Getting Back To Coding

New submitter rrconan writes I always feel like I'm getting old because of the constant need to learn a new tools to do the same job. At the end of projects, I get the impression that nothing changes — there are no real benefits to the new tools, and the only result is a lot of time wasted learning them instead of doing the work. We discussed this last week with Andrew Binstock's "Just Let Me Code" article, and now he's written a follow-up about reducing tool complexity and focusing on writing code. He says, "Tool vendors have several misperceptions that stand in the way. The first is a long-standing issue, which is 'featuritis': the tendency to create the perception of greater value in upgrades by adding rarely needed features. ... The second misperception is that many tool vendors view the user experience they offer as already pretty darn good. Compared with tools we had 10 years ago or more, UIs have indeed improved significantly. But they have not improved as fast as complexity has increased. And in that gap lies the problem.' Now I understand that what I thought of as "getting old" was really "getting smart."

Comments

c/c++, vi/emacs, make, ddd

[mrflash818]

c/c++, vi/emacs, make, ddd.

Lots of good years of use, likely many more years of usefulness, too.

Re:ultimately the misperception is by businesses

[gweihir]

Really, that is completely ass-backwards. We do not need better tools. We need better programmers. I recently finished a medium sized project in C, using text editor, command-line compiler, commandline-debugger and svn only, and I found absolutely nothing wanting in my tool-chain. That was dual-platform development on Linux and Solaris (with the Solaris compiler and debugger on Solaris, not the GNU tools), and still, even an unified IDE would have benefited me almost nothing.

Now, it may be that I am stuck in the dark ages of programming, but I don't think so. My development speed and result quality is entirely appropriate and significantly better than average. However, I have observed that many "programmers" are indeed helpless without exactly the complex tool-chain they are used too and cannot even produce simple code without the only IDE they know. These people have no business producing software and, indeed, they do not understand the language they code in or the machine they code for. They "muddle through" somehow, having their hand held by the IDE. It seems these people are the norm, not the exception. It is really no surprise so much software is so bad.