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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...
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.
It seems that you did not put the new cover letters on them.
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.
Sounds more like a cranky dev who graduated looking forward to creating Interesting Things(tm) and found themselves in the wealth of jobs out there creating What People Will Pay You To Do(tm) and is trying to find something grander than his lack of interesting job opportunities to fault it on.
As stated: If you want to create something fun with simple tools THEN FREAKING DO IT! There is nothing in this world holding you back unless all you are willing to work on is what someone is paying you to do.
...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.
Actuall, during a surgery every scalpel move does not need to be pre-approved by some clueless administrator. The surgeon knows his job and does it with great freedom. He/She 'just do' brain surgery
Nobody would survive a brain surgery if a physician would have to go through the same hurdles as a professional programmer
I don't really follow what this guy is talking about in general. But one thing I have noticed is that documentation quality on new tools/APIs has steadily gone downhill. For example, I am really excited about node.js, but on the page proper, their docs just dump some bits of info on standard functions. That ends up making learning something new, really fast, more difficult than it used to be because you have to go to 3rd party sources, they may be full of crap, way out of date or both. It is one thing to have to put in your time to get comfortable with something new, but it is another to have to act like you are hacking a black box to learn it.
Actually, there are plenty of doctors who would just like to treat patients. Instead they have to deal with insurance companies, malpractice, paying off their loans, etc. Just the other day I was thinking that this probably explains why there is no shortage of doctors who will give you a "420 recommendation" but there's a shortage of physicians accepting Medicaid patients. The Medicaid program isn't even being properly funded here.
So yeah, the doctors would really like to treat patients; but there's no satisfaction in it because of the system and in some cases there's not even money. You can't blame some of them for becoming pot doctors.
I guess maybe the equivalent of being a pot software developer is either to write black hat stuff, or work for the NSA or some other government agency that violates our rights. Kind of ironic, since the pot-heads would be on the other side if you took the government agency route.
Anyway, your analogy is flawed. You're glossing over the real issues. Any profession can be bogged down with beurocracy and complexity that's perceived as interfering with certain human factors. You can't just gloss over the issue so easily. Some of these extra tasks have a purpose and can't be eliminated; some of them have no purpose other than to satisfy the irrational fears of those who hold the purse strings. Those can and should be eliminated.
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
As things become more powerful, you can't just wish away the complexity. Maybe you can hide it in one of these 'shibboleth' things mentioned in the summary. That sounds big enough to hide things. Or maybe we could just use describe things more clearly -- but that's crazy talk.
Anyone can write software, but to make it sustainable is a serious challenge. Ive worked at corporations where there was a coding standard that everyone "was expected to know" but it was never told to anyone on their first day (it turns out that was the oreilly perl best practices book.) Im currently working in a shop on a 15 year old application with a confetti development pattern that uses tomcat, jakarta, java, josso, struts, postgres and mysql, as well as a host of other malevolent and unsustainable technology with zero implementation docs and minimal code comments. I understand the love of coding, but as a greybeard i also understand the need for the managerial aspect of it as well so let me try to expound upon what it is we seek to do. im sorry if it comes across in an arrogant way.
standards, practices, limiting scope and clearly defining goals and objectives prevent redundancy and wasted human time, which lets me keep devs longer because im not constantly sandpitting them in your 'just let me code' app. competent documentation and a service framework with a specific workflow ensure your application can and is debugged in a timely manner when it breaks, meaning I dont drive you out of the company with mandatory 24/7 pagerduty. ITIL and SCRUM are designed to ensure you arent a permanent part of the application, and that I can rely on other teams to help support it if or when you decide to leave for your next job at $corporation. Status updates and progress reviews really dont help you though, they help me. I need this information because at my meetings I have to run defense for you, my star coder. I need to know dates, times, and what it is that you're doing because I translate that into simple english for people in charge of my departments expenditures. "hes just coding" is never an answer i can give to my superiors, because ultimately as a management droid im responsible for you. if something breaks, thats actually my fault. and it makes the entire team look bad, despite it just being your code. If there is an unexplained cancellation and I dont convey it to you, that is also my fault and i expect you to hold me accountable. We're a team.
