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In Praise of the Solo Programmer
HughPickens.com writes: Jean-Louis Gassée writes that once upon a time, we were awestruck by the solo programmer who could single-handedly write a magnum opus on a barebones machine like the Apple ][ with its 64 kilobytes of memory and an 8-bit processor running at 1MHz. Once such giant was Paul Lutus, known as the Oregon Hermit, who won a place next to Jobs and Wozniak in the Bandley Drive Hall of Fame for his Apple Writer word processor. "Those were the days Computers and their operating systems were simple and the P in Personal Computers applied to the programmer," writes Gassée. "There's no place for a 2015 Paul Lutus. But are things really that dire?"
As it turns out, the size and complexity of operating systems and development tools do not pose completely insurmountable obstacles; There are still programs of hefty import authored by one person. One such example is Preview, Mac's all-in-one file viewing and editing program. The many superpowers of Apple's Preview does justice to the app's power and flexibility authored by a solo, unnamed programmer who has been at it since the NeXT days. Newer than Preview but no less ambitious, is Gus Mueller's Acorn, an "Image Editor for Humans", now in version 5 at the Mac App Store. Mueller calls his Everett, WA company a mom and pop shop because his spouse Kristin does the documentation when she isn't working as a Physical Therapist. Gus recently released Acorn 5 fixing hundreds of minor bugs and annoyances. "It took months and months of work, it was super boring and mind numbing and it was really hard to justify, and it made Acorn 5 super late," writes Mueller. "But we did it anyway, because something in us felt that software quality has been going downhill in general, and we sure as heck weren't going to let that happen to Acorn."
As it turns out, the size and complexity of operating systems and development tools do not pose completely insurmountable obstacles; There are still programs of hefty import authored by one person. One such example is Preview, Mac's all-in-one file viewing and editing program. The many superpowers of Apple's Preview does justice to the app's power and flexibility authored by a solo, unnamed programmer who has been at it since the NeXT days. Newer than Preview but no less ambitious, is Gus Mueller's Acorn, an "Image Editor for Humans", now in version 5 at the Mac App Store. Mueller calls his Everett, WA company a mom and pop shop because his spouse Kristin does the documentation when she isn't working as a Physical Therapist. Gus recently released Acorn 5 fixing hundreds of minor bugs and annoyances. "It took months and months of work, it was super boring and mind numbing and it was really hard to justify, and it made Acorn 5 super late," writes Mueller. "But we did it anyway, because something in us felt that software quality has been going downhill in general, and we sure as heck weren't going to let that happen to Acorn."
... those with original ideas
We get to enjoy so many wonderful things, every single day of our lives, because of those who came up with original ideas - and work to make their ideas become reality
Solo programmers with original ideaas deserve praises - as for those who can't or don't - nothing special, reaslly - as they are just like all the millions of data monkeys throughout the world
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Once upon a time you had to write a type renderer if you wanted to write a wordprocessor, now the OS does that for you.
Once upon a time you had to drive the audio directly, now the OS does that.
3D? You had to write your own stack, now OS does that.
Really its a LOT easier for one person to write a full app these days, and behind a lot of those mega teams you'll find there is actually one person doing the heavy lifting.
I find it trivial to do major apps these days.
Surely there are a great many people out there who develop both android and iPhone apps, along with the web site and server that they go with. I didn't think the 'solo programmer' was an uncommon thing.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
" Once such giant was"
How about something entitled "In Praise of the Solo EDITOR" ???
Oh wait, this is slashdot.
This book has some great stories of the days when solo programmers reigned: http://www.amazon.com/Hackers-... It still blows me away that some of my favorite games from Sierra, etc were designed and coded by one person (art and all) while today you can't make a video game without a team of hundreds.
Sample Programs: http://www.qb64.net/forum/inde...
Another place with programs: http://www.thejoyfulprogrammer...
He can write a C++ compiler using only javascript.
He can build a robust modern MMO with no bugs in 2 days, using only a Commodore 64 and a case of Red Bull.
He can promise an application to solve all your company's problems, and actually deliver it !!
And he always puts pros before hoes
He's Davy, Davy Brogramar...master of all programming!
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
I think we need to accept people who don't work with others, instead of trying to squish them into the unsuitable role of "team member." I've been thusly squished, and I've won lots of praise for cooperating. No one seems to have noticed that my output has dropped by about 80%.
