work now, for level 2. But being at that level doesn't guarantee that your software will be good. It seems almost like we are attempting to fit the creation of software into the old engineering mold, because it kind of fits.
So to answer the question - I don't think that there have been any great improvements to obtain the goals you stated. Software relys on hardware, which seems to contstantly be changing. A bridge is a bridge, but the very idea of what software can do has been changing constantly over the last 25 years.
If you want reliability, look at what NASA has produced. Those are some engineers. Ahh, but you said 'quickly', didn't you? :-) If you want something rock solid, you can't have it tomorrow, if you want it to do anything remotely complex. I think one of the big things we as an industry has to realize is that our product (software) can be simple and fast to market, or more complex and take more time. And all of the variations in between. I haven't been convinced that what we do is engineering, but I haven't been convinced that it isn't. After all, it is a pretty young profession, compared to others. Imagine trying to explain to someone from 100 years ago what a software engineer does.
All that being said, I think that the obvious Slashdot answer is that the GPL and free software have been a huge force, but only in recent years. I think the two biggest forces in software development were the PC and the internet.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
What sort of programming do you do? I've done machine tools programs and xml to Oracle data converters and I spend more time developing algorithms and data structures than I do wtriting code.
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There have certainly been improvements in software development, but they generally only address yesterday's problems. That is, as one improves the process, instead of making life easier, the complexity of the project simply increases.
My personal theory is that the complexit/hardness of software development is more or less constant. Putting together that "monsterous" 1000 line COBOL program yesterday was probably just about as hard as today's 100,000 line Java program.
After the 1000 line COBOL program, you have to do better, add more features and use a richer model. This entails increased complexity. While you may have gained valuable knowledge, skills, and new techniques in making your 1000 line COBOL program, now it's time to move on to the next level. The new stuff you developed helps you get to that next level, but you end up working just as hard, and the problem is just as difficult.
IMHO, one of the keys to writing good software is to not write very much software. Class libraries like the one in Java are almost invariably more feature-complete, more reliable, and better tested than roll-your-own libraries. Using existing libraries means you don't have to worry about off-by-one errors in your linked list implementation, or figuring out a good hash key for your string. While I think that all coders should know how to solve these problems, they shouldn't have to as part of their daily life. It's busywork, and giant class libraries do a wonderful job of making life easier. They let you concentrate on the important stuff - the algorithms, and marketing's feature of the week.
Yes, libraries have been around for more than a decade. The STL and Java both showed up in the mid 90's, though, and I'd argue they've made a huge difference since then. Yes, they have bugs. Yes, there have been other advances. Yes, there are special cases where standard libraries aren't appropriate. There's no silver bullet, but standard libraries are a huge advance.
That's what code libraries are for just rewrite the function in the library, recompile the library, and relink the other programs... or even better, put it in a dynamic library and just recompile the library...
software has gotten more complex and user expectations have grown at a rate equal or greater than software development tools.
Find some other career. Like be a male stripper or something else that has regular hours.
Is this thing on? Hello?
All the problems with software today aren't a result of poor engineering, but rather of poor software development management.
;) But most business orientated software is bug-ridden, and that's just fine. It's the accepted risk for getting the software out the door as cheaply and quickly as possible.
I can't count the number of times last minute feature requests are required to be in a build. As software developers, we just deal with it. But quality suffers because of it. And the engineers get the bad wrap.
Do you think Intel management requires last minute features to the Pentium core, and tries to push them out the door with no testing? Do you think people building cars for Toyota decide to swap engines at the last minute, becuase GM just put a turbo charger on it's standard Prizm?
It's ludicrous the stuff that gets requested of software engineers.
My brother is an contract electrical engineer. He was complaining one time of a 'last minute feature request'. His project still had a year of development time left! I laughed so hard I almost puked.
Granted, given all that, the current model for software works. When software is required to be bug-free, it can be. Lots of software is bug free. You just don't hear about it, because it works. Look at NASA, the AIN telephone network, or Windows.
I don't have a sig...Do you??
Software is like any sort of engineering, really. If you spend the time designing properly, prototyping what you don't know, and document everything carefully, you'll get the same result as people who do the same building a bridge or a tank.
This assumes however, that requirements don't change. The sad fact is, in software, requirements change a lot. Unless that changes, software will always take longer than people want/expect.
To give an equivalent engineering task, look at the Bradley Fighting Vehicle that the U.S. Army "designed" and built. Watch "The Pentagon Wars" with Kelsey Grammer. Great movie, BTW. The requirements for the Bradley were changed over and over again through its many, many, many, years of development. It's an armored car for God's sake. At least that's what it was supposed to be.
It took them something like 15 or 20 years to get to production to build what amounts to a tank that's as fragile as a Pinto. Fortunately it's been improved since then.
Anyway, if your requirements remain static, then doing software "quickly" using any of the many modern tools and processes available today is quite acheivable. Quickly being a relative term and all, but compared to the old days.
While people seem to be saying there haven't been any advances, and won't be any advances, and such, they're forgetting that the first key step in solving any problem is identifying the problem.
People are complaining about how using stronger employees to lead less-skilled employees doesn't work. People are complaining that the person testing the "bad coder's" code is usually the "bad coder" itself. These complaints begin to define the actual problem of "Why software development isn't improving." Each of these complaints, taken together and addressed, is the first step towards improving software design methodologies.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Here is my take on the best environments available today (in order of best first) - I only include stuff that I use:
- Cincom VisualWorks Smalltalk - a really fast coding environment with support for SOAP/WSDL/UDDI/all possible database connectivity, built in web development tools, huge class library so often new applications are very little new code
- Microsoft VisualStudio.Net - I almost hate to include this one, but I am trying to be honest here
:-). Last year when I was writing a J2EE (Java Enterprise) book, I took a good look at the competition and liked C# and .Net.
- Java with light weight web services - I am a HUGE fan of Java on the server side, done light. By light I mean that I like to just use servlets and JSPs, etc. and only use heavy weight J2EE stuff when I really need transaction support, etc. that EJBs provide
- Common Lisp - lots of great commercial tools from Xanalys and Franz, and lots of great free tools like CLisp, CMULisp, OpenMCL, etc.
- Python - Love it for small projects, munging text, etc.
- C++ - only use it when I must - great runtime perfromance, but a pain to code in
It seems like so much work today requires deploying web services so I appreciate tools that make it easy to develop basic application logic separately from any user interface, get it working, then write web and/or standalone GUI interfaces.-Mark
Warnng: I am blogging now: http://radio.weblogs.com/0115954/
I think the varying degree of control over the physical machine a developer can now choose when writing a program is the single most important factor in increased productivity. In assembler the programmer must worry about everything. C was the first truly abstract programming language where the programmer could call a routine like printf and not need to worry about the details of printing a string to the screen. Because the language was more abstract, the programmer could do far more complicated things (have you every tried to write a red/black tree in assembler)?
Over the last several years languages have gotten more and more abstract, languages like Java isolated the developer from pretty much everything except the logic they are trying to capture. Developers can now choose the level of abstraction they wish to work with based on the problem domain. (low level library vs. script for renaming files) Higher level (more abstract) programs are usually much easier to write but it is worth noting that there is a price to pay for, generally these programs are not as powerful as their low level cousins. Some languages like VB still try to abstract development out even more, so that it is accessible to everyone. Abstraction has brought the ability to program to a much wider audience and has greatly reduced the time it takes to write basic applications and for that it is the most important change in programming.
Development methologies may have improved, and frankly, i believe that. however, most software is not just developed with the latest and best practices alone.
What really drives development, from my experience, is that grit that resides between the client (or target) and the developers: the management. And my experience more than not is that they:
1. don't care about best practices and just want it done
2. Care, but don't have budget or schedule - or so they say.
Bottom line is that everyone (or at least all managers) want it on time and under budget. But rarely can you get the two. This translates into cutting corners which produces shotty products which, in turn, makes the developers the scapegoat.
I was thinking the other day "what if more software was developed more the open source way - things usually don't get released until they're ready and where code is more peer-reviewed?" How would this affect the software industry? What would the upgrade cycle look like? What would the security landscape look like? Would there be a software industry today as we know it? Who knows?
You can release good products on time. But there has to be a orchestrated effort between management and development on what can and cannot be released in a reasonable schedule. Unfortunately, most of the shops I've worked with tend to ignore that and thusly, it doesn't matter what process or tools you're using since the integrity of the product is damaged from the onset in such a severe way that what ends up happening through the rest of the product lifetime is a catchup and patchup feedback loop.
There's a big piece of self-deception that's been with us in various forms for, um, five decades.
An early phrasing of this deceptive might be: "Every FORTRAN statement generates ten machine instructions, so you will be ten times as productive writing in FORTRAN than writing in assembly language."
The problem is that when you're doing it right, programming progress is exponential, not linear. Every time you do something as simple as calling a subroutine, you're writing one line of code that is the equivalent of ten (a hundred, whatever). If you're doing it right, you write subroutines, then subroutines that call subroutines, always leveraging what you've done before.
So something that seemingly gives you a multiplier (in terms of instructions executed at run time per unit of programmer work time) is really only additive (in terms of project progress).
For example, what's the effect on productivity of being able to call strcat? Let's suppose the implementation of strncat is twenty lines of code. Every time you use it, strncat does NOT give you a twenty-fold multiplier. All it does is save you the time it would have taken to write strncat ONCE yourself. (And test it, and document it--but still, only ONCE).
Most "advances"--a good subroutine library, a good language, object-oriented programming, rapid application development tools (yes, Visual Basic--go ahead, flame me)--have the same effect, when they work. What they do is to start you further along in the development process.
But it's just a head start, it's not an increase in development speed.
And, of course, all of this is counterbalanced by the time it takes to learn the tools. (Is strncpy guaranteed to give you a terminating zero byte? How about strncat? How sure are you?)
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I think any programmer who sees the benifts of CVS would understand where im going with this concept. We all have functions we use again and again - and realizing that there is a potential flaw in a given function at one point is always followed by exasperation because one realizes that the function needs to be changes in X number of programs.
You don't need a new version control tool, you need a refactoring tool.
Small-scale development has always been efficient. The challenge facing the industry has been to find ways of doing large-scale development (the type Fred Brooks was talking about) cheaply and effectively.
And in this domain, there has been a revolution, namely the Internet, and the arrival of cheap connectivity between developers anywhere in the world.
Prior to this, the only way for developers to collaborate was to be hired by the same company, work on the same network. Inefficient as hell.
Today any group anywhere in the world can create a project and work on this as efficiently as a small group in the past.
The irony is that the revolution does not care a shit about the technology used, and works as well for COBOL programmers as for companies cracking the human genome. It's about solving a purely human problem: communications.
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
In the 2nd Edition of "The Mythical Man Month",
Frederick Brooks lays out a summay of various rebuttals to "No Silver Bullet" (there have been, 'a couple' of papers on the subject)...
Its worth a read.
Software (design and) development is all about passion. Only mechanisms to express the road to success have changed (and improved). Experts look for species like good software developers, analyse them and define a new process. And most of them are not wrong.
