Whatever Happened To Programming?

Mirk writes "In a recent interview, Don Knuth wrote: 'The way a lot of programming goes today isn't any fun because it's just plugging in magic incantations — combine somebody else's software and start it up.' The Reinvigorated Programmer laments how much of our 'programming' time is spent pasting not-quite-compatible libraries together and patching around the edges." This 3-day-old article has sparked lively discussions at Reddit and at Hacker News, and the author has responded with a followup and summation.

Comments

what's the deal with don knuth?

[Anonymous Coward]

So he wants to write a book on compilers, if he ever finishes his series of books on computer programming for people who time travelled back to the early 1960s. Really? If he knew jack hit about compilers, how does he explain TeX? TeX isn't a typesetter, it's a poorly thought out programming language. How poor? "How do I ..." questions on comp.text.tex are invariably answered with "Use perl/python/ruby/awk/sed/etc". Imagine if the answer to "how do I loop from 1 to 100 in java?" was "write a python script to generate the unrolled loop code."

Re:Half a Century of Crappy Computing

[mfnickster]

Go away, Louis.

Re:Half a Century of Crappy Computing

[rebelscience]

Make me. I dare ya. LOL.