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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.
I think a better analogy would be to say that today's programmers are more like a Cargo Cult.
I'm already at the gunpowder stage. My code has been blowing up for years.
slashdot. where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
That's because programming isn't usually an endurance challenge.
"Making something that works" is more important than "talking about how hard you made your job for yourself"
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
I'm currently a J2EE (and C, but predominately Java J2EE) programmer, familiar with Hibernate, Spring, as well as the old school EJB 2 mess. I wasn't always a Java programmer. I've taught C and coded with it commercial. I also have commercially used a variety of other platforms from VB and Delphi, to Smalltalk, to C++.
Here's the core of the problem: The web is a horrible platform. I went from Rapid development drag and drop screen design in the late 90s to the abomination that is hand crafted JSP against shitty state based environments. Sure our applications are more scalable now, but I'm still hand crafting code to talk to a database object. There are tools out there that spit out mediocre code (hibernate tools come to mind). But nothing that I'm aware of spits out a good set of CRUD classes with corresponding unit tests. Why do we ever have to hand write this shit? (I haven't used Grails and Groovy extensively but I understand scaffolding has similar issues and not being as mature the people I've worked with have had to work around issues with transactionality)
Then you take a look at the GUI layer. Hand writing CSS and JSP? Really? In 2010? SHIT. Hand writing code for simple controllers. Never mind if you do actually end up doing anything non-standard in which case good luck getting into the guts of the documentation for Spring MVC or Struts or similar. And then you have to deal with having to redeploy your application to see simple changes OR using exploded views that don't update properly and leave you debugging a problem for 4 hours that should take 4 minutes.
It's a complete mess. It's WAY more complicated than it should be. I should be focused on the business problems - modelling the backend, getting the algorithms right for complex transactions etc. Instead there are people arguing that such simplicity leads to sloppy programming (usually mentioning VB as if the same programmers wouldn't have made a mess with something more complex). Well if you have nothing better to do than some stupid little dance just to get a web page up, that's your issue. For me that is a stupid statement. There's always a genuinely complex issue to solve without inventing one.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Warning! Before you read the linked article or its followup too deeply, be aware they are not by Donald Knuth. Instead, the author has a brief quote from Donald Knuth in his first blog, and the other link is a followup story. So, "the author" referenced in the Slashdot summary is NOT Donald Knuth. I made the mistake of reading the followup article first, and then when I read the original, I found a brief quote from Donald Knuth which tipped me off to the fact that the author was not Donald Knuth, and as far as I can tell, Donald Knuth doesn't even know this author.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
It's not so much "dumbing down", but rather becoming a swamp navigator instead of an engineer. You can't just know principles, you have to also know the swamp.
More time is spent trying to figure out how to use and work around limitations of existing libraries and tools and less about designing such tools from scratch.
It can be roughly compared to what's going on in the automotive repair industry. You used to see all the parts involved and how they interact. Now a computer controls servos and if things don't work, you have to use Sherlock Holmes-like abilities to figure what's going on in the sealed dark-gray-box provided by Ford or Nissan that controls most of it. It's now about studying the relationship between the controller and the parts rather than "fixing the parts" directly.
It's a shift away from being The Wright Brothers toward being Sherlock Holmes: doing your best with limited clues by poking and prodding and digging instead of just making it "right". Instead of being a constructor, now we're deconstructors more or less.
Table-ized A.I.
excellent programmers steal excellent code."
I stole this, and I don't know where it is stolen from!
The problem is simply: Why bother?
You are usually facing two choices:
1) Create a slick, nifty, fast framework yourself that does what you need. It will be lightning fast.
2) Use some sluggish can-do-everything-and-more framework out of the box that does 10 times what you need. Basically, it's like delivering a soup cube with a flat bed.
Option 1 will take about five times the development time, but save you well over 60% runtime.
Your boss will outright fire you if you opt for option 1. Why? Because it takes 5 times dev time for 0.5 seconds saved during use.
Machines today are fast. Much, much faster than what we need for programs to run. Hell, even games are today produced with sluggish frameworks that waste resources left and right, and they tend to be the programs that are most time-critical an "ordinary" user would get to see.
I hate this development as much as anyone who learned programming during a time when memory was scarce and gaining 10% run time speed was worth everything. But that simply ain't true anymore. Today you have programmers (I use that term loosly now) that look at you blankly when you ask them what sort algo they used, then they give you the name of some library function. No, they have no idea what the function does. Only that it somehow automagically sorts the stuff. Why this one and not the other one? Because they know this one, or it was the first the help file spit out when they searched for a "search function". But then again, it does not matter. The other function that might have been faster because it happens to implement an algo that is more fitting to the problem at hand would have saved about 0.0something seconds, because the machine running the program eventually is fast enough that it means jack what algo you use. Memory amounts today mean that it is pointless to ponder whether you really need double linked lists or whether you get by with single linked ones. Or that you use variables smaller than DWords to store integers.