There are hardcore believers of waterfall model. And so goes with extreme programming. Configuration management is luxary (and waste of time, sometimes) for somebody, and may not be same for others. The best part is, we have methods suitable for individual's nature.
Hmmm... Ok.. Chivas on the rocks.
First of all, glad to see a lot of positive posts on this topic...I frequently see on this very same site laments about the dismal state of software. I am in agreement with the viewpoint that software developers continue to be more and more productive (through frameworks, code reuse, improved languages and tools, etc.), however the productivity hasn't resulted in improved software quality because we are simply being asked to do more complex tasks with the same schedule and resources.
One thing that has drastically improved my productivity is the Web itself (time on Slashdot notwithstanding), as a way to locate resources for programming. Almost any algorithm, component, or subsystem that is not specific to the problem domain can probably be found on the web, whether as a library, a set of source code, or simply a precise definition of an algorithm. I agree with one post that a lot of young developers would have difficulty writing a correct bubble sort, but anyone that attempts to design and implement a bubble sort on the job is wasting resources, since there is an implementation somewhere on the Web in any language you would want. In addition to software projects, informative articles and API documentation, newsgroup discussions are invaluable as well for pinpointing problems. So the Web is really my most important programming tool.
In conjunction with the Web, the vast supply of open source and free software out there that has drastically improved my productivity. The Apache Jakarta project and CPAN are my favorites, but there are many interesting projects on SourceForge and FreshMeat as well. Often, even if you are determined (or required by corporate standards) to roll your own, free software can give you a good idea about how others have approached the problem and the abstractions and metaphors they've used. In my experience, design reuse is often far more helpful and practical than actual reuse of code.
Software development, at least many types of software development, has changed, in that programmers are much more dependent on large APIs and libraries than they used to be. In theory this is good, because it saves work. In reality, it has turned many types of programming into scavenger hunts for information. Now you have to hang huge posters on your wall showing object heirarchies (you didn't remember that a Button is a subclass of BaseButton which is a sublcass of ButtonControl which is a subclass of WindowControl?). Now you need online forums so you can get a consensus about how a certain API call is supposed to behave in certain circumstances. Quite often I feel I could write a new function faster than locating information about how an existing function is supposed to work.
Brooks, in the "No Silver Bullet" essay referenced above, stated that there is both essential and accidential complexity in software development, and because of that there never would be a "silver bullet" to slay the software "monster". However, there are fundamental practices that increase the likelihood of success and fundamental pitfalls that every project faces. And, in the end, the root causes of most failed IT projects are human factors; in fact, you could just cite the "seven deadly sins"--pride, envy, gluttony, lust, anger, greed, sloth--and probably hit the nail on the head.
In conjuction with that, far, far too many practitioners in the IT field lack one or more of the following:
To quote George Santayana (who is often misquoted):
Software engineering is hard enough--with all the human issues--without further handicapping ourselves with ignorance of all that has been already discovered and documented. Yet that is exactly what most IT workers do. Until we find a way to solve _that_ problem, the failure rate for IT projects will remain high indeed. ..bruce..
Bruce F. Webster (brucefwebster.com)
I think the ingredients you mention have made production of software a better process over the past 25 years. Software applications can do more and can be built more quickly as result of those improved tools available to developers.
However, you still see a great deal of unreliability, bloated, and inefficient code because developers are trying to do much more than they did 25 years ago.
If all we needed to do was re-create the applications of 25 years ago, then the benefits of new techniques would be more evident. But people demand more and programmers want to create works up to their full personal potential and exceed what is currently possible.
Ragged-edge software is manifest evidence that we still are constantly crossing the barrier of human potential, that place where what is barely possible becomes what doesn't work. It's a good sign of innovation. And, it provides added impetus to keep trying to find more ways of improving the software development process.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Scary how this rule keeps coming back time and time again.
No problem is ever going to be like any other problem, expect in the abstract. 80% of what you will need to do for any family of problems can be turned into a module / code base, but beyond that you will have to start customizing your code to the partitulars(sp?) of the problem.
And let's face it, 80% of your time on the project will be working on the 20% customization.
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
It is obvious that Microsoft has been the fantastic driving force behind software innovation over the past two decades. Their uncanny ability to feel out new markets and met the needs of their customers with cost effective, friendly licensed, quality software has forced all other developers to increase the quality of their products.
From the article:
The most a high-level language can do is to furnish all the constructs that the programmer imagines in the abstract program.
A-men. But if it does that well, then it makes the job a lot easier. That's why going from C to Java or Perl was sheer relief. Actual strings? Real associative arrays? Whoohoo! And less memory management grief. Not to mention the component libraries available for things I hadn't even thought of yet. CPAN...
To be sure, the level of our thinking about data structures, data types, and operations is steadily rising, but at an ever decreasing rate. And language development approaches closer and closer to the sophistication of users.
True... but the user sophistication is increasing to. It seems highly apparent to me that with more experience and more shoulders to stand on, language and component developers are able to concieve of more and more useful abstractions. And because of the internet, they're more easily available for sharing, commentary, and change.
To sum up, I am much, much happier with the readily available toolsets I have access to now than the ones I had 15 years ago, or even eight years ago. They make developing much easier and much more fun.
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
Actually I think programming has gotten *MUCH* worse with GUI based programming environments like Delphi, VB and even Visual Studio. These tools strongly encourage painting the program and responding to events rather then concentrating on abstractions, infrastructure and good design. In making things easier, they fail to allow programmers to understand what goes on under the hood and most younger programmers (who never really had to understand what goes on) are programming via wizards that assumes a certain architectures and approach. Outside in (GUI based) programming methodologies usually collapse after programs reach a certain size and complexity.
All of the above. Each has brought improvements to some aspect to the development process in certain projects. Next question?
--
CPAN rules. - Guido van Rossum
We don't know enough to do software engineering yet. If materials in the physical world were as poorly understood, and changed as fast as they do in the software world they couldn't do it there either.
If requirements were as poorly understood and changed as fast in the physical world as they do in the software world construction would cost a fortune and most big buildings would never get finished (or would never be fit for purpose).
People who say things like "Make sure the requirements don't change" are living in a fantasy world where they want to blame their inability to deliver on someone else.
The rules haven't changed, get a high quality small team, get good access to a user who knows what they want and grow a system from small beginnings, checking at each stage that it all works and that quality is high.
Its all there in Brooks.
Its no surprise that the guys pushing the agile methodologies were all very succesful designers and developers anyway.
I notice the original post mentions several things that could influence the development time of a software project. I will address a few of these below:
1) Object Oriented Programming :)
This is one of the bigger Silver Bullets to be unleased upon the programming world. I don't think it entirely lived up to the hype. Most OOP is just for local project design, and heaven help you if you have to reuse code somewhere else. It isn't just a case of bad design. Problems like software design are actually ambiguous. The design process is not algorithmic; rather, it's heuristic. You use "templates" and "patterns" to represent your ideas. Trying to shoehorn real-world complexities into these cookie-cutter styles is difficult at best. Trying to further take those styles and integrate them with each other in a very large scale product is a hair-tearing nightmare. I think Tablizer would agree with me on this...
2) Reusable components ;)
The most visible place reusable components come into play is GUI programming. It's very, VERY simple to use a visual-based system (like Visual Basic, C++ Builder, Delphi, etc.) to create a GUI simply by dragging the desired components onto the blank form window. If anything has been sped up significantly in the past several years, it has been the GUI development.
Components are, of course, used in a variety of other places, particularly in run-time libraries of various programming languages. However, learning to use these components effectively takes more time and dedication than one might suspect as the syntax tends to be rather cryptic looking.
3) Java
Don't get me started. I am currently employed as a Java developer. I don't really like it a lot. The file scoping rules bug me. (Similarly, I don't like Python because of the way it enforces indentation.) Also, the Java IDE sucks. Whoever thought the entire GUI needed to actually be written in Java needs to be taken out and beaten with a stick. A large stick.
4) The Internet (and OSS) ;)
One thing I noticed that you hadn't mentioned is the Internet. I have never been exposed to so many programming concepts and new languages. There is an astounding variety of tools, and thanks to Open Source and researchers at various universities, you can try your hand at as many of them as you have disk space for. The 'Net can be a wonderful place, after all.
My advice to any new programmer would be to get online and start reading. Download and try out new languages, especially ones in different paradigms, like functional programming. The tools you need (such as compilers, editors, databases, GUI component libraries, etc.) are ALL there, free for the taking. The only real "silver bullet" is to make yourself the best programmer you can be.
bytesmythe
Hypocrisy is the resin that holds the plywood of society together.
-- Scott Meyer
One thing I always keep in mind when developing a project is something from my Electronics class so long ago:
The most important thing in developing a product is having the "right" design.
What he was getting at is that, if you rush into devleopment (coding in this case) without having fully thought the design though, you could end up shooting yourself in the foot later on. Redesigning and recoding something later on in its development cycle can be hideously expensive and time-consuming. Also, depending on the industry, it can be fatal (think lost contracts from being late). It's absolutely vital to think all the issues through regarding your product, not just in the short term, but what you might anticipate for the long (and in many cases, the very long) term.
Good, Fast, and Cheap can happen, even in software. If the aircraft industry can pull it off, so can the software industry. Read up on the Lockheed Skunk Works. They did incredible stuff with very few engineers in a very short amount of time. The key is people. You need a top-notch staff and more often than not a world-class leader. Such a team is hard to come by, but when they do get together they can pull off some amazing stuff.
It's pure OO, just like smalltalk, not hybrid.
It's syntax is easy to learn, write and read.
It has assertions nicely integrated into the language, everything must meet the precontitions and postcondition you set up. It feels natural to add checks and tests pretty much everywhere instead of cluttering the code with assert()s and #ifdef DEBUG..
SmartEiffel (the GNU Eiffel compiler) compiles to ANSI-C or JVM so it's portable to every platform there is.. Some other compilers can also compile to .NET..
You can use existing C and C++ shared libraries without wrappers/bindings. (although making bindings are preferrable to make it follow standard Eiffel-style)
It manages memory for you and has a garbage collector. You never have to think about buffer overflows and malloc()/free() again!
Its runtime speed is as fast as C/C++, and sometimes even faster because the compiler compiles to C-code that is more optimized than most human beings can code..
;-)
I could rant about it forever, but I won't.. Instead you should read one of these great tutorials!
Eiffel for beginners
Eiffel: An advanced introduction
Eiffel Object-Oriented Programming
And of course, the GNU Eiffel compiler: SmartEiffel
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
To be honest, to throw my 2 cents in, we are seeing more and more bad programming. 20 years ago, you might have expected a program to have bugs. But know we see some of the biggest software houses and programmers releasing half standard programs, just to get them released on time. With many bugs still with them. And for the most part these bugs are bareable only because, our massive increases in hardware does not notice the odd memory leak here for a long time. To be honest, how many things we have designed over the years, would run on a 286, with 4 meg of ram. Fair enough you can't ask it to hand some of the graphics side, but the bare bones should at least run, even if you would be waiting hours for it to say Yippie. All in all, we can get payed silly money for stuff we write, and the pressure of deadlines makes some awful things. But on the plus side, those that do side projects, do end up being the best things around. As you dont want to release a personal project unless its perfect.