"I once preached peaceful coexistence with Windows. You may laugh at my expense - I deserve it."
-- Jean-Louis Gassee, CEO Be, Inc.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
In a way, Notepad++ was written by one person, right?*
*With a handful of contributors since 2014?
It's not famous or widely used, but my pet project MSS Code Factory started in 1998 and has kept me busy ever since. I think I'll finally be finished with it this year, though. I think it's time to find something new to occupy my mind and my time with. :D
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
The Apple ][ we had had a 64k address space, true. But it was bank switched. Main memory was 60k, as I recall, but the top 4k had an OS function to select an additional 60k that would map into the low-order 60k. So you had a high 4k permanent bank and two low switched banks of 60k each.
If you stuck to BASIC you never knew this was going on, and maybe it was only the later machines that did this. But us 6502 hackers knew it. A total of 124k.
It was many years ago; I think it was the top 4k but it might have been the top 8k. I thought it was so neat that Apple was using address lines to bank switch.
Obviously Minecraft shoots this theory out of the water. The first version was created by one person. Software can still be created by one person. I always wonder what software companies that employ thousands of programmers actually do with them. They aren't producing that much software. I think people just pile on because money can be made, and every manager wants their own fiefdom.
Or the quite unknown Hiawatha webserver. A very good alternative to the well known Apache webserver and completely written by one person.
It doesn't have to be like this. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking.
Solo programming efforts in the past are the stuff of legend (i.e. Knuth's LaTeX) But even several of posted examples were written by one person and then documented, marketed, sold, and supported by _teams_ of people. Software research literature beginning in the '80s shows that one properly skilled designer/developer could be better than 10 or 20 mediocre ones (see 'N-version programming' and 'software cleanroom' which led to the '10x programmer' buzzword). The 10x programmer is great, but finding one is like finding a unicorn. And once the code is written and debugged you still have to have a team to sell, support, invoice, etc. because the 10x guy doesn't do this stuff.
As for iPhone apps: if you're doing anything useful there's somebody developing on the backend - plus sales, support, etc.
Independently authored RollerCoaster Tycoon (almost entirely) in x86 assembly.
Another variation on the same story we get here every month or so. "Such-and-such is so complex now that the individual is no longer able to contribute anything truly new, as the stuff that one person can do on their own has already been done." That's the price of technological progress, people.
Sure, the exceptions jump out at us, as some of you are posting. But they jump out at us because they are the exceptions nowadays. As things progress we should expect that the serious front-line work will require more than one programmer.
I know, they do, you know they do, but everyone in IT has been trying to prove they don't. The one position in any IT that is looked upon as a mere cog is the programmer. Lose your Java programmer, hire another Java programmer. Most organizations are pretty bad at documentation and what most people don't like is that the programmer generally is the one who know how the "system works."
Most places I've worked there's an emphasis on team. I don't have a hard time with that and any programmer with a whit is not afraid to share what they know but then you introduce Agile and Scrum. The programmer is now given small tasks; basically you're the puppet for everyone who writes a story. Because these tasks are small, it's okay to do them over and over again in the name of agility. You're never going to learn anything about any system by working on an agile team.
Now a word about BAs. I've met some really good BAs. Most weren't very good. They end up being a layer of obfuscation between the developer and the business. They don't know anything about the business (except what the business tells them) and they generally are pretty poor at technology so of course they're the logical communication conduit between the business and the programmer.
There was a time when the programmer acted as BA and programmer. Now programmers are just implement. I've been told on more than one occasion to "shut up and code it" when I questioned a requirement.
The only way to be a programmer as describe in this article is to code your own project. That's really tough. You can poor a lot of love into something that is either ignored or becomes so popular a large company steals it.
The best modern piece of software I know of that is written by a single programmer is Total Commander. By far the best file manager in existence, anything you can think of in terms of file management is possible with it. Unfortunately Windows-only, I miss this functionality on Mac and Linux.
AFAIK, both are developed and mantained ba a single person: David Harris.
"There's no place for a 2015 Paul Lutus. But are things really that dire?"
This fellow Jean-Louis Gassée - pompous, witless and clueless.
Those were all single-programmer programs. On the Commodore side there was SpeedScript.
First: Some of the best stuff I ever worked on was entirely by me. For one thing, you don't have to get your point across to another person to know what you are trying to accomplish. Its actually very hard for lots of people to share a vision and work on it.