I love creativity, i really do, because it means I've hired a good developer. Find a solution, write an application, code a system, but i fully expect you to design it and come up with a unique and functional way to make it the best. But unlike college, the things you do here will impact the company you're a part of for a long time. your code isnt just getting read-and-shred by the adjunct prof, its expected to perform a useful function for us and as such there are dramatically different standards and practices for how you need to code. im only sorry college doesnt teach this; it can be an uncomfortable awakening for many grads.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I fully understand what he's saying and he's right.
I started doing software work in the early 80's and it was easy, fast and fun.
now, its about 'scrum' and 'agile' and all that stupid shit (sorry if that offends). we had a simple life with makefiles and cvs, but now the librarians are complex and not intuitive, the build systems are uber complex and the CI (cont. integr.) stuff is a big change (and a whole system in itself) compared to the nightly build idea. code reviews, enforced coding standards add more slowness to the dev cycle. bug reporting systems are also complex.
in short, its no fun anymore for us old guys. I fully see what he's saying. he's not talking about tiny snippets but getting shipping code out the door - its more process than it really needs to be, and the quality is STILL NOT THERE, so I don't think we made any real progress. and add in java where even idiots are allowed to write code (no need to free, whoopee!) and you have people who get lazy and if they ever have to write in C, they are totally lost.
lastly, there are too many fad languages and this wastes everyone's time and since you can't be good at so many things, it spreads you too thin if a project has 5+ languages in it.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Let's say you're a competent Java developer and you'd like to build an Android app. I wish you the best of luck!
First you're going to need to pick an IDE. I've always used Eclipse and hey look, there's an Android SDK for Eclipse. Perfect! Download, extract, fire it up... Errors. This version of Android SDK requires Android API version foo, you have version (foo - 9), please use the SDK manager to upgrade. The hell, the IDE bundle doesn't even launch out of the box?
Alright, so you're distributing your IDE with an outdated version of your API, I can forgive that. Run SDK Manager like it suggested, let it do its thing,. Update available for SDK tools and SDK platform tools, looks good, do it! ...And, errors. Package not found, blah blah, let's see what Google has to say about this one.
OK, apparently hundreds of other developers are having the same problem and have, after much wrangling, figured out a solution on their own. I see, I have to go into SDK Manager Settings, create a new User-Defined Add-On Site pointing to https://dl-ssl.google.com/andr... because the URL that ships with the IDE is missing the "s" in "https" and that server doesn't have the right packages available to download. That highly intuitive process would surely have been my first try anyway, but at least someone else found the fix.
SDK Manager seems to find the packages now, great! Got past that hurdle so let's do the upgrade. Wait, now what! What do you mean you can't upgrade to SDK Tools rev. 23 while SDK Platform Tools 19.0.2 is installed? I checked the boxes to upgrade them both; if Platform Tools has to hit rev. 20 before SDK Tools can be upgraded, why is the installer going in the wrong order?
If and when you finally get the actual goddamned IDE installed and working, have fun with the official developer tutorials to create your first "Hello World" app. See, the API has changed over the years^Wmonth^Wpast week and so the app architecture that the tutorial talks about isn't valid anymore. XML files that it says should be there, aren't, so there's no way to follow along in the tutorial by editing them.
I gave up on Android and won't touch it again unless I'm being paid to.
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
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.
Of course brain surgeons don't "just do" brain surgery .... in any surgery, there's a ton of pre-operative work, investigation, preparation, paperwork, practice, etc. No one just dives in and cuts open your head.... and just as no one administrator hovers over the scalpel's every move, no manager hovers over every keystroke, either.
The surgeon knows his job and does it with great freedom. He/She 'just do' brain surgery
Nobody would survive a brain surgery if a physician would have to go through the same hurdles as a professional programmer
Very true. By the same token, by the time your average programmer was done with your brain surgery, you'd have toenails growing out of your asshole for some inexplicable reason. "Oh, we'll fix that in the next surgery." *That* is why we have "clueless" administrators pre-approving their shit.