--+> Life, is there any?
This is where so many people get it wrong. Making software is not analogous to making buildings. Making software is analogous to designing buildings. (You'll notice that the Design Patterns movement is based on a technique for architects, not builders.)
(And, by the way, if you think real-world construction projects follow a simple waterfall model like that, you should read about the Panama Canal.)
What makes you think that if you design the hell out of it up front and build strictly to that design you won't find, six months or a year later when the project's finally finished, that you'll have built it wrong anyway? Or worse, what happens when halfway through you realize that your design was wrong, or your requirements were inaccurate or inadequate -- and you're locked into a process that requires a ream of up-front paperwork before you can change what you're building?
Again, coding is a design task. Everything else is just requirements gathering.
I think you've missed the point of XP's approach to unit testing. The unit tests aren't written to "check the code" -- I agree, it's pretty pointless for someone to write a test that proves that his code does exactly what he coded it to do. The unit tests are written to describe what the code is supposed to do -- they're like a design document that can automatically validate the code that implements the design.
Also, pair programming -- even when it's not between "two people of equal ability", so long as they both have enough ability and they're communicating well -- goes a long way toward alleviating the problem of having the watchmen watch themselves.
Don't knock XP if you haven't tried it.
-- Some things are to be believed, though not susceptible to rational proof.
Seamless integration with CVS, automatic refactoring tools, incremental compilation, full integration of unit testing, plug-ins, etc, etc... you owe it to yourself to try this fantastic open-source tool. /t
> I'm in a Computer Science degree program, and I > keep wondering what "improvements" over the last > quarter century have actually brought progress to > the key issue: more quickly and more > inexpensively developing software that's more > reliable?" Sounds to me like someone got an assigment entitled "Discuss improvements to Software Engineering in the last 25 years" handed out at the end of their last lecture.
One study I recall reading about (take it with a grain of salt) has shown that the average error rate in a program is 60 errors in 1000 lines of code. Some companies have managed to get that down to around 1 error per 1000 lines of code. Organizations that successfully incorporate the ISO 9000 model (Dilbert jokes barred) tend to have a much better rate. For example, code for a space shuttle only has 1 error per 420,000 lines of code - an astronomical (excuse the pun) figure as far as software engineering statistics go. Critical software development teams at Lockheed-Martin, for example, may spend up to two-tirds of their time in meetings and in design, rather than in actual coding. And the engineers tend to go home at 5:00 too. Just some food for thought.
An unjust law is no law at all. - St. Augustine
Well this is not exactly about languages and libraries but more about experience and use.
Frankly the market looks big but it looks bad. Yes, there were tons of improvements for the last 30 years. I still remember as a kid how my father had to fight small bugs in code by looking at the holes in the punch cards. I remember how terrible it was to fight Xenix in a S/36 and learn my very few first steps in *NIX. I remember the horror I got when I saw one of the very first PCs in Europe. It was a terrible world where the only help was the guru and yourself.
When I met the new OSes, Object Oriented Programming, RAD and all that pretty stuff out there I thought we had the road ahead and, soon, the horrors of the past would be gone. However, looking behind I see that we have lost something valuable - creativity. Today we use nearly the same things that were created in the beginning of the 90's. With the exception of Java, we have not seen any major revolutions in computing. Linux is not a revolution per se, in fact it is the congregation of revolutionary steps that were breeding for the last 30 years before its creation. Apart of this, Linux is quite old and conservative.
When you look at old generations, you see that 90% of what they did is what you do today. The only difference is that you either reuse their work or invent the wheel again. Most of the market got reduced to a bunch of architectures and programming technologies. We no longer see computing rooms looking like zoos, with every kind of hardware and software. We don't see people fighting for every bit inside the memory and making marvels out of small chunks of code. We no longer have these weird 7bit, 8-bit or 12-bit computers laying around. And that's bad.
It's bad because we are going from an intensive revolution into an extensive evolution. And we forget that there are still tons of fields that are still unexplored or badly explored. AI looks standstill, Robotics is nearly forgotten, technologies beyond the microchip look more and more as SF, Quantum computing as far as Quantum theories, neuron networks look as cracks in a barren desert. These are areas that demand bleeding edge ideas and methods, those same methods that gave rise to our modern computer world. Btw, on our OSS world we have a good example of the lazyness of modern times - look at Hurd and where it stands now.
Besides, because we are loosing the bleeding edge in computing, it is probable that we do not see nothing beyond the present languages, architectures and technologies. It is very probable that we may had a whole New World behind the present Ocean of Information. But to cross it, one needs some will and courage.
I've often thought over the last few years that we've made too little progress in making programmers more productive. I largely blame that on Microsoft, simply because it drives more software development with it's tools than any other entity. One language I've categorically made a decision to avoid is Visual Basic. I have always felt it was basically (sorry) a waste of brain cells. It has certainly done nothing to advance the state of the art.
In my opinion, one of the best things to come along in a long time is Java. The gentle reader may recall earlier posts along those lines. I enjoy C, and have spent the majority of my career doing C and C++. However, I have also spent _way_ too much time tracking down memory-related bugs. Often, they were in third party code. That is no way to run a railroad.
Java addresses almost all of the glaring deficiencies of C++, both in language design and in runtime safety. In my opinion, the best programming tools will be those that enable single programmers to tackle larger and larger projects.
Compared with C++, Java enables me to tackle much more ambitious projects with confidence. A team approach can never attain the efficiency of a single programmer approach. The "sweet spot" of software engineering efficiency is the largest project one person can tackle. Extreme programming is a useful hybrid that attempts to turn two programmers into one programmer. ;-) (Also teams can be nearly as efficient as single programmers if the system is properly decomposed into subsystems separated by simple interfaces. This rarely happens smoothly, in my experience. It takes a top notch group of people.)
One last note on Java - performance is now almost completely on par with C++. On my most recent round of benchmarks, Java (JDK 1.4.1_01) on both Linux and Windows outperformed C++ (gcc 3 and VC 6) on most tests. Dynamic compilation and aggressive inlining are that effective. The VM also soundly spanked the gcj ahead of time compiler in gcc 3. It thoroughly rocks to have truly cross-platform code that runs faster than native! Think how many religous wars would be avoided if 99%+ of software was available on all OS platforms...and think how much it would help Linux! :-)
If you want to see what's out there for Java, download either the NetBeans IDE project, or the Eclipse IDE. Both are free and each has its strong points. NetBeans is a Swing app and includes a Swing GUI designer. Eclipse uses a new open source "native widget wrapper" library from IBM called SWT which has it's interesting points. You'll also need a Java VM (there are also others available from IBM etc.).
One last thought - wouldn't it be cool if web browsers had support for something like Java? I mean, you could deploy apps just by putting them on a web page! It wouldn't matter what the target platform was! What a great idea! (This paragraph was sarcasm in case you were wondering.)
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
I maintaint that there is nothing in software that can be called an Engineering Discipline. It's just not that important. People die if a bridge isn't designed right. People have to do things by hand if the software doesn't work. Which of these is more real?
.mdl that you ftp to some cut-rate sweat shop in Bangalore.
Coding is not an engineering discipline. Coding is typing. Coding can be done from a Rose
I'm going to get flamebait for this but I don't care. I'm a programmer and I know my line of work is a crock of shit, but I'll take all the money my employer will give me.
Programming tools, development environments, and languages have gotten easier in the past 10 years. That does not replace good software design. Efficiency and serviceability cannot be added to a bad software project by switching languages or development tools. Only good design principles can make good software.
The Linux kernel, while monolithic, seems to be a great example of this...massively complicated, but easily broken down into parts that all fit well together and can be replaced easily. (And documented well...for the most part).
-ted
For most modern languages, you spend a week learning how to use a langauge and then (potentially) months learning the (class) libraries.
I just started using Smalltalk again for commercial product development - it is amazing how little new code one needs when reusing already debugged and efficient libraries.
-Mark
Warning: I am blogging now: http://radio.weblogs.com/0115954/
When Y2K was getting ready to roll around, businesses spent billions of dollars ensuring that 30 year old code would handle the change of millenium.
Think about that!
How much new code, made with all of the zippy new tools in all of the latest and greatest paradigms, do you expect to be in critical use 30 years from now?
Big part of software development is often communication and interaction with the customer. Now it may be that in some of those countries many programmers will be fairly or very well versed in the languages. But not all will be, plus the distance and time zone problems will add to the communication and interaction problems. You just can't do everything over the phone and email, some things just need the engineers and the customer locked up in a conference room with coffee and a whiteboard, and flying people around the planet costs money and time too.
Sure, you may get cheaper software, but it won't be exactly what you want, or it won't be as effective a product as it could be.
Some jobs will move to the cheap regions, mainly the jobs (usually considered boring) that can be easily written in a spec, or that can be done by a completely separated team with minimal externally driven spec changes. Other jobs will remain available closer to the customer, and that is not just sales.
Basically, aided by the advent of open source software taking the role of commodoty software, this will mean that US and European programmers will relatively do a lot more custom jobs. A lot of the testing and bugfixing (QA), and supporting library development will probably move to the cheaper regions.
Actually, it should make the jobs a lot more fun to the programmers in Europe and the US.
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
30 years ago I was programming in assembly language and had to code my own library of subroutines. You young whippersnapper programmers have it easy.
When I was programming I had to walk in three feet of snow on my way to school... uphill in the snow both ways... lard sandwiches... old rubber boots... carrying my younger brother...80 degrees below zero... aaaannnnd we had to use MSDOS on a 4.77 mhz CPU!
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
In my experience many in the IT field fall into one of two categories: Those who do the work and those who make a living telling people there are better ways to do the work (this group usually correlates with people who couldn't actually do the work themselves). Reading your resume it is readily aparent what category you fall into...
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Yes, exactly... except for the part about other engineering disciplines. ;)
The trouble with that phrase is that 'software engineering' isn't properly one of them... or is it?
Geeky modern art T-shirts
For the most part the industry has stagnated. Let's get real. This is a site that primarily is a haven for people who dislike innovation and who worship variants of an OS (Unix) originally designed in 1969 to run on a PDP-7 minicomputer. The languages espoused here are virtually all derivatives of C which was a quick hack developed at roughly the same time.
Even in 1969, C (and Unix) weren't state of the art. But, they were, mostly by accident, available for free to universities with little budget for their math departments. Hence a generation of coders who actually think that C has value.
Let's get real. A language with no concept of a string? A language with no concept of buffer validation? A language with enough precedent levels to keep thousands of programmers confused and making errors? A language with symbols and operators that mean different things based on context? A language with standards that actually consider order of compilation rather than requiring multiple pass evaluation? A language with case sensitivity?
These things were all obsolete in the early to mid 1960s. That C and its descendants continue to this day is both a tragedy and a source of shame for all of us yet we see few new languages that aren't designed to look like C.
Perl, Python, Java, LiveScript/JavaScript/JScript/ECMAScript, C++, C#, ObjectiveC are all children of a badly designed parent that inherited many of the faulty designs. Where is the new Simula? Where is the new SmallTalk? Where is the new PL/I? Where is the new GPSS? Where is the new Algol? For that matter, where is the new BASIC?