Second: http://www.paulgraham.com/head...
Well, not quite...I do have one other guy helping with a GUI admin tool that calls down into my system. But all the guts of my new, general-purpose data management system were written exclusively by me. I have a huge list of features yet to implement, so I could use a lot of help, but until someone steps up and wants to dive in with me, I am on my own. It is an incredibly ambitious product (think file system, relational database, key-value store, graph database, and distributed data management system all rolled into one big data object store that uses multiple data models) so there is nothing trivial about it. I have been in the data management business for 30 years (wrote file system drivers, custom file systems, PartitionMagic and Drive Image, cloud backup, etc.) and I have never seen anything that comes close to my system in terms of speed and flexibility. At this rate, it might still be more than a year before it is ready for use in a production environment but I still code on it every night and weekend. A video of my demo can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"PartitionMagic and Drive Image" - by DidgetMaster (2739009) on Thursday August 27, 2015 @10:42AM (#50402109)
See subject: If you wrote those, you have my respect (big fan of applications, not webstuff, here - & those are useful ones).
APK
P.S.=> Good job... apk
There are definite advantages to a solo-programmer project.
For starters, you can take shortcuts you couldn't take in a team, because there is a reason that you have all these coding styles and guidelines and templates and levels of abstraction and frameworks and all that other stuff, and the reason is "you are not the only person working on this project".
Well, if you are a lot of these constraints disappear. I love to write code with a low amount of abstraction, because yes, I understand its advantages, but if I need to hop through 20 levels of abstraction before I find the place where the actual (potentially buggy) calculation is being done, that's just a chore. In a team, where other people re-use your code, you want modular.
There are projects you can do alone. In fact, a lot of applications can perfectly well be written by one person with enough time. I've got probably a million lines of code in various projects that are all one-man projects or started out that way.
And frameworks make your job easier not more difficult. There is so much stuff in them that you don't have to re-invent or write yourself. I wrote one complex web-app using pure PHP and I don't want to ever do that again. With Symfony2 (my choice ATM) or whatever other framework you like, you can have a basic app running in one day.
What I find to be the problem more and more is not that you need more programmers. But that you need designers and graphics artists and UX experts to make a competitive software, application, website, etc. today.
Back in C64 times, you could draw a couple sprites yourself, even if you were not an artist. Yeah, they would not look as great, but it was good enough. Today, peoples standards are higher and while you can make a 12x21 pixel that looks similar to what a real artist might make, you will not do something that comes even close at 128x128.
So in summary: Absolutely, you can code a reasonably complex application with one programmer. Aside from a few edge cases it is really hard to create the whole application with everything as one person. Though in parts you can simply buy what you can't make yourself. Icons are not a problem to get for free or for money, for example.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
See subject: Almost TOTAL agreement here - maybe not about it being "the best there is" but it's good stuff!
* I've always like WinRar myself - compresses better than WinZip (& does more formats natively afaik, not lately, but from the past, better memory usage etc.) which I used to consider a paragon of functionality & form fitting perfectly. BOTH are...
APK
P.S.=> You know, there's NOTHING STOPPING YOU from learning how to make these things yourself really - ever consider it? Believe me - a few programming courses is all it really takes (suggest C++ here, most used) + a GOOD idea... apk
Who else had never heard of this software before?
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
Glad you liked them (PM and DI). Some of the best words a programmer can hear is..."I used your software and it really helped me solve a problem."
"his hosts program is actually pretty good" - by xenotransplant (4179011) on Monday August 10, 2015 @03:34PM (#50287195)
See subject & that quote "I know the feeling/what you mean" via that quote from others here.
(THAT, for me, IS a rarity here - as most make their monies from GOOGLE here afaik as webmasters etc. - they don't want their admoney cutoff - sure, malware makers might object, but I think they're the least of my 'enemies' - they just make more, like doritos, in malicious sites... admen, webmasters, & inferior browser addon competitors are the ones I deal with most, as far as "detractors"... funniest part is, THEY TOO can benefit by my program's outputs also!).
APK
P.S.=> You're right - word of mouth goes a LONG ways & it's what it's ALL about + inspirational too... apk
GoldWave was (and is) written entirely by one person and is still being updated 23 years later.
Geoff Crammond, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoff_Crammond
who wrote ALL the Grand Prix games.....
Solo programmer always codes first.
Good thing nobody told Notch that the days of the solo programmer are over.
