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The Technologies Changing What It Means To Be a Programmer
snydeq writes Modern programming bears little resemblance to the days of assembly code and toggles. Worse, or perhaps better, it markedly differs from what it meant to be a programmer just five years ago. While the technologies and tools underlying this transformation can make development work more powerful and efficient, they also make developers increasingly responsible for facets of computing beyond their traditional domain, thereby concentrating a wider range of roles and responsibilities into leaner, more overworked staff.
I don't see many changes. Vendors, managers, and salespeople change the buzz words every few years and talk of great paradigm shifts. Programmers continue to write code and produce actual results. In a perfect world the programmers get to choose their own tools. In the real world we have to use whatever buzz word compliant tools are thrown in the mix each year. They never actually live up to the hype and you have to dig in and find the code buried within and build stuff that works. I remember when the salespeople were touting dBase II and how programming would be completely changed. Right.
As a former COBOL programmer way back when during the mainframe era, and as somebody who has had to develop and maintain JavaScript code over the past several years, I can say without a doubt that I much preferred using COBOL.
Although COBOL is a verbose language and not always the easiest to use, at least it isn't shit-for-brains stupid like JavaScript so often is. When I use JavaScript, I often sit there wondering, "What the fuck was Eich thinking when he came up with this stupidity?" and then I wonder, "Why the fuck hasn't the JavaScript community fixed these fucking stupid misfeatures?"
So many things about JavaScript are just so stupidly broken, and there's absolutely no reason why they should be like that. They're so idiotically wrong that it's totally worth breaking compatiblity with existing code if it means fixing these problems. COBOL, while not the best language, was never anywhere near as fucking moronic as JavaScript usually is.
Because it is InfoWorld. Seriously.
Here's item # 3.
Do you remember the first time you used a library? But they're new because programmers 5 years ago did not have libraries.
It gets better:
Yeah. That's a radical new concept there.
Fuck it.
Tonight we're gonna party like it's 1995.
And, finally:
No it is not. Not they would not. Windows XP was released in 2001 and there are still people using it. That's 13 years ago.
InfoWorld sucks.
I've been doing this full-time since 1985, and the most distressing part is how little real change there has been in all that time!
This is quite possibly the stupidest article ever posted to Slashdot.
Ok, this month.
Yeah, it only runs the front end of EVERY WEBSITE IN EXISTENCE (which includes tons of "serious" SaS applications, and more and more "thick client" sites where the bulk of the code is in JS and the server is just used for database work). But yeah, other than that nothing mission critical at all.