1.) Back then, you had a zillion platforms and things where much more experimental. Today you get x86 whereever you look. It's become <i>the</i> standard plattform for developement.
2. )Todays comps are <i>fast</i>. And I mean really fast. Things like my favorite Editor JEdit (www.jedit.org) are actually usable with todays standard hardware, even though it is a hideous chunk of OOP stuff running on top of a VM. In five years from now no one will give a shit what processorpower an app will need, as long as the Framework is easy to use, OOP all the way through and extendable within hours.
3.)Rocksolid OOP packages that have years of expierience and expertise in high level softwaredev behind them. Just think of Java or it OSS 'counterpart' Python if you will. I programmed a simple Inet-Agent with it's own HTTP socket within a few hours the other day. I didn't even bother of using wget as an external programm, because it would even have been more difficult(!!). Think about that. No way would have that been possible 10 years ago.
You have you're libs that can be bound into any PL you can think of within minutes, you have entire Application Servers that will install with 2 mouseclicks (ok, maybe three...) and have you're project rolling 10 minutes later and if you know one PL good enough it usually takes you round abouts 3 hours to get rolling with a new one because they all follow the same tried and true principles that have proven the to be the best. And if you only keep you're eye on it a little bit you're bound to have zilch hassle in migrating or porting to another plattform.
Yes, Softwaredevelopement has developed from an exotic experimental thing to a fully grown science and profession, with all the benefits that come along.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
... Lisp development environments in 1980? If Visual Studio is an example of progress in the last 20 years, I'm impressed... NOT. Every one of those features was in every commercial Lisp development system of the era (Symbolics, LMI, Xerox), along with lots more. And, they live on in the ilisp development environment, which gives them to many Common Lisp and Scheme implementations.
Yes, this is flamebait. Yes, I'm bitter and curmudgeonly. Perceptive of you to notice...
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
People die if a bridge isn't designed right. People have to do things by hand if the software doesn't work. Which of these is more real?
On the other hand, if a sidwalk curb isn't designed right, it wastes some concrete. People die if the software in their pacemaker doesn't work.
It's the project, not the discipline.
Johnson and Rich were also proponents of having Lockheed engineers maintain their aircraft instead of having military personnel do it. Using Lockheed engineers would save a ton of money because they aren't rotated and therefore don't need to be retrained. Sure, Lockheed would get some money out of the deal, but not as much as the gov't would save.
The Skunk Works wasn't perfect, but overall they were pretty good with money under Kelly and Ben.
Take some programs from the late 70's early 80's. Do you have any doubt a talented programmer could knock out something like Visicalc in about a week using modern tools? How about a simple flat file database system?
Programmer effeciency has skyrocketed. The applications being designed today are much more complicated than those of 25 years ago.
Seen XP work with 4 people who were very good. Saw it fall flat on its face with 16 average people.
As all the XP books say, XP doesn't scale.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Once you boil down analysis and modeling into the steps necessary to do the job, you've essentially written your program. What you're suggesting is a universal programming language that doesn't look like code and instead looks like some modeling or analysis diagrams.
"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
-Marilyn Manson
I wrote my first computer program in 1974 or 75 and have been a professional programmer (meaning that I got paid to write code) since '79 or so. School was mainframes and an early Wang desktop system (Basic and punched cards, oh yeah, baby!) I later moved into minis, mainframes, and I've been working with desktop systems since CP/M and the S-100 bus, so I guess I've seen a little of the history, anyway.
In my experience, the actual process of coding has greatly improved over time but the process of developing software hasn't improved as much. As other posters have pointed out, object-oriented tools, technologies and techniques (among other factors) have greatly facilitated the generation of code but the management of the process; deciding what gets coded, when, by whom, etc. is little better now in actual practice than it was in the late 70's or early 80's. In fact, in my opinion the situation is in some respects worse.
Management of software development today makes the same mistakes and operates under many of the same misguided assumptions as it did back when I spent my day in front of a dumb terminal. Adding outsiders unfamiliar with the details of a project makes the project later, not earlier, etc.: all the platitudes we know and love are still with us, still the butt of Dilbert jokes.
Technology may change; people aren't quite so amenable to upgrades, I think.
You don't hear much these days about the "fifth generation" computing projects that Japan was spending a lot of money on back in the early '90s, do you? This is why.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
"No Silver Bullet" was included in the famous book, The Mythical Man-Month, as most or some of you know. The newest 20th anniversary edition includes both "No Silver Bullet" and "No Silver Bullet Refired", an introspective look an how software methodology has improved over the last 20 years. I don't mean to sound pompous, but while some of you have talked of your experience over the last 20 years, Dr. Brooks was already a project manager at IBM working on operating systems 30 years ago, so the man assuredly knows what he's talking about.
Admittedly, I can't comment on Dr. Brooks' latter essay, as I bought the book myself not long ago and just finished "No Silver Bullet" (the last chapter in the original version of the book), but it still makes for interesting reading. Pick up a copy, or just even sit down at Borders and read both chapters, I promise you'll be intrigued if you're interested in software development.
--- What
[no body]
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
I work for a Fourtune 500 company (intern) working with a software & hardware development model. The model that we use constantly goes through changes and is very sucessful in terms of delivering software and hardware on time, and defect free. I have no clue about budget, but I'd guess that it is not over budget either. Working here has given me a favorable view of software engineering. Every process is laid out and explained, and there are many tools at our disposal, including a requirements tool, a UML tool, code generation tools, code testing tools, etc.
Now for the rant. I also go to a large University 20 miles down the road, and I am taking their software engineering course (<- yay for relevance). Among CS majors there is a bad reputation for the SE class, that it is never organized well and leaves students with a bad taste for SE. In my class, we are currently in the 'Design' phase for our semester-long project, we will be done tomorrow. The Implementation phase is a week long. That's right, a week. We spent months on the requirement and ooa phases, but they are still unclear (because the document that calls for them is unclear), and now we have a week to iron everything out. This class leaves me with an unfavorable view of software engineering.
I think that more colleges should teach software engineering not as just one class but as an approach along with code classes. It makes sense when teaching people how to code that one should also teach them the likely environment in which they will code, otherwise students will get the impression that they can opt-out of having to deal with software engineering.
Has software engineering become better? Probably. Would you be able to tell when taking the class that I am? Hell no.
Looks like your painter doesn't have a good specification to work to, or hasn't been 'empowered' enough to ask for one.
ALWAYS blaim the management.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
That's the old BASIC in a new version. The new BASIC would be a language designed for beginning non-programmers to get an idea of programming concepts in a SIMPLE, friendly environment.
Compare Dartmouth BASIC running on its interactive time-sharing terminals to batch Fortran on punch cards to get an idea of what a revolution it was at the time.
Of course software development has improved,
Security is at the heart of the Windows' design - It is so bloated, unstable and slow that no hacker ever gets a chance. Now you know why it got C2 certification.
You should duck from the Java purist flames because you and the poster you're replying to are wrong. Java hasn't been interpreted for years. All Java virtual machines use some sort of JIT mechanism to compile the code before its run.
My blog: http://jkratz.dyndns.org/~jason/blog/
Hm... the average developer may *write* 100 lines of code in a day, but my empirical knowledge says that probably only 10% of those lines will make it into the end product. There are exceptions, of course... I worked with one developer who seemingly never made any errors in his code... but that is a rarity. On the flip side, I have worked with developers who even they may have written hundreds and thousands of lines, ended up with *none* of their code in the final product.
The idea of course being that good modular design, and good use of classes can increase reuseability ad infinitum, so that eventually there will be no task and no problem that cannot be assembled lego-like from blocks of premade reuseable code. The marvelous technology in Douglas Coupland's Microserfs ( called Goop wasn't it ? ) was really the epitome of this concept, a totally reuseable code system that was so generalized, so modularized that anyone with no more experience in programming than a child could assemble working programs for just about any purpose in a drag-and-drop virtual lego-building reality.
Any student of the history of science and science forecasting should begin to smirk at this point. Is it any surprise that these visions have not materialized? The hard truth, IMHO, is that logic is inherently not conducive to such high degrees of abstraction and modularity. For given tasks which are fixed and well defined with completely known and understood parameters and requirements than yes, abstraction and modularization can be a great boon in optimizing design and improving the development cycle. We can see the great advantages that this has yielded in some areas where the requirements are fixed and the applications are mostly derivative of each other. GUI design is a great example, and there are a multitude of GUI building toolkits & development environments that take great advantage of this.
However the whole thing breaks down when you move from the known to the unknown. When you try to extend this principle from fixed tasks to hypothetical ones in which the basic requirements are not envisioned. I would argue that there is a basic lack of understanding among some of the proponents of these techniques that at a fundamental level logic cannot be generalized out across all possible tasks, and all possible configurations. This was similar to the revelations of Godel's theorem in mathematics already in the 1930's - that any axiomatic system could be consistent but never complete. In reality adapting one set of code to a purpose other than that for which it was designed, or with parameters other than those originally envisioned usually is more trouble than it is worth, and often you would be better served by building new objects from scratch. You will always need intelligent educated people to design these things; there is no such thing as logical lego.
Unfortunately it seems to me that many have not gotten this message yet. Sun and Microsoft are still actively humping that dream of infinite modularity and drag-and-drop programming design. In my experience with both Java and .Net, I have found that I always run into blocks where the established object model is too constraining and has too many built-in assumptions about what you're going to be using the classes for, and so I have ended by coding new versions from scratch. Of course it may simply be the nature of the applications I'm working on, and your mileage may vary. Ultimately I think that for derivative applications this kind of abstraction and generalization is definitely an improvement, but when you come to applications that move beyond those fixed tasks it actually becomes an impediment not an advantage.
There are a thousand forms of subversion, but few can equal the convenience and immediacy of a cream pie -Noel Godin
All the skunk works did was cool hacks. And like software hacks it got the job done in a fast and dirty way, but in the long run their products were unworkable. The SR 71 Leaked more fuel than it lifted. Thats right, they blew-off all thermo issues and said, "who cares that it leaks like a sieve on the ground, it'll heat up at Mach and the pipes will expand and stop leaking." This is the Aero equivalent of not checking for a null handle on a malloc. Sure it'll work most of the time but it;s sure to blow-up on you. Lockheed did some great research with the skunk works, but they never delivered a product. Sure you can build something flashy real quick with VB, but would you want to fly in a play controlled by it?
The software development process has greatly improved in the last 5-10 years. While software hasn't specifically gotten all that much better, the processes for producing good software have been advanced.
Here is my list in ascending order;
1. The Internet and the web. Access to resources like USENET archives and online vendor documentation have greatly improved the development process. For example, a defect in a popular Java Application Server was causing me considerable difficulty, and a quick check of the vendors website indicated SP1 would fix my issues.
2. Acceptance of high-level interpreted languages. While Smalltalk tried to make this happen, it wasn't until Java, Perl and ASP (VBScript) that this trend became popularized as computer hardware started catching up. Developers no longer have to author their own implementations of String(), and many other common functions are readily available.