While it's not a program that an everyday user would use, the application DragonFrame is the work of a single developer. This application is used on most of the major stop motion animation movies (Boxtrolls, Shaun the Sheep, Frankenweenie, etc.). I think that one-developer applications require a very, very good (aka "rock star") developer who enjoys working on one project for a long time.
- Silently checking in 12000 lines of code in the middle of the night and leapfrogging the entire development schedule by months.
- Spending 72 consecutive hours at the keyboard, sustained by caffeinated drinks and a desire to produce an end product that will make your users - and other programmers say 'Wow!'
- Delving into the voodoo and deep magic of a system, consuming it all and spitting it back out with ease, and being regarded with awe by your peers.
Yeah, these are awesome. The Story of Mel was an early encouragement to me; between it and the movie Tron, it put me on the path to being a software developer.
Lots of folks pointed out pro- arguments, so I won't cover those, but there are an awful lot of cons. 20 years plus into my career, I'm seeing some fatal flaws.
The first is the Bus Factor. A solo developer, whether in a group or not, does not facilitate the dispersal of knowledge. There's a difference between documentation - even the elusive technical documentation - and knowledge, and that gulf widens with each feature, bugfix, and release. In my experience, when a solo developer leaves - for whatever reason - it's often easier to start from scratch than try to maintain their software.
That leads us to the next issue, maintainability. As was described above, a solo developer can skip quite a bit; coding style, documentation, modularization, naming schemes, readability, unit testing, automated build and deployment, and so on. I've had to take over so many projects in my life that required more time to set up a working build and test environment than they did to fix the error I had been brought in to tackle. I used to carry a pack of cd's with precompiled versions of sed, awk, as, and other tools for various *nix platforms (and versions of those platforms) because these were often not just pre-requisites for the often complex script-based builds, but often only came in for-pay packages that weren't on the machine I was expected to work off of. I had a set of about 30 just for HP-UX alone (because you have no idea which version-specific behavior a given build relies on). Put it this way: every build required a port.
Of course, it's not just other people's code. I'd come back to something I wrote a year prior and it'd be horrible.
"Why did /THEY/ do this? Wait ... did I do this? Geeze, I USED to write bad code." - me, every. single. time.
I have a theory that only constant modifications to code keeps away the gremlins that cause bitrot. Leave a piece of code alone for a month, no commits (assuming you're even using version control), and they come in and crap all over your beautiful hacks and graceful architecture, rendering it just barely capable of doing what it was designed to do, and sometimes not even that. Yet, you write your code as if a team will handle it, losing most of the benefits of being a solo dev, and it's usable when you come back to it later.
Communication is next, and it ties into the maintainability above, but on a software development lifecycle level. When someone is silently making architectural changes and off doing their own solo thing, sure, they get a lot done. When you're completely by yourself, that's fine. What happens though, when you're doing solo development in a large company? Suddenly there's no code reviews, no understanding of department or organization architectures, or even just updates to them. Your code usually stands on the back of a whole architectural stack, and without two-way conversations, it isn't guaranteed to hold up. It's not just that you might accidentally reinvent the wheel - it's that you could do it wrong and limit the application (or have it die) later, with an expensive to fix systemic issue. Documentation fits in this category too - and why do documentation when you're a solo dev? You can always answer any question, right? Yo
But of course, they won't be considering the other prerequisites like reducing manager count, burning the timesheet forms (with the 30 second intervals), or offices with doors that close.
Ya know, I have nothing against Apple, and lots of praise for interface builder and the other tech that came out of NeXT, but is this AC honestly jizzing for Apple development products, or is he actually an alien trying to test how quickly Apple-haters will start flaming and others will argue frivolously over their favorite development environment?
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
Dwarf Fortress!!!!!!!!!1!!!1eleventy!!!!!
Here's a pretty cool article about Tarn Adams. His lifestyle sounds pretty similar to the guy in the cabin.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/magazine/the-brilliance-of-dwarf-fortress.html
"You cannot find out which view is the right one by science in the ordinary sense." - C.S. Lewis on Intelligent Design
that's mostly the work of one programmer, for instance luajit http://luajit.org/ mostly the work of Mike Pall.
He's transitioning to open sourced without him though.
It's not perfect (for instance writing his own assembler instead of using a standard one for the interpreter makes debugging changes to the interpreter hard).
