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Ask Slashdot: Everyone Building Software -- Is This the Future We Need?
An anonymous reader writes: I recently stumbled upon Apple's headline for version 2 of its Swift programming language: "Now everyone can build amazing apps." My question: is this what we really need? Tech giants (not just Apple, but Microsoft, Facebook, and more) are encouraging kids and adults to become developers, adding to an already-troubled IT landscape. While many software engineering positions are focused only on a business's internal concerns, many others can dramatically affect other people's lives. People write software for the cars we drive; our finances are in the hands of software, and even the medical industry is replete with new software these days. Poor code here can legitimately mess up somebody's life. Compare this to other high-influence professions: can you become surgeon just because you bought a state-of-art turbo laser knife? Of course not. Back to Swift: the app ecosystem is already chaotic, without solid quality control and responsibility from most developers. If you want simple to-do app, you'll get never-ending list of software artifacts that will drain your battery, eat memory, freeze the OS and disappoint you in every possible way. So, should we really be focusing on quantity, rather than quality?
yeah — learning code should be hard and arcane and locked up in air conditioned rooms full of punched card readers, and the only way you're going to get to programme a computer is if you solder a CPU to a motherboard and your name is WOZ — like its such a horrible thing for a good elegant language to exist that finally replaces god-awful basic with line numbers, and is able to compile a mach kernal and the whole OS using the same language. — who wants a good easy deep language (or be stuck with java and objectiveC for the next 20 years!?) — the nerve of those folks, making good tools like this available for free.
we've been in a desert for so long, and now you grow up with good compilers and plenty of RAM — and i just dont get it — why the author is complaining!?!?
you can be handed good tools and still not know how to draw — but you may be drawn into the art and craft and learn and get better.
by the same logic — should we ban typewriters!?!? — because millions of people might now be enabled to write crappy literature!?
please dear author of this post — wtf!?
If a head and a book come into collision and the resulting sound is hollow,
the fault need not necessarily be that of the book! (Lichtenberg)
These 'zOMG, everyone should STEM up and become an app entrepreneur!!!' stories aren't really about the desirability of everyone having a career in software development. They are more a reflection of the fact that plucky optimists looking for what kids should do to be successful when they grow up are...not exactly...swimming in options. Yes, they are also letting the fascination with shiny trendy things distort their perception of the options, hence the fascination with who will make the next Social Twitfriend app, rather than who will write unbelievably dull line of business stuff; but in broader strokes they aren't pushing this because it's a good idea, they are pushing it because it's an idea, and they don't have another one.
The pronouncement that 'software is eating the world' may have been a bit hyperbolic; but it sure isn't doing the life chances of people without advanced qualifications any favors. "Everyone writing apps" sounds slightly better than "Everyone selling each other securitized bullshit", so it gets more face time.
I run a P4 3.8GHz single core system as my main desktop, even though I do development with it. Switching to a newer Core i5 system will make it run 10 times as fast, but as the runtime on my huge (tuned) code base is under 5 minutes already, it really won't save me *that* much time compared to *editing* the code. It will save on build time, which is a boon to me, but even that savings is only due to the nature of my build process -- I do full instead of incremental builds.
I do plan on buying a new machine in a few months when I've saved the money, but my main point is that the hardware we use has been "good enough" for a good decade. It is the crappy software the people shovel out that drives hardware upgrades nowadays, not the actual need for faster hardware.
So it is to the hardware manufacturer's benefit that as much software as possible be absolutely incompetently written crap so that people will buy the latest shiny-shiny because their old one is "too slow."
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
This is really just Apple, Microsoft et al trying to get cheap programmers. Not everyone can code the Linux kernel, but anyone without a learning disability can be a rank and file coder banging out data driven apps. Right now Apple has to pay $100k+ for some of those guys. The H1-B program helps, but it's never enough, is it? How 'bout $50k? $20? $15? How low can you go. All you need is enough food and drink to keep 'em going long enough. And so long as they get to look down on all those "non-Coders" (sorta like you're doing right now...) they'll be a-ok with this.
Screw that. Let's get back to Unions, worker solidarity and high minimum wages.
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A lot of the complexity is driven by programming languages themselves. The conflict between compact code bulky self explanatory code, not having to rewrite functions creating large algorithm libraries, coding conventions as they differ from normal language and maths use, language logic being simply the arbitrary decisions of the people who coded the coding language amongst other issues. What to know how bad coding languages really are, give code without any documentation at all and get another coder to figure out what is going one and how to fix problems. Why is this inherently bad, it is like handing a text book to someone, and they requiring a second one in order to be able to read the first one, even when they know the language used in the first one.
So what is this really all about, cheap greedy psychopath business types who have no idea at all about how to code but who want cheaper and cheaper and cheaper programmers (minimum wage cheap). So they want to flood the market with coders, whether by internal training as long as those coders pay for it themselves or by bringing in cheap temporary immigrant coders.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
I don't know about anybody else, but I've written in scripting languages (bash, powershell) and have usually been pretty good at determining arithmetically what a program should do. The problem is I get stuck on the syntax a lot.
It's not simple logical controls (I do proper for loops, do while loops, if/else/then, etc. just fine after googling for a few examples) but the APIs are where I really get stuck. Speaking of powershell, a lot of the stuff I've wanted to do involves a .Net handler that I've had to look up, and finding what I need to do sometimes takes a few hours or even days. Also, on scripting languages (ESPECIALLY powershell) I get stuck on figuring out why I can't pass quotes into a function or something like that (for example, I needed to make a script prompt the user for UAC admin permissions if not running as admin, and never could figure out how to make it work if somebody happened to rename the script to include spaces in it, because one of the functions used for checking if the user was admin had issues taking quotes. I had to ask on stackexchange how to do it, and somebody else figured it out, and the solution wasn't obvious at all.)
I've also had situations where I've figured out algorithmically what a program should do to overcome a certain situation, and posted my idea to developers on e.g. forums, github, etc, and they've actually implemented what I couldn't do because I didn't know the syntax.
I think the problem is a little more complex than that. Stupid people tend to have high self esteem, and high self esteem means among other bad things that they don't know their own limits.
So if stupid people learn to program, they are unlikey to be self limited to harmless trivialities and to try something important or dangerous.
Since people with high self esteem also tend to be good self promoters, and since we already know that business management is rife with people who can't judge technology or technologists worth a damn, the odds of stupid people being given something important to do is fairly great.