3. Object oriented development.
4. The relational database server and ANSI-SQL. Developers today are versed in the methods of normalization, and dependencies on home-grown datastores has virtually disappeared.
5. Modular / packaged code. While this isn't a recent development, it has become a best-practice and this has greatly improved the development process.
6. Revision control best-practices. There are still many organizations who version sourcecode using a copy command, but the vast majority of pro shops now use some form of source code control.
7. Open source software. IMHO, this is key to the next wave of development and it has already had an enormous impact.
A variety of software development lifecycle models have helped professional developers learn how to manage projects, but this still needs work particularly from the perspective of management. It's quite possible OSS will obviate the need for many ongoing commercial software development efforts, and while the last decade has been about software teams getting bigger the next decade can really be about the team getting smaller.
Once the teams can leverage existing OSS code, wheel re-invention becomes less necessary and code can be written under-budget (cheap) and on-time (fast).
Eric Sarjeant
eric[@]sarjeant.com
I am still mystified that a discussion like this can take place and the system which Donald E. Knuth created to enable him to write TeX (www.tug.org, see the book, _TeX: The Program_ for the pretty-printed source) and METAFONT (_METAFONT: The Program_) is almost never mentioned.
t .w.gz (with an offer of a $2.56 reward check if one can find a bug), or as a document to just read here: http://www.literateprogramming.com/adventure.pdf
DEK has since written an entire book on the concept (_Literate Programming_ a CLSI series book) a decade ago, but one seldom sees source so provided.
There are some really cool example programs which're quite interesting (and educational) to read, for example:
Will Crowther's game Adventure - available here: http://sunburn.stanford.edu/~knuth/programs/adven
Or a CWEB version of the RPN calculator for K&R's C Book: http://www.literateprogramming.com/krcwsamp.pdf
Probably what really needs to happen is a way to post a program as a web page, then to click on a link on it, to automagically compile and run it....
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Yes...it takes time the first time through the code. Big whup. There is definitely a trade-off when using Java but then again nobody ever said that Java had to be used for every project. Someone else posted about how slow Java is even scrolling. They're full of crap. The machine I'm currently using is a P3-500 with 256mb of RAM which is not by any means a speed demon and I use JEdit exclusively for coding. Scrolling is not slow. It would seem that most people saying that Java is slow probably haven't actually used Java in years.
My blog: http://jkratz.dyndns.org/~jason/blog/
As for programming itself, it's now common to put together many megabytes of code. In the 1970s, you couldn't make anything that big work.
On the other hand, we have a major cruft problem. We're still living with design decisions from the early days of DOS and UNIX. They're hidden under layer after layer of additional structure, but they're still there, warping the architecture. C++, X-windows, MacOS, and the Win32 API are good examples.
Although it's less realized, we also have a hardware cruft problem. The PC of today is a warmed-over version of a much smaller machine designed for a much simpler operating system. Although today's PCs are far more complex than the mainframes of the 1980s, they don't have a mainframe-type architecture. The big problem is in I/O - I/O isn't channelized, as it is on mainframes. The lack of uniform channelized I/O means that drivers are at too low, and too privileged, a place in the operating system. Thus, every new driver is a source of system instability. Even though the hardware is slowly becoming channelized (SCSI, USB, FireWire), the operating systems have a low-level driver model. So we have scanner and printer drivers that can crash the whole system.
But at least the ISA bus is gone. Finally.
The other big change in programming, although I hate to say it, is the rise of "scripting languages". Visual Basic, Perl, and their lesser competitors have made programming more accessable to the many, and less risky. Yes, many of their basic features were in LISP and Smalltalk a quarter-century ago. But the syntax of LISP turned too many people off, and Smalltalk somehow didn't quite make it. What makes a good scripting language is an interesting study, and it's worth reading Larry Wall on this, whether or not you like Perl.
Yes, I think things have improved.
.Net Beta 3 to generate controls, will understand what I mean.)
Such things as Structured Design, and OOP have made coded reuse better.
What hasn't improved:
1) Programmers STILL refuse to use tools that could help them in productivity. (i.e. source debuggers, instead of writing printfs around everything and printing out your variables)
Tools tools TOOLS people. Use a source debugger and save yourself a great deal of time.
If you can't use a different language or infrastructure to write the code.
Sadly, many programmers still do not use source debuggers, citing a waste of time. But they will sit there and hack over and over again trying to understand the code they write with printfs!
Tsk tsk.
2) Cost Time Estimation. Wow, talk about almost zero improvement there. Almost zero, but not quite zero. After all, most people are now adopting an open source strategy so that even if your estimates are off, the cost penalties are reduced. Furthermore, most people are beginning to realize that you have to complete a full requirements document, and do some fact finding before you attempt to quote work.
3) Finally, the hardware we use to write software is vastly more powerful, and as a result we can run much nicer environments on our machines when we write code, such as API references, etc. I have far fewer references now days to things like Java for example than I use to have to keep on my desk. Primarily because with the rise of IDE's the development environment can answer alot of questions I might have about the language I am using to write the software with.
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I would also like to point out things have got a little worse. If you believe like I do that 80% of the work in writing software is debugging it and maintaining it over its lifetime, then you like me have problems with our IDE's.
Primarily when our IDE's produce automated code for drag and drop environments. They produce horrible code, at the expense of saving time now, and end up costing a great deal of time later.
(Anyone use the latest
I primarily write only Java code, but even my SunONE environment produces some pretty cruddy stuff if I am writing a desktop app.
I think automatic code generation is a step backwards in many ways, and ends up costing more money to fix or maintain it.
I still think a code "repository" built by humans, and nicely documented, like a cvs tree for example, is the better way. Time spent on the CVS code repository for building customized pieces is time much better spent IMHO.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
Look at the software written twenty five years ago, and look at the software written recently.
Bill Joy wrote vi pretty much by himself. Bram Moolenaar write Vim pretty much by himself; it's a huge superset of Joy's editor.
The original portable C compiler (PCC) was about 5,000 lines of C. No one even blinks if a graduate student writes a far more sophisticated language processor, e.g., a C++ compiler, a complete Java development environment (including a compiler and debugger).
The original SimCity was awesome. No one thinks twice of re-implementing it for a PDA or a Java-enabled web browser.
What's changed? Programmers don't have to worry so much about CPU, disk, or memory limitations. The tools (compilers, libraries, source control) are much improved. Some of the new languages are far more productive. There are also new practices, and the results of lessons learned, on how to do development; some programmers take advantage of these (not enough!)
But our abilities haven't kept up with our aspirations. Compare SimCity to the masively multi-player Sims Online. How do vi or PCC stack up against Eclipse? Look at the text formatters of twenty five years ago, and then look at OpenOffice (or Microsoft's stuff); at Unix v6 vs. Max OS X.
Software hasn't kept up with Moore's Law. We're running a Red Queen's race, going as fast as we can just to stay in one place; and we're losing.
Stupid job ads, weird spam, occasional insight at
If you are talking about the Linux Kernel, only recently Linus adopted a version control system (bitkeeper). There are many huge projects maintained on CVS though, and this includes KDE and GNOME. But, the common denominator to all these projects is the fact that the source was made publically available for peer review and international collaboration.
When I want a bunch of things in order I stick them into a cursor or other data abstract and say "sort".
My Journal
Always struck me as a wonderful idea. Fifteen years ago I worked at a place where the client came up with a new idea in the morning and we aimed to demo a solution that afternoon in OO Lisp. A lot of fun, and it made having a dialogue with the end users a million times more useful than Bible-thick specs that no-one can get their head round. Maybe programmers don't actually want clients telling them how they want programs to work?
Virtually serving coffee
In the last 15 years, I've been grateful to improvements in process. Great bug tracking software (I use bugzilla) and source management (cvs) has improved the process of writing and maintaining projects greatly.
In terms of language and library improvements, I think they enable programmers to finish projects much faster than they could before. Well, much more complicated projects. I think that OO languages allow programmers to write good code more easily.
Finally, I think these improvements most help good programmers. Anyone can code poorly, but good programmers are still hard to find. Process is as much a part of programming as language/library knowledge. When I was in school this was not really emphasized, and I think it's an important aspect of coding that most programs still fail to mention.
The Objective-C language has been around for a while, but kinda got locked-up in proprietary runtime implementations by NeXT (now part of Apple) or the Stepstone corporation which were amongst the first to come up with an Obj-C compiler (for x86). Now, GCC does Obj-C and MetroWerks also has an Obj-C capable compiler. Also, the entire runtime is now open sourced in Darwin, the core OS at the base of Mac OS X, in the form of "Core Foundation" and "Foundation Frameworks".
Couple that with the open-source API SPECs (oppose "implementation"), and you have an amazing combinaison.
On the Mac, this is now known as Cocoa. Cocoa is an object framework that's now mostly accessible via the Java programming language.
For Linux (x86, but soon PPC as well), thetre's AfterStep, an open-source implementation of everything that had made the NeXT a NeXT, including the dev environment.
If you have access to a Mac, get yourself some tutorial and explore Cocoa programming. If you only have access to a Linux box, get yourself a complete install and explore what you can do with this.
No amount of description actually gives any justice to how amazing this dev environment actually is.
If you're tempted to explore further, o'Reiley has a couple of Cocoa books, but the very best Cocoa books out there is written by Skott Anguish and al, and is called Cocoa Programming.
The problem is that the big players priced the Compiler based Common lisp development frameworks right out of the reach of most business developers. They also failed to take full advantage in the increasing capability of the PC, turning their noses up at in favour of past glories of the Symbolics machines. A good Lisp compiler could factor out the "cons", producing code sometimes surpassing the performance of C++.
The void was filled mostly by C++ and now Java, lesser beasts dispite their current quality standard libraries, overly verbose and fragmented incomparison to Common Lisp elegance.
Today there are open implementation of the lisp compilers, but they still lack a comparable development enviroment to the commercial varients. Sadly, since I started professionally in 1988, I have not had one job or contract were they would consider the adoption of Common lisp, and I have never programed professionally in it. David Betz's XLisp, and later XScheme was the closest I came to using it at work for scripting, and at home for some early AI-planning system hacking that has yet to see the light of day.
In my opinion, IBM's Eclipse IDE has finally comming close to surpassing the old benchmark of the commercial Lisp IDEs, it even has the ability to plug in refactoring tools. But then I can remember when, thanks to the "cons"-ed Lisp, manupulating the source of the program was as easy as mainpulating the data,
Software is at best a cottage industry of craftmen that have widely different abilities. At worst, it is a cottery of alchemists that promote their own secret snake oil recipes and only succeed by sheer luck.
And I am a developer that calls himself a software engineer, so this is not a flame.
Why craftmen? Because we develop with tricks and recipes, often called "processes". But neither of these are scientific processes. They cannot predict the outcome of a software project within a definite set of constraints. They cannot be disproved. And they cannot explain failures. So they aren't science, they are rules of thumbs. The guy who makes a living by applying rules of thumbs and learned tricks is a craftmen.
Why alchemists? Because scientists publish their methods and their results. To the contrary, the software industry hides its customer references and does not publish its source code (with the notable exception of Open Source, with remains the exception in large-scale software projects). This is how alchemists and "savants" worked in the Renaissance. They hid their trade secrets, they had confidential relationships with rich patrons, and they feared full disclosure.
