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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)