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Why Programming Still Stinks
Andrew Leonard writes "Scott Rosenberg has a column on Salon today about a conference held in honor of the twentieth anniversary of the publishing of 'Programmers at Work.' Among the panelists saying interesting things about the state of programing today are Andy Hertzfeld, Charles Simonyi, Jaron Lanier, and Jef Raskin."
Show me a non-trivial piece of software software that doesn't stink. I'm willing to bet that it flat out just does not exist. Period. I have never in my 20 years of programming seen a large piece of software that didn't stink. I've worked at all sorts of places. Open-source, small companies, large corporations, government agencies, and all of the software sucks.
We should not be asking the morons who put us where we are to fix the problem. To suggest they have a clue is ludicrous.
We need something fresh, something new, something creative to solve this problem. We have yet to hear from the person or people who will give us a revolution in software. It doesn't have to be like it is. We have been approaching the creation of software from the wrong angle since the beginning.
The ratio of people to cake is too big
Dr. Dobbs is a cool mag, but I try not to let it do all my thinking for me... On to your points:
:). It doesn't take you any longer to read and understand than "frob". HN takes advantage of this innate linguistic skill. Honestly, when I say I'm fluent in HN, that's exactly what I mean. I'm not saying it's definitely a skill everyone should learn, just that I and many others find it useful. It's also more useful in some languages than others, just as different human languages use different inflection schemes.
Ambiguous meanings? I think you will find that the (pretty small) subset of HN that most people use has an unambiguous grammar.
More typing? In fact with Intellisense it often requires less typing, because the scope is narrowed down within the first character or two.
"Harder to read"? Subjective. Like I said it's something like grammatical agreement. If I say a verb "frobbed" you know I'm talking in the past tense (loosely speaking
Maintaining code is very problematic? That may be some peoples' experience but I have to say it hasn't been mine. Changing the type of a variable often has effects that need to be dealt with anyway, and of course modularisation helps to reduce the scope of the problem.
Therefore I respectfully reject your first conclusion. Your second is just unsustainable hand-waving and generalisation, and isn't worth addressing, save to say that you have left out two categories of programmers.
LOL!
Very, very sad.
Hopefully one day you'll wake from your coma. In the mean time, we all pity you. Well, not true. Not all of us. Some of us will just laugh and point.