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

Re:Frameworks

[Ethanol-fueled]

Knuth:

When I was fourteen, I wrote space-invader games in BASIC on a VIC-20. If you were interested in computers back in 1982, I bet you did the same...It's not what we dreamed of as fourteen-year-olds and trained for as eighteen-year-olds.

Yeah, because all of us totally had PCs as kids. Except that stepping out into the daylight and becoming interested in sex was much more awesome.

When I was 18, I wrote multi-user dungeons in C on serial terminals attached to a Sun 3...

In C but not in assembly? What a pussy.

we're looking up the EnterpriseFactoryBeanMaker class in the 3,456-page Bumper Tome Of Horrible Stupid Classes (Special Grimoire Edition), because we can't remember which of the arguments to the createEnterpriseBeanBuilderFactory() method tells it to make the public static pure virtual destructor be a volatile final abstract interface factory decorator.

Nice jab against Java, but if you can't code multi-user dungeons in assembler then there's a reason why your bosses stuck you with Java, dumbass.

Are you gonna argue with Knuth? Huh? Are you? Didn't think so.

Oh yeah, you're so bad, I bet you're man enough to hit your dick with a hammer. That from a man who spent his entire life masturbating to his own source code while the rest of us were riding bikes and getting pussy.

I want to make things, not just glue things together...Tuna nigiri. For me, there is a sort of metallic flavour to most raw tuna; but belly tuna, the fatty cut known as toro, is just sensational...

Wow, you even fement your own sushi-vinegar and then hand-assemble every bit of rice grain-by grain until you're left with a perfect oblong shape? Do you grate and color your own wasabi? Do you catch the fish and cut that piece yourself? No, you don't, so shut the fuck up sissyboy.

I understand, I think, how we landed up here. I wish I know how we can get out.

You'll get out soon enough when your job goes to India, asshole!

easy

[pydev]

It's easy to see what happened to programming: the industry was taken over by people who "wrote space-invader games in BASIC on a VIC-20", "wrote multi-user dungeons in C", and "worked deep down in the guts of a text database system — still C".

Re:Implement some things yourself

[Anonymous Coward]

Your comment is "gay"er than an picnic basket...

Half a Century of Crappy Computing

[rebelscience]

Half a Century of Crappy Computing. It's much worse than people think. Crappy code is all around. Computing started out on the wrong foot. The mathematicians and the Turing Machine worshipers are to blame.

Lack of imagination? That's your problem!

[Hurricane78]

He seems to bitch about not being able to write something fundamentally new... but ignores that you have to think of actually inventing something new beforehand. Maybe he is more of an engineer, and less of an inventor/scientist. (Two types that complement and need each other.)

I don't do much library gluing, since I chose to concentrate on inventing new things. Revolutionary things.
It’s just a choice. Nothing is stopping him from doing the same.
But I don’t even consider the gluing bad. Actually it only shows how far we have come, when we have nearly perfect standard libraries for everything and its dog. Generalizing algorithms and making things reusable are corner stones of programming. And they are great ones!

If you want to code something new, you need to come up with something revolutionary.

So: Mr Knuth: How about we team up: I deliver new ideas that nobody came up with yet, and you get something to code that nobody ever coded before. How about that? I bet we would make a great team! ^^

Re:Crappy frameworks, tools and web standards

[shutdown -p now]

Second, Access is not a web platform (such as using HTTP as a GUI primitive control transport). And third, SharePoint only has rudimentary CRUD ability (although is likely to improve, but in a proprietary way).

Access 2010 lets you design applications as usual, and "publish" them to SharePoint as web apps. There are some limitations there, of course, but not as many as one may think (and it's definitely above what SP offers out of the box).

Re:As a writer of crappy code..

[TapeCutter]

"Or perhaps it would be just a different kind of crap?"

Yep. Source code is like shit, you can't smell your own but if it comes out of someone else then it stinks.

Nazi fascist

[C_Kode]

Cablevision is a bunch of Nazi fascist. FiOS and the like isn't even an option in my area and they know this so if I can and threaten they pretty much just laugh in my face. Cablevision is my ONLY option unless I want something really horrible.

James Dolan should be deported from the US for being an fucking asshole. The Knicks would probably actually become a winning franchise again. How embarrassing was the Knicks losing to the Nets last night. The Nets were 6-55 before beating the Knicks.

Good job Dolan!