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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."

7 of 585 comments (clear)

  1. Did they ask the Indians? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    Cuz they know programming, hell they are pulling their shithole excuse dump of a country out of complete poverty leaching off American business and enginuity like the parasites they are devoid of any original thoughts or business ideas.

    But they should have input doing as much as they do...

  2. Simonyi's part of the problem by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    Simonyi is part of the problem with software today, thanks to his putrid invention, "Hungarian Notation."

    Maybe he's working on a better version... something like HungarianNotationX. Yeah, that'll solve the world's problems!

  3. That's curry you smell... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    and I think it smells nice, you insensitive clod!

  4. Re:copyright and stealing by mar1boro · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    "Copyright infrement doesnt change the intent of the copyright owner."

    That is the self-serving rhetoric of a 12 year old child. Twisting meaning
    and context to justify breaking the spirit of a law while supposedly
    not breaking the letter of the law makes you look stupid and foolish.
    It also casts a dubious light on any future legitimate work you may do.
    Stop acting like a corrupt politician or corporate hack.

    If you want to read an article, watch the damn 20 second ad
    or go do the interviews and research yourself. If you are good enough
    at it, someone may actually pay you for your efforts. Salon did,
    after all, pay people to generate the content. That is what those
    of us not sponging off of mommy and daddy or welfare agencies do.

    --
    -- "It was as if the paint factories had decided to deal direct with the art galleries." - Thursday Next
  5. All software stinks by Cthefuture · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    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
  6. Re:Hungarian Notation by AndrewHowe · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Dr. Dobbs is a cool mag, but I try not to let it do all my thinking for me... On to your points:

    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 :). 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.

    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.

  7. Re:Hungarian Notation by GooberToo · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    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.