On top of that, each subbranch of computing has its own lingo and redefines as many words as possible. Mathematicians who specialize in field theory topology may not understand number theory, but at least, they use distinct, well-defined jargons. In computing, terms like "record", "field", "server", "link" are so overloaded that they are just noise.
About 60% of all software projects are cancelled or written-off as failures. I don't think civil engineering or, say, aeronautics have such a abysmal track record.
I hope that some day, we'll practice and teach Computer Science as, well, a science, not as a craft.
--
Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
...Doesn't work. Ask NASA .
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
After years of debating and haggling with OOP fans (I think OO is way overhyped), I have concluded that an important factor is the personal psychology of the individual. IOW, "mindfit".
People simply perceive things differently and are bothered and helped by different conventions, notations, traditions, etc. Each individual has to find their *own* silver bullet, or at least a brass one. Some of the surveys by Ed Yourdon seem to back this. OOP scored higher when "OO fanatics" worked on projects, but as OO went more mainstream, its score faded into the background noise (average).
Perhaps IT shops can focus more on screening for individuals who think alike rather than simple buzzword matching. It perhaps is time for an inkblot-like test for developers.
I used to complain about how Perl is a "write-only language", but I later realized that it is just write-only to *me*. If other Perl fans can figure out Perl and are productive under it (both in writing and maintenance), then I see little reason to complain. A given shop just has to be willing to accept the fact that they are married to Perl and Perl-loving developers. But if they can get things done, then why should I or anybody else fuss? One man's spehgetti is another's gormet favorite.
(It is still important to explore other viewpoints to expand your horizons, but if something does not seem to "click" for you after a little while, then don't feel bad. I am tired of "you just don't get it, neener neener" from various fans of different paradigms or languages.)
Table-ized A.I.
Please come back when you know what you're talking about. Until then, HAND.
If you do a formal design using elements like Z you can test that the design works. You can also do this using things like OCL to define the requirements/pre/post for the classes in your design and then running conditions against this.
There aren't many products that do this yet as most people don't see the need, because most people don't test code properly, let alone designs.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Just as the hardware industry has grown from abstracting commonly used circuits into chips, what occurs is the creation of building blocks on standard designs. In the software sector, that would equate to a component architecture which keeps building on what's been done in the past. The big problem here is that if ANYBODY starts trying to hide anything in Microsoft Windows, Microsoft eliminates them from the market. C++ frameworks were very popular in the early 90's but they all but disappeared as Microsoft provided their C-- (object like) way of doing things at a financial loss. Borland was a leader in the C++ dev tool market but their work hide MS Windows API's so much you could start building applications that recompiled on many different operating systems. MS gutted Borland of it's top level design engineers and paid Borland a tiny fee to settle out of court. CORBA was another framework for building applications across a network of different operating systems and languages. We got 3+ years of intense MS-DCOM press coverage and CORBA eventually faded. I worked on a project which was to use CORBA for a large military hospital system but 1 year into it we were told to stop and start using MS tools and languages with no explainations. Java did/does the same thing( OS/API abstraction ) and it too was fought by Microsoft with incredible gusto.
As long as Microsoft holds the major share of the desktop computing platform, they will not allow anybody else to decide what's to become a standard software component or API. And changing this every 2 years or so keeps the $$ flowing from your pockets into theirs.
Sure you can do some of this within your own organization but as an industry, the largest software company in the world opposes such thinking. And with $30 billion in cash, they have the power to change the minds and directions of whole countries.
IMHO
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
loss of performance with the current obsession on over-inheritence and Java-style interpreted/P-code software overall.
Most companies see the small performance loss from using object oriented languages does not compare to the loss in man hours maintaining non-OOP code. OOP code scales better when that small application gets larger. Code reuse is simpler and can aid in quicker development of other applications with similiar functionality in the future.
The "vanilla unix" does not exist anymore so its not really an issue. The original idea of byte-code compatiblity was lost when unix commercialized. This spurred the development of a language like Java which allows code to be cross-platform. Writing in ANSI C would be another way of doing this if only it was implemented the same across the Unixes and the hardware remained a constant. That will never happen.
Add to this GPL/OS that slashes meaningful business value from well engineered software components
I think that there are many well engineered software components under the GPL and could give plenty of examples. These components required the experience and time of many programmers. By sharing this codebase IT departments do not have to hire dozens of programmers to create a similiar product.
You may be a "professional" developer, but I think you should avoid any position where you would have decisions on the direction of what technology is used within your company until you come into the realization of the economic savings of GPL code and the reasoning behind object oriented languages. These subjects are generally covered in most computer science programs at most universitys.
...and I'm surprised no one mentions it too often. Things like generative programming, aspect oriented programming, domain engineering, the list goes on. They are all headed towards filling in the gaps where OOA/D falls short (and yes, it DOES fall short. WAY short) and creating flexible, general programs that are highly reusable and highly correct with a minimum of change. It's really great stuff, straight out of Star Trek. And if you think it's just theory, it's not. Do some research and find out that big (and I mean BIG) companies are going this way.
I'm perpetually amused at those seekers after a silver bullet.
Their faith in the existence of a magic method is comic.
All of these studies roll up statistics for us to nod at knowingly, yet they are impotent when it comes to taking creativity and serving it up so that the novice can be productive. That bit of Southern engineering wisdom: "y'all just cain't polish a turd" applies to staff as well as designs.
People just don't aggregate, and pursuit of models and methodologies is a diminshing-returns game. Have a model. Have a methodology. Stick to it. But never mistake this means for an end unto itself.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
The focus has definitely shifted away from algorithms and toward abstraction.
The term "abstraction" is another overused, overabused, and now watered-down buzzword, I am afraid to say.
It generally means, "Hiding away stuff that you don't want to worry about", but has taken on all kinds of paradigm- and language-specific meanings to suit the author's POV.
A "fun" debate tactict is to call anything you don't like a "low level detail". This will usually result in a fat flamewar along the lines of "my thing is a *higher* level than yours, neener neener....".
I would also note that abstraction is relative. The proper abstraction for one user or module may not be sufficient for another. An accountant and an engineer may look at the very same parts, but each will have (or want) a very different view. Techniques that use "levels" (hierarchies) of abstraction tend not to do well with such relativism. Point of views are needed, not levels.
Levels are like a map zoom-in/zoom-out. However, perspectives are like a geology map versus a road map. Zooming is an orthogonal issue to what the map actually shows. Also, in some cases one may want *both* views on the same map so that they can take the right road to find the minerals they are seeking.
Table-ized A.I.
However, take a look at Parnas' classic paper on information hiding. In it, he makes the following statement (emphasis mine):
Is there anyone in the crowd that doesn't think he could write a shell script/perl script/etc. to accomplish this in 30 minutes or less? I'd be willing to bet I could do it in Python in under 15 minutes.This paper was written 30 years ago. It only pre-dated Brooks by 5 years. In that time, if my estimate is accurate, the development time for simple programs may have fallen by a factor of a hundred or more.
Software doesn't appear to have improved in that time simply because we keep trying to do more complex things.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
All the developments in tools described by the questioner have bought improvements in both speed and quality of programming. But they are small increments - 10% here, 50% there. Structured programming was an advance on spaghetti coding, and OOP an advance again. But while software productivity has, maybe, doubled or trebled, the size of the problem has tracked hardware with Moore's law. The result is that software developers are *always* on the back foor. And I agree with Brooks - there is no silver bullet. We will always be on the back foot. But new tools will help a little.
Actuall, for all the spiel about different languages, styles and tools, I think the biggest advances have been the intrioduction of portable, well tested, well documented libraries. The best tools in the world don't beat pulling 90% of the solution out off a hat.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
May I point out that programming languages can be used to develop things other that software (although related) nowadays.
Probably, the thing I find most interesting is hardware, which can be described using Verilog or VHDL, both Hardware Description Languages. That, together with technologies like FPGA, enables a programmer to design his own microprocessor if he wishes to do so, I find that revolutionary.
1) Hotspot: definitely interprets TODAY. Designed to interpret. Just intelligently compiles the most-commonly used code. And yes, it's a major speed boost to do things this way. But tight C/C++ would be faster. Roughly, all Java ~ mediocre C++, which means it's easier to write good Java, but Java won't solve all problems.
2) Trying to compile everything (bytecode->native) beforehand is what makes the JVM so slow. A programming language that loads 40Megs of memory for a GUI and takes several seconds to load (on a fast machine!) is bad. And then you close the program, and lose all the gains running it and compiling efficiently earned you...
A witty [sig] proves nothing. --Voltaire
OCAML is a very practical functional programming language with excellent compilers. A number of Linux utilities are written in it.
Actually "No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents in Software Engineering" was published as an article in Computer magazine in April 1987. That was (for the math challenged) only 15 years ago, rather than 25 years ago. I remember reading the article in its original form in college and I don't think that I'm THAT close to retirement yet...
I think people like Brooks have done a grave disservice to the community by claiming, without solid evidence, that languages don't matter. Some language differences don't matter--Pascal and C are almost equally cumbersome and error prone. But in general, languages do matter enormously: runtime safety makes it easier to compose programs out of large numbers of components, dynamic typing and reflection help with configurability and I/O, static type safety and garbage collection reduce the probability of bugs, etc.
A disregard for the importance of languages is why projects like Mozilla, Gnome, and KDE keep lumbering on in languages like C and C++, producing software that crashes with regularity, consumes enormous amounts of memory, and takes forever to get finished. It's why software like Apache, IIE, and IIS keep shipping with bogus and avoidable buffer overflow errors.
Programming technology has improved enormously over the last three decades. It's just that most programmers don't use the improvements and still stick with three decade old technology for their jobs.
There are some really amazing things going on... and I'm surprised no one mentions it too often. Things like generative programming, aspect oriented programming, domain engineering, the list goes on.
I'm interested in hearing more... do you have links to specific pages that exemplify some of these practices?
Hmmm,
.NET era engineers of what "Managed C++" is and so I'm currently coding an unnecessary Managed to UnManaged code layer so that C# can talk to unmanaged C++ on the back end...
Of people and projects and the use of tools and technologies:
Let's see... Two contracts ago I was on a team of developers who had one hammer in their toolbox: COM. I pleaded with them to limit their use of COM but they went on a rampage. They wrapped ADO in a COM based object/relational DB abstraction. Then they used the COM based DB wrapper in their COM based business tier to talk to COM based Active-X controls in the UI. I pleaded with them to use MTS, distributed transactions, and stored procedures as the system was a distributed client/server app; but I was told that transactions and stored procedures would add too much overhead. COM, COM everywhere and no transactions in sight! Result: A slow, giant, buggy, leaky, unstable 4 tier COM based pig of a system that has major database issues. I finally couldn't take it anymore and so I gave notice after 1.5 years on the project. I left there 2 years ago and today they have sold the thing to one customer - who is extremely unhappy...
