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'Just Let Me Code!'
An anonymous reader writes: Andrew Binstock has an article about the ever-increasing complexity required to write code. He says, "I got into programming because I like creating stuff. Not just any stuff, but stuff other people find useful. I like the constant problem solving, the use of abstractions that exist for long periods nowhere but in my imagination, and I like seeing the transformation into a living presence. ... The simple programs of a few hundred lines of C++ long ago disappeared from my experience. What was the experience of riding a bicycle has become the equivalent of traveling by jumbo jet; replete with the delays, inspections, limitations on personal choices, and sudden, unexplained cancellations — all at a significantly higher cost. ... Project overhead, even for simple projects, is so heavy that it's a wonder anyone can find the time to code, much less derive joy from it. Software development has become a mostly operational activity, rather than a creative one. The fundamental problem here is not the complexity of apps, but the complexity of tools. Tools have gone rather haywire during the last decade chasing shibboleths of scalability, comprehensiveness, performance. Everything except simplicity."
...just do it on your own time, and don't expect people to pay for it.
He who pays the piper calls the tune...
In the good old days you could go around opening people heads and fix their stuff. Sure, sometimes it went wrong or they died soon, but it was thrilling and exciting!
People with nostalgia, keep crying a river, but far away from the rest of the world.
Yeah there are some complicated tools but you don't have to use them. Use the old tools and code in the old way... most of them still work no problem. And even with the new ones there's simple ways to do the same thing.
How many people are throwing up snipits of python code... its everywhere. I really don't know what the fuck this guy is talking about.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Engineering any complex system requires a significant amount of planning and management overhead. When you want to build a bridge, you don't just throw a bunch of construction workers at it and trust them to make the best judgements, even though you might trust each one of them individually to build a sawhorse or something equally trivial.
If you want to bring three hundred people half way around the world, don't try to do it on your bicycle.
If you enjoy bicycling far more than piloting a jumbo jet, then you should be in bicycling, not commercial aviation.
What, you don't like jumbo jets and nobody wants to pay you to ride a bicycle? Maybe you should invent the hyperloop or manage a B&B instead.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
This is a old song and dance. It's easy to create software, but it is difficult to create and maintain good software.
Apply Sturgeon's Law and be done with it.
I'm tired of whiny youngsters, and not-so-young wimps who think they can program because they took a few classes, or got hired by a tech company who was desperate to hire anybody with even the slightest talent.
Like the whining by Phil Fish in Indie Game movie about it being hard to write video games. Duh.
Get over yourself, it's called work. Many people including many programmers have being doing it for several decades now.
...Yep, got a pretty solid collection of those components, yesterdays micro controllers, CPU, Ram, Rom, Transistors, Tubes, Electrolytic Caps, Resistors, Varistors, Nuvistors and whatnotstors...
Yep, they're old...but they've made me a finalist in various international Robotics competitions, given me freedom to invent stuff from scratch without making everything overly complicated, kind of like LEGO building bricks...you can make anything you put your mind to, and I like a CLUTTER FREE mind.
I do feel the pain of many of todays youngsters who have to go trough extreme learning curves just to get into "the game" from scratch, not easy. Everything is specialized and we literally have no jack-of-all-trades coders anymore, pity...that's what we need IMHO.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
With new processors being absurdly faster than they were 10 years ago, writing programs has never been easier thanks to the plethora of scripting languages available today. It seems like a lot of the tools are easier than ever to use, or still in use (make). Text editors like SublimeText or gEdit can help alleviate some of the terminal based text editor fear in a more "Word" like environment.
IDEs can do some crazy shit with little or no knowledge of what's going on in the inside, just sit back and "enjoy" the magic.
I personally write a lot of small programs, and I've never thought "this has gotten harder." Granted, I'm explicitly making the choice to use a scripting language instead of something like C, Java, Haskell, Erlang, etc. but due to the advancements in hardward-- why not? Unless you're programming low-latency server applications or games it really doesn't matter.
Maybe it's just a problem of you not finding, or having the right tool for the job?
P.S. Try scaling up a 100 servers on the cloud using Chef, then try doing that with tools/platforms from 10 years ago... No don't. It'd be irritating as shitting on an ant hill.
The simple programs of a few hundred lines of C++ long ago disappeared from my experience
I think the reason is, that people who pay for software have been bitten by "simple" programs too often.
With a simple program: one where you open a file, do some stuff and produce an output - that always supposes that everything works as it's expected to. It assumes the input file has the expected name, that it contains the expected data and that the format is what you expect. It also assumes that the data will fall nicely within the bounds of "sensible" values, and that the output can be written as the coder expects.
However, real-world data is never as neat as we plan for (especially when there is a deadline). There can be missing values, changed formats, some data is floating point or fixed and DATES. Can the "simple" code deal with DD-MM-YY and DD-MM-YYYY or even some people who randomly swap that day / month / year field order, or use names for months - or slip leap years into the fields.
Basically, with the "simple" libraries that most of us use, there is a fundamental lack of robustness. Our code works with data we expect, but coughs a brick with something unusual - or from a changed specification.