So it doesn't really matter anymore whether you can program, or whether you even know just how much space and time you just wasted with that horrible choice of library functions that will probably eventually even do the work but are just about the worst choice for the problem presented. Modern computers are fast enough and have enough ram to compensate for programers' inaptitude.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Except that what really happens is that you end up trying to use a sluggish can-do-everything-and-more framework that does 10 times what you need it to do but fails to do 2-3 critical things that you absolutely need to do. And between the time spent learning the can-do-everything framework and what parts of it you don't care about and the time spent kludging and hacking on it to fill in the missing bits, you end up spending more time than it'd've taken you to write your own from scratch or using more primitive tools.
Been there, done that, got the drawer full of t-shirts.
I absolutely hate frameworks. They are the same as libraries. But without the ability to plug them into anything. They want to be the core of your application, and not play with anything else.
They are a very “enterprisey” concept.
Please, all, stop doing frameworks, cut them into their aspects, and start doing libraries again! Nobody wants you elaborate all-encompassing framework that is its own inner platform and yet unfortunately lacks the very function you need the most.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
That's the kind of thinking that leads to batch jobs taking an hour, that should be done in 5 minutes or less.
I've said this before and I'll say it again, because I've created plenty of unoptimized "batch jobs" that take longer than they should.
COMPUTERS ARE CHEAPER THAN HUMANS
A cubicle filled with racks of computers running inefficient batch jobs costs a tiny fraction of a competent person sitting in the same cubicle and optimizing every little thing by hand. And a program written in a high-level language is probably cheaper to maintain over the long run as well.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Whining about "infantilizing" the end user? WTF? I get really tired of the elitist attitude that some computer types have that computers should be hard. They seem to think it should be some sort of almost mystical priesthood that you have to work at for many years to be allowed in.
Bullshit.
Computers are tools, nothing more. they exist to allow humans to do tasks that we otherwise can't do, or at least can't do easily. As such they should be as easy and accessible for an average person to use. Ideally they would require no training and be usable by even extremely mentally challenged individuals. The more we can simplify them, the better. They should be adapted to work how we want, we should not have to adapt to them.
Well guess what? Programming is another part of that. Ideally, we'd have computers that could more or less program themselves. People would tell the computer what they wanted it to do in plain English (or other natural language) and it would figure out how to make that happen. Obviously we are a very long way away from this, but the easier we can make it, the better.
Even as it stands currently, where you do need training/practice to be a good programmer, there's a lot to be said for easy tools to make parts of development quicker and more robust. The user interface would be a good example. If all UI elements have to be coded in C++ and then compiled to see how it works, it is going to take a long time to develop and change. Goes double if others (like artists usability experts) are working on it as well. You write it, compile it, send it to them, they test it, write up problems, send it back, etc.
Much better to have a simple GUI interface for laying out the GUI. You can make changes much quicker and easier, and see what you are doing to confirm it is what you want. Also, should the design change, a redesign is much faster and easier.
I really get tired of this idea that computers and programming should be hard, that we don't want it accessible. Bullshit. You should want that in general, because it makes it available to more people, and even for you, because the ease of use can save you time. Yes, it allows for people to write programs that don't understand it. Deal with it. The microwave allows geeks everywhere to easily prepare food without understanding how to do it. Doesn't mean we should demand everyone become a master chef and cook all their food from only elementary ingredients. That will give you tastier food, but there's something to be said for having a meal ready in 5 minutes with 0 effort.
You need, to boldly add, more commas [where no commas, have been placed, before!]
The "real programmers" can sneer at us, [...]
That's not about it.
As long as you understand what you write, it's fine.
The problem is with the newer generation of Java/C# who: can't write their own algorithms thus inevitably depend on libraries, manage to have problems integrating the libraries together and (worst) do not understand how/why the stuff works.
the BIOS, bootloader, operating system, libraries and editor
That's a misconception about the "real programmers".
The difference between the "new programmers" and the "real programmers" is that later were still taught math and computer architecture - former were taught only syntax of a sandboxed programming language. Later know why/how software/hardware works at least in general, former have to rely on book which tell them that it would works.
Those who are actually try to reinvent "the BIOS, bootloader, operating system, libraries and editor" are not "real programmers": those are last remaining artifacts of the DOS times, the times when it all fit 64K.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.