The brain surgeon has to be worried about malpractice lawsuits; the programmer does not. The brain surgeon requires board certification; the programmer does not. The brain surgeon requires twice the education and years of formal, on the job training before he is ever allowed to operate; your average programmer thinks he/she can write shit-hot code before they even graduate.
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
You are why spec and finished product do not match.
I think the main reason why spec and finished product don't match is because "spec" is a moving target that never solidifies. Agile processes just make it worse by not even attempting to nail down requirements beforehand - "it's more important to be able to show progress than actually know what we're supposed to end up with, and don't you dare document anything because it's going to change anyway" along with the idea that it's okay to spend thousands of dollars completely rewriting stuff as the requirements continue to change. It's impossible to properly engineer a product when you don't even know what the product is in advance.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
Programmers are just cogs in a machine nowadays.
Code monkeys are, and that's the way that managers who hire code monkeys like it.
There are plenty of programmers out there creating interesting and useful new software, and plenty of customers/clients willing to pay serious money for the value that software offers them without all the unnecessary bureaucratic overheads and middle management crap.
If you are a good programmer and professional in your general conduct, you owe it to yourself not to be a code monkey for anyone, IMHO. You have to be really, really unlucky with the time and place when your current gig(s) run out not to have better options in 2014.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
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.
I believe he's bemoaning the complexity of frameworks and toolkits rather than the tools used to work with those frameworks and toolkits. Technically he's correct -- things are a lot more complex than they used to be for getting the most basic of tasks done.
But you know what? Business isn't interested in basic tasks any more. They want it secure. They want it scalable. They want a web front end, and a desktop client, and apps for Android and iOS. The days of the old "read billing file, produce accounting records" code have not gone away; those projects were just done 30-40 years ago and don't need to be rewritten, just tweaked from time to time to allow for changes in regulations such as tax law or liability.
Even the last company I worked for wasn't content with a mere rewrite and update of their core business with the new software -- they had a whole new plan of integrating another 5 or 10 vertical functionality features into the system (it was just an autodialer -- they wanted integrated CRM, push button customer calling, call answering, call forwarding, a full phone system with voice mail support and enhancements to the ever popular auto-answering system of branching menus and responses, and the ability to deploy the whole thing as a multi-client web service instead of deploying custom configured hardware to the client sites.)
The frameworks and toolkits have correspondingly become more complex in order to support those needs. Look at the transaction processing systems of old -- you'd buy a number of seperate products including a message queueing system, a report formatting tool, a database engine, and a transaction processor, each of which had their own APIs and documentation. Each tool was relatively simple, but getting them all coordinated and working together was hard as hell. Now you take JEE, buy just about any message processor and database you like, and it all largely works with the same API regardless of which vendor's tools you chose. So while the JEE framework is incredibly complex compared to a transaction processor of old, what it does in total is also saving you insane gobs of time integrating and debugging disparate products. So technically JEE is far simpler than things used to be, despite the ramp-up learning curve.
The same is true of every framework or toolkit I've used for over 10 years -- they tie together multiple vendors products consistently so that only small tweaks are needed to adapt to the vendor's products rather than whole-application re-writes if you decide to swap something out.
Hell, take a look at what I did with Java, six different vendor databases, and JDBC alone for http://msscodefactory.sourceforge.net. The differences between each of those database integration layers are not subtle, but nor are they particularly arcane. All of the products have virtually the same feature set; there are just differences in how you use JDBC and stored procedures for each database. Compared to "the old days", it was a cake walk to do that integration and customization over the past 3-4 years. And remember I worked on that code by myself -- it wasn't a whole team of programmers dealing with the complexity. If one guy can produce that using standardized toolkits in 3-4 years, how can you say things are more complex than they were when it used to take a team of 100-150 programmers 2 years to produce something similar for one database?
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
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.