And then there's the security angle. There's always a security angle
These are the factors that have made "coding" a complex business. Simply because the simple coding models we use to knock out a couple of hundred lines of code with, have shown themselves up to be wrong, limited an unreliable.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
As a surgeon, I long for the good old days when I could just give my patients a rag to bite on, grab my hacksaw or a good pocket knife, and BOOM, DONE. Now I'm forced to use an "operating room" which has to be "sterilized" along with everything in it -- you wouldn't believe the time it takes! My boss won't even let me use my own hacksaw; instead there's this bewildering array of "scalpels" and "clamps" and things -- they're supposed to make my job easier, but I spend half my time trying to figure out which one's the right one for the job. Oh, and goodbye rag -- I have to have an anaesthesiologist now, and IV tubes for blood and fluids, and all these doohickeys to monitor heartbeat, blood pressure, O2 sat, etc. It's a nightmare!
Just let me cut!
Koans and fables for the software engineer
Yes, it is true coders have little time to code. But the author misses the primary cause: the ratio of library/framework code to self-written code.
In the old days (say, 25+ years ago), you would pick up a book -- a single book -- of the OS API calls, memorize, and start coding. Today, with github, it's as if everyone in the world were working on the same single project. Today, a developer needs to learn all these libraries that are coming out daily and how to work with them. In the old days, there was a lot of reinvention and co-invention of the wheel. Today, that is not allowed, because one has an obligation to "buy" (for free) instead of build because of a) of course, development time and b) more importantly, one gets updates/upgrades "for free" without having to invest (much) additional development time, and c) one's organization can advertise in the future for developers who already have experience with that particular library/framework.
To address specifically the reasons identified by the author:
But this new development paradigm of the global github hive -- where we're all essentially working on and contributing to this one massive codebase that we all have to understand -- is what the author missed. The amount of custom code to actually code is small now, and the majority of time is spent figuring out how to get the various libraries and frameworks to work.
From: http://vpri.org/fonc_wiki/inde...
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We are faced with a need for significant action and the odds are stacked against us. Invention receives no attention, and innovation (even when incorrectly understood) receives lip service in the press but no current-day vehicle exists to to nurture it. This wiki is an open invitation for talented individuals to pool their energy and collaborate towards fundamentally changing computing.
Over the years many groups have debated how to make progress in computing. There were likely as many opinions as there were people in the debates. Nevertheless personal accounts suggest that initiatives were sometimes reduced to a handful and then pursued with vigour. Consider what could be achieved by following the same pattern today, with the added benefit of doing it as a virtual, distributed team.
Our goal could be to capture the significant ideas and initiatives that we have been exposed to, are aware of, or can discover, distil them into groups, reduce them to a handful of concepts worthy of vigorous exploration, and focus our efforts on these common ideas with the eventual aim of making substantial progress towards finding a common set of fundamentals of new computing.
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See also: http://vpri.org/fonc_wiki/inde...
A big focus of FONC was in reducing lots of complexity. Smalltalk shows what is possible... But in practice new languages and new standards often just add more complexity to the mix and what we often need are better tools for dealing with complexity. And community and trends mean a lot too, as does hireability and ubiquity and easy installability. So, again, in practice, I'm moving to JavaScript with conceptually simple backends (even in, yikes, PHP) -- inspired in part by Dan Ingall's own work with the Lively Kernel which shows what is possible as near-zero-effort-to-install JavaScript apps.
My own thoughts on FONC from 2010: :-)
"fonc] On inventing the computing microscope/telescope for the dynamic semantic web"
https://www.mail-archive.com/f...
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Biology made a lot of progress by inventing the microscope -- and that was done way before it invented genetic engineering, and even before it understood there were bacteria around.
What are our computing microscopes now? What are our computing telescopes? Are debuggers crude computing microscopes? Are class hierarchy browsers and package managers and IDEs and web browsers crude computing telescopes?
Maybe we need to reinvent the computing microscope and computing telescope to help in trying to engineer better digital organisms via FONC? :-) Maybe it is more important to do it first? ...
It's taken a while for me to see this, but, with JavaScript, essentially each web page can be seen like a Smalltalk ObjectMemory (or text-based image like PataPata writes out). While I work towards using the Pointrel System to add triples in a declarative way, in practice, the web of calling cgi scripts at URLs is a lot like message passing (just more like the earlier Smalltalk-72 way without well-defined syntax). So, essentially, a web of HTML pages with JavaScript and CGI on servers is like the Smalltalk system written large. :-) Just in a very ad hoc and inelegant way. :-)
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A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
That's because in the 90's programming got more difficult, and programmers *liked* it. No more soccer moms entering the field because they heard it was a way to earn a decent wage.
Complexity makes programmers feel they can do things most people can't. So, they seek complex solutions. If it's not complex, it must not be the intelligent way to do it, since a lesser person could do the simpler thing.
They have it backwards, of course. The ability to reduce the complexity of a task is actually a higher skill.