My last contract was an aircraft carrier combat system. 220 developers had been playing in Rational Rose for 1.5+ years when I showed up. They had modelled over 5,000 classes and had not modelled anything called "Weapon", "Sensor" or "theShip". They used Rose to generate their C++ code for HPUX and VxWorks and they used TCL/TK to do their UI. Frankly, if there a was a fork in the road these guys took the hard way every time. Result: the system is an impossibly huge nightmare that runs on dying platforms and depends on a dead UI language. The company has run out of money to finish the system. The staff has been cut from 220 to 50 and no deadlines have been moved. None of my friends who remain on this project work 40 hour weeks...
Currently I'm on contract to do a UI by X-Mas. I just fought a 2 week pitched battle with pig headed engineers over whether or not we should use C#, VB, or MFC to do the UI. I finally ended the battle last week when I walked into a meeting with working screens coded in C#. The UI is mostly finished and all are very impressed with my work. But I have been unable to convince unwilling, MFC loving, pre
I guess what I'm saying is that the biggest thing I've run into in the last few years is people who have very real design decision making power but who don't have a good background in what tools and technologies are available. I see projects blunder into Death March situations because the people working on them are unwilling to keep up with technology or are unaware of what tools are out there...
I work like heck to keep up with the times. I wish more people would read books like "The Pragmatic Programmer" and take them to heart...
--Richard
Why would you want to scroll? Why not use it for real programming?
Lets not confuse Java the language and its performance with Java GUI framework. Just like you would not compare C++ the language with the Microsoft windows framework.
The Java framework sacrifices some speed for generality. So see what you save writing it once and delivering it to multiple platforms vs re-writting the GUI portion for another platform. There is method and cost to this madness.
The tools make probably 10% of the process easier. The ability to cut and paste text is the biggest gain from tools, with every other tool declining in return for investment. Fundamental to tools is the fact that every time a tool comes out to fix a certain problem, we increase the magnitude of the problem until the tool is ineffective. Secondly, tools don't give you a competitive advantage because everyone has the same tools. The human brain and the ability of the people is still the only thing making a difference.
Refactoring will solve exactly this problem, one of the refactorings (Rename Method) allows you to change a method and have the method calls be changed to reflect this. Refactoring like these are extremely handy and are one important way to solve the problem of reducing and managing duplicated functionality (AspectJ is another interesting solution).
The Drowned and the Saved - Primo Levi
Incidentally I've read several things that talk about the fact that Hotspot server version is the one everyone should be using....even if on the client. Client is only designed for short-lived things like applets.
My blog: http://jkratz.dyndns.org/~jason/blog/
That one sentance, which was Brooks' key insight, sums up why progress will always be limited. You can read commentary on that point in a paper I wrote here.
Other's have already pointed out the obvious corollary: good management practices are most important for successful, reliable software development.
I don't think the Agile people need to be trashed as much as they are here. Sure, they are gurus. But they are emphasizing human-centric instead of "software engineering" which is a Good Thing (TM). Just don't get too religious about XP and you'll be fine.
Other than that, the greatest thing for programmers since sliced bread is Python.
And yes, I also agree open source development has pushed this industry light years ahead. But it works because - it's human-centric programming!
As to 2 I don't know of any Java application that I've used yet that takes 40MB of memory on load. I agree though that you do lose the gains made on loading/compiling to native. Sun needs to address that issue. OTOH you can also buy native compilers that do the work upfront. If you want a fast GUI use SWT. Not as functional as Swing imho but certainly faster.
My blog: http://jkratz.dyndns.org/~jason/blog/
Until one comes up with a meaningful version of each version coded properly to use the strengths of the language in question you can't say that. Server-side Java is extremely fast and you gain far more coding in Java on the server than you'd lose in speed.
c. For that matter, when real execution speed is required, people still optimise in assembler (or even design custom hardware).
Uh...whatever. People who worry about that type of optimization wouldn't be looking at much more than C or C++. Java and the like aren't even on their radar.
Java is not designed for execution speed. No point in pretending it is. Nobody ever claimed it was.
Java is slower than c. First off its C....not c. Secondly you can't make that claim. It certainly is true in some respects and not so in others. Making that claim is pretty much pointless.
My blog: http://jkratz.dyndns.org/~jason/blog/
I disagree somewhat. Good practices can make a sub-standard team into a gets-it-done-well-enough team, or a good team into a great team. They won't turn a lousy team into a great team, but you'll never have a great team with them, either.
I disagree with that as well. There are plenty of good developers out there. The problem is invariably that management fails to acknowledge the nature of good developers, usually in one of two big ways.
If management could get over its short-termism and help good developers to develop well, then they'd find that such people really aren't that rare at all. There are a few in every company I've ever worked at, and I've worked on some teams that consisted almost entirely of high calibre people. But just having a team of good guys isn't enough; this is why good management is worth what you pay for it. Kinda like good developers, when you think about it... :-)
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I can't help feeling that this post is off the mark.
The issue isn't software complexity, it's how well the software does its job, which is helping real people to do something more easily.
Yes, it's true that one drive individual used to be able to write full packages. Of course, that's still true. Many of the best tools I use look every bit as professional as the mass-developed, highly-complex things, and work at least as well, yet were developed by a single enthusiastic person. They have a smaller scope, but on the flip side, they tend to do their one job very well.
As for collapsing into mayhem... You are more generous about current software than I am. When did MS-DOS or WordPerfect 5.1 ever crash and lose your last hour's work? Yes, yes, they weren't multitaskingGUIfrontendmousewavingbizapps(TM), but they let me write my letters, booted in a heartbeat and didn't keep asking me if I wanted fries^H^H^H^H^Hhelp with that. I accept that today's software tries to do much more, but it's hardly an exemplary field for progress in an engineering discipline.
Oh, and WinXP is so much less stable than Win2K it's not funny. I speak from direct personal experience, on several different machines at several different places. Win2K was the one MS got right. WinXP was the candy-covering they forgot to taste before they put it in the shop.
Having said all of this, I do think software development has advanced a lot as a field. I just don't think your argument justifies that conclusion in itself.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
There are not silver bullets in software development. Probably never will be. So get that out of your mind.
On the other hand, our toolbox is filling up with lots of nice silver hammers, silver screwdrivers and silver saws.
When I started coding, structured programming was the latest tool in the toolbox. It was and still is a great tool for many tasks. Since then we've gotten object oriented and generic programming tools. These are great tools as well. But they're still tools. Which means you have to but some labor into using them, and they won't be suitable for every task.
If you don't think that software development has improved in the past twenty five years, it's time you rummaged through your toolbox and picked something other than a screwdriver to hammer in nails.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
I use recursive grep to identify where I call a certain function. I get a few false positives, but usually, it's not too bad.
Stop the brainwash
It seriously takes 3-4 seconds for an "open file" dialog box to come up (Solaris runtime). The second time it's down to maybe 1/3 of a second (thank you hotspot!), and I'd bet I could take that time out by caching the dialog instead of making a new one each time. It's that first pass being way too slow though...
Hotspot in of itself is pretty good. A year and a half ago, I was cursing Java for slow everything - now it's just the startup time and memory footprint - the rest of the language has shaped up nicely. Another year of improvements and I just might switch... :-)
Never gotten to play with one of those native compilers :-(. But I'd bet a good one would take out half my complaints right now! However, I just don't feel the memory footprint is likely to go down.
Hotspot server is better? Very interesting... Thanks for the info!
A witty [sig] proves nothing. --Voltaire
Heh. Non-intuitive, ain't it?
The fact is that C++, in particular, has 'features' that prevent certain optimizations. Java, due to stricter specification, has some advantages. Whether or not Java will ever be faster than optimized FORTRAN is a different question, but largely moot since very little non-scientific software is developed in FORTRAN (or hand optimized assembly, the other performance poster boy).
Anyway, I'm working on a magazine article regarding my benchmarks so I can't release them yet. However, for a much earlier article that shows great results with last generation VMs, check out Binaries vs. Bytecodes. The 1.4 VMs are substantially faster than the 1.3 versions he used in that article, while the C++ compilers have made little or no progress in the same time period. Cool, eh? ;-)
Source is provided with that article, so you can test it with current compilers and VMs.
So, anyhow, before you do any more spouting about "several orders of magnitude faster than Java" you'd better run your own benchmarks. You're in for a surprise.
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
For the last 20 years the commercial software development
:-) deadlines) -- and in fact, we got accustomed to it:
churned through imperative programming languages that do the same thing with just a bit different syntax and Spartan/or complete set of standard libraries (Cobol, fortran, C++, pascal, java, C++, C, perl, C#). So we have wasted investors money,
customers money, many man hours by lying to them that when we use the new programming languages things going to be much better (that self-satisfying process is now called 'commercial software industry').
In addition to manual conversion to different lang. syntax (and fixing some bugs on the way) of the existing software, we spent millions of dollars on what we call 'Design Tools' and those are mere lego-like packages that allow us to break-down our tasks into such small and disjoint components that a developer who was not part of the 'team-that-did-the-breakdown' would need to spend weeks to find out what set of 'components' (an important word in our vocabulary) enables that button (and it turns out that the a row in a database is read by the 'database layer', then the there is code that the checks if that row is has all the necessary data, then it sets some boolean flag (we call that a business logic layer), then the button checks that flag and to be enabled or disabled (and that we called our GUI layer)).
In the last 10-15 years, we came up with a role of a 'Software Architect' -- that probably had a noble goal, but really degenerated into a task of dowloading the latest 'new' technology from the internet, then setting them up for some irrelevant test, and then running around the company and telling everyone how we should 'upgrade to the latest technology for some great benefit and no one can understand'.
Then, in the past 20 years we convinced our customers that they cannot really expect bug-free software from us, but instead we can do something that does most of what they want and fix the rest later. So then the customers simply stopped believing us that we can manufacture something that works, the only thing that customers can do is to request us to do something by some date (therefore the unreasonable (but always movable
Look at the press releases of the public software companies: they do not mention what functionality their products have, how fault-tolerant they are... instead they mention what Tools they used to build their stuff (XML, EJB, Java, OO, UML, web-enabled and wireless ready). And for a while the stock market rewarded just that. But have you seen a profitable hardware design and manufacturing company bragging in their press releases what compiler or VLSI design tool they use, instead of highlighting the functionality of their product?
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We also convinced ourselves that there are no 'methods' to desing software without bugs, instead we'd rather rely on QA to test it -- because we think software is like nothing else -- it cannot be VERIFIED for CORRECTNESS by us.
And that is fundamentally what needs to be changed: we must be able to use mathematically sound algorithm verification techniques and we should ask our tool vendors NOT to deliver to us a syntax change every 3 years, but build for us tools that would do what do data-flow analysis on the program logic level, that would simulate timings and parallel execution for concurrency enabled applications (threading/etc) and so on.
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Of course there has been a lot of progress in the computer science and mathematics that supports it, but most of it did not make in to commercial app development world.
Compilers are better, language parsers are better, OSses are better -- but those are the tools where the science was used to design algorithms (like graph coloring for register allocations, or other optimization techniques)
And hardware, of course is much better --
the commercial software 'looks' like made leaps and bounds -- but it is really some of tools that we use underneath that made us look better.
That's not including the 14100 lines of C++ in the main support tool (which won't be shipped) or the other tools, or data.