In these days and age peeps can still make living selling image manipulation tools..... lol.... there's GIMP, Krita, Inkscape or Blender and of course there are the Adobe's stuffs... heh.
See subject: I'm impressed + I take you @ YOUR WORD (why not? Until it's time not to, I do)! I'm a former user of YOUR work!
I spent a 20++ yr. professional career writing mostly custom business info. systems (everyone needs them, no 2 businesses do business EXACTLY the same is why - so, there's always work) that managed everything from shop floor to all the business-related aspects that tied into the departments concerned - mostly all really!
You can do imo & experience, about 1 million lines of "bugfree & bulletproof" code yourself in a year but large systems are MUCH larger than that as you know & take more time AND MANPOWER!
E.G./I.E. - Code on front-ends are only part of it, reporting & DB work is even more (now 'semi-retired' & into realestate, occasionally doing custom app + network migrations for various Fortune 100-500's that contract me to do it - only thing that "gets me off my lazy ass" is the payrate (well over $45/hr. usually)).
Other than that though? I'm quoting David Bowie from "The Prestige" on this one:
"So, here I am, enjoying my retirement..."
APK
P.S.=> In any event, good luck to you in your future endeavors!
The future's MORE about DATA & INFORMATION, ala this creation of mine (yields more speed, security, reliability, & even anonymity) - about 40k lines of code I popped together in about a month:
APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-2 32/64-Bit
http://start64.com/index.php?o...
For free, for folks using it - ONLY GIVING FOLKS WHAT THEY WANT (their money's worth in bandwidth ads rob + more speed, & security vs. malwares etc.)!
It's far more efficient than browser addons &/or DNS locally installed (considering admen are bribing browser addons to not work fully crippling them, OR ala MS Edge not running them etc.).
Using what you ALREADY NATIVELY HAVE, vs. "bolting on 'MOAR'" for no good reason, in slower usermode (vs. hosts in kernelmode & part of the IP stack itself)... apk
I'm sorry, but I don't want to be an emperor. That's not my business. I don't want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone - if possible - Jew, Gentile - black man - white.
We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that.
We want to live by each other's happiness - not by each other's misery. We don't want to hate and despise one another.
In this world there is room for everyone. And the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way.
Greed has poisoned men's souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed.
We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in.
Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want.
Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness.
Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost...
The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men - cries out for universal brotherhood - for the unity of us all. Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world - millions of despairing men, women, and little children - victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people.
To those who can hear me, I say - do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed - the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish.
Soldiers: Don't give yourselves to brutes - men who despise you - enslave you - who regiment your lives - tell you what to do - what to think and what to feel! Who drill you - diet you - treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don't give yourselves to these unnatural men - machine men with machine minds and machine hearts!
You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts!
You don't hate! Only the unloved hate - the unloved and the unnatural! Soldiers! Don't fight for slavery - Fight for liberty!
In the 17th Chapter of St Luke it is written: "the Kingdom of God is within man" - not one man nor a group of men, but in all men! In you!
You, the people have the power - the power to create machines. The power to create happiness!
You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure.
Then - in the name of democracy - let us use that power - let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world - a decent world that will give men a chance to work - that will give youth a future and old age a security.
By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power. But they lie! They do not fulfill that promise. They never will!
Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people!
Now let us fight to fulfill that promise! Let us fight to free the world - to do away with national barriers - to do away with greed, with hate and intolerance.
Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men's happiness.
Soldiers: in the name of democracy, let us all unite!
* FROM -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
APK
P.S.=> Quoting a great man (Charlie Chaplin) from LONG AGO on that one - he said it better than I ever could... apk
There are several people who work on Preview.
Its the "eat your own dogfood", what helps.
A person has a problem, solves it with code and shares his program. He improves on the program, as he uses it and needs it, others benefit, too. He will be way more efficient and his product way more useful, than a hand full of programmiers, with some unclear specification, which needs to be worked on to check bulletpoints on a TODO list. They will do what they are told to, while he will do what he needs for his program to work fine. And if he sees that some idea won't work out, he will find another solution, instead of pushing hard until the TODO list item is finished, even when the feature will be useless.
Looks like some HR pukes modded you down.
Listen up kids: HR is there to defend the company, NOT you. Never say a word to them thinking they're your friend. They're looking for a reason to fire you and replace you with someone cheaper.
Ignore this advice at your own peril.