So short small projects let you be a lot more productive in terms of LOC :-), well until we get into the proper testing phase anyway :-(
My karma is excellent, so I guess I must be a troll.
you can have a big try statement wherever you want to and catch (OutOfMemoryException e)Well, it's an Error, not an Exception. This means that a reasonable application should not try to catch it, according to the documentation. If you go against the documentation and decide to attempt some local recovery after certain failed allocations, you need a try-catch clause around each one.
The alternative in C is ugly. A million if() statements for every malloc that basically do the explicit checking. Big whoop.To be fair, it's at most one if statement for every malloc.
With C you have the extra "printf("Out of memory\n"); exit(ENOMEM);" code after every malloc.Nonsense. If it's acceptable to terminate in the event of any malloc failing, you'd write a wrapper to hide the details. There would be no explicit error checking at all at the call site. Now whose argument is retarded?
I think the tech market is very good right now. However, you have to look at it from the right perspective.
I'm in a tech company that has been growing over the last 3 years. The problem is knowing how to find business.
Every business wants to automate what they do. Every business wants to operate better and faster. The problem is, most tech companies know very little about how to actually do this, especially how to treat and care for customers.
Get to know the people and companies around town. Find out what their problems *actually are*. Find a way to fix them, possibly using technology. Present your solution and your price.
There are always people with problems that are willing to pay for them. What happened in the tech industry are:
a) it grew so fast, "developers" were in such demand that completely unqualified incompetents were being hired. In addition, HR had no way of distinguishing between competent and incompetent people. This is probably the biggest problem.
b) Even fewer people cared about actually serving consumer needs. Upgrading to Windows 2000 became more important than making my processes more efficient.
c) Management finally wised up and stopped doing useless things with technology. However, there is still a demand for useful technology, you just have to be able to justify it to a much smarter crowd.
d) Management refuses to go along with technology people who can't communicate.
Tech people are used to being able to just make sales based on the fact that they knew more about technology than anyone else. Now they have to be able to actually help solve problems. I see this as a good thing.
By the way, solving problems is something that can't be outsourced to third-world countries. It requires personal communication. It requires being able to see technology from the point-of-view of the business owner, and being able to speak intelligently and understandably about them and their problems, and only speak about technology when it's absolutely relevant.
Engineering and the Ultimate
Some of the other good things (C, debuggers, the Unix command-line interface) were there before 25 years ago.
Some things have been steps backwards:
And some bad things were already there 25 years ago (unrealistic schedules, buzzwords, complexity).
A: No. First we had UNIX, then MacOS, then Windows. If that's not evidence for a decline in software quality, I don't know what is.
Nathan's blog
COM is excellent. However, the glue framework (i.e. - the OS) completely sucks. Try printing from a service sometime, and see how dependent Windows is on having a logged-in user.
However, COM is not as good as actually having the data in a text-readable format. With COM, you can do everything the application can. With open data formats, you can do more.
Engineering and the Ultimate
Incidentally IBM has pretty much always had a great VM as well....dont think its available on Solaris tho ;) Certainly works well on Linux and Windows.
I dont think any of the companies that do native compilers for Java offer trial versions which sucks and they're not cheap either. There are at least 4 companies and each product is better suited to certain types of applications (some server-side...some client, etc).
My blog: http://jkratz.dyndns.org/~jason/blog/
Common Lisp vendors, including franz missed the window of oppertunity during the impressionable years from 1983 to 1998. Even with making the tools readly available to universites, the commercial and per-seat licenses where expensive even incomparison to IBM's offerings.
The joke when I worked for a large aerospace company went something like this:
Generally, when people want to make a baby, one woman gets pregnant and you wait for nine months. Low and behold, after nine month and assuming nothing goes wrong, you have a baby.
Software development managers seem to be of the opinion that if you get nine women pregnant and puts lots of schedules on the walls and yell and scream alot that you can then produce a baby in one month. No matter how many times this approach fails, development managers refuse to give it up.
In their defense, I will say this company learned the "mythical man-month" lesson and stopped adding developers to late software projects. Instead, their approach was to add additional managers so there were more managers posting schedules on the walls and yelling that the project was late. I guess in some ways this approach really did work a little better since it got them around the adage that adding more developers to a late project only makes it later. Unfortunately, the additional managers all usually wanted status reports so the developers wasted more time writing status reports for the additional managers which still ended up making the project later.
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
Actually, its often the quality of the analysis that is the root of the problem. Incomplete or incorrect requirements are common.
What you say about programmers could also be said of analysts: No two perform their analysis exactly the same way or come to exactly the same conclusions. But uniformity is neither sufficient nor necessary to guarantee a good result.
The fact is that creating a good software application is hard - way to hard for a machine to perform given the current state-of-the-art.
First off its C....not c. Secondly you can't make that claim.
The poster was right - it is c. c is the speed of light, and as we all know, nothing can go faster than that, so it follows that Java is slower than c.
8-)
I know some people use languages in which programs can be proven to work like ML
Oh, the languages can be proven to work, eh? When you produce a compiler that can prove that your *arbitrary* program ever stops, much less does A, B, or C, come see me, because we'll have tons of fun turning the entire mathematics and computer science worlds upside down.
If you just mean human-provable, and only for small non-arbitrary programs, that's quite doable with C or any other language. ML makes it slightly more structured, which is convenient, but doesn't give you anything that you couldn't do with C.
May we never see th
Let me prepend this by saying that I really do not like ocaml or other ml languages, but if you're into functional languages, you may like it. There are some things that are done right, like a very strong type system.
Unison, a file-sychronization tool, and MLDonkey, a P2P client that supports just about every significant P2P protocol out there (except the closed version of FastTrack) are both written in ocaml. That's all I know of, though.
Give me something like ocaml but without type inference (most annoying invention of all time) and not a functional language (sorry, just don't think that way), and I'd be pretty happy. It's about the fastest safe language out there, followed closely by eiffel.
May we never see th
Personally, I think good OO code is the optimal modelling language. Done right, the code should end up being easily readable:
SlashdotPost post = new SlashdotPost(request);
if (post.validate()) {
story.addPost(post);
return new PostSubmittedPage(post);
} else {
return new PostEditPage(post);
}
People who think that a phone book of UML diagrams and user-written specs are enough to produce code are generally fooling themselves. And if the spec does have all the information needed to produce the code, then somebody should just write a compiler for it and let the programmers go do something interesting.
In a tangential manner, you've hit upon what's the real problem. As long as software developers cede their craft and their profession (and their sanity) to the market desires of big software development companies rather than what's best for computer science, these stupidity cycles will continue dragging us all round and round and round. It's high time for a powerful programmers' guild that not only takes on poor software development management, but also software development companies that push their own selfish/myopic agendas over what's technically/financially best for the organizations we work for.
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
This is already the case. The people who can write those analyses are called "programmers." Higher level languages will make programming easier, faster, and cheaper, but the people writing the analyses will still be programmers. Non-programmers, managers, and aspiring programmers will always find that it's difficult to solve difficult problems.
Programming is actually not very hard. Understanding the client's problem is kinda hard, but describing the solution is the really hard part. It will always be hard, unless the problem is trivial.
Higher level programming languages will still require programmers.
Build stuff. Stuff that walks, stuff that rolls, whatever.
My dream system would be something like what you've said, except the functions would be stored in a language-independent manner (okay, Perl's probably out). When you need a function, 'fvs' would generate code in the language of your choice.
Well, there's always the library. Do you have access to one of those? I read Knuth in my high school years via inter library loan. And Brooks as well.
Now, that I can afford to, I own them
Stefan Axelsson
Any good C programmer would have done OOP in C (maybe without knowing it) before he switched to a "proper" OO language. Some aspects of OOP are easy in C , eg by using function pointers in structures to mimic methods and inheritence. The problem learning OOP languages is more due to their appalling design and syntax, I mean was Bjarn on drugs or something when he came up with the C++ template syntax?
It's probably way to late to bring this up, but, yes, Java can and probably will beat C++ performance. There are two basic reasons:
First, Java byte code operation is specified completely. This means that is a calling tree never calls any sort of native method implementation, the optimizer can play 'fun with graphs'. This gives the optimizer the oportunity to use tricks like non-blocking I/O, and aggressive inlining. Most importantly, it allows register optimization across method calls. In C/C++, optimizing across method calls runs afoul of odd and random pointers.
Second, Java can reoptimize based on current runtime usage pattern. Imagine a banking transaction program that processes a million checks and deposits. Cashing a check involves looking up the account, withdrawing the money, applying overdraft, etc. In reality, 99.99% are correct without overdrafts. The Java optimizer rewrites the code as 'look up account or panic, then subtract check amount from account leaving a positive balance or panic'. The program is shorter and can make better use of registers in the usual case, and the 'panic' means to unwind the optimized code back to the Java byte code. This beats C++ when you do a million checks followed by a million deposits.
There really is a much larger theoritical cieling for Java optimization. It comes with the cost of stepping back from the hardware.
I'm sorry for my late response, a virus penetrated my firewall and set the automatic defense system in motion: increased priority to the 'White cell' service at the expense of the Intelligence app.
;) The problem with avoiding change in your app is that you get code rot. The real world changes while the code stays the same. You add local hacks to support feature X, Y and Z, messing up your code. Changes become harder and harder to make. You start to get massive code duplication and (unnecessary) interdependencies. Your resistence to low-level change catches up with you because you are now forced to make all kinds of wide-spread, buggy hacks just to support the features that your customer really need. Finally you throw out the mess and start again.
Named parameters is to *avoid* find-and-replace.
Yes, I know. But the effect will probably be substantially smaller than using refactoring(s). My point was more that they don't exactly overlap, refactoring can do much more than named parameters and also a bit less ( named parameters can be arbitrarily ordered, may increase the readability of function calls and allow functions with the same name+parameter type(s) ).
I actually consider this "refactoring" push a *failure* of OOP, or at least a bad idea. Rather than trying to avoid the Code Change Gods, it is giving into them big-time. I don't get it.
I guess you don't like Extreme Programming then
XP tries to avoid this as long as possible by making it much, much easier to keep your code up to date. Many of the XP rules support this:
- no ownership of code
- no clever tricks, KISS
- rigorous unit tests
- only create the code that you need now
- integrate often
- refactor regularly and in small steps
Having unit tests for just about everything is a very important rule in this regard. It gives you confidence that you can change the implementation without changing the functionality. This allows you the maximum amount of freedom. You keep the code lean and mean. The design evolves along with the addition of new features. You won't be prevented from making necessary changes just because it's 'too hard to do' (which happens in real life - a lot). I understand why it is hard to grasp, this goes against the engineering principles that you where taught: gather all requirements first, make a detailed design, etc. Of course, we all know that the world doesn't conform to the waterfall model and that software is especially prone to changing requirements. There is only so much you can do to reduce the effects of this threat. Instead of fighting it, XP embraces this law of nature (which makes it very effective for some projects). Refactoring is an important part of this strategy and I don't see why you consider it pushing a failure. Is procedural programming immune to code rot and changing requirements? Is any programming paradigm?
The Drowned and the Saved - Primo Levi