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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 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.
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.
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.
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...
Minecraft is a great example. Written at a time where all major games had teams in the hundreds, and multi million dollar budgets. Everyone had declared the solo programmer dead.
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?...
But in order to get Minecraft or Cave Story or any of the other solo success stories onto game consoles everywhere, the team had to become a lot more than just Markus Persson or Daisuke Amaya.
Efficiency in modern business is measured by how many hours you spend in your cubicle chair like an inflatable Bozo doll looking like you're typing something. Not on actual production of a quality product.
And you're expected to be 110% efficient, so if you could come in Saturday ... that would be great.
I was one of 4 programmers that wrote the first 3 or 4 versions of PartitionMagic. I was the only programmer on the Drive Image team for its first 2 versions. After it started bringing in a few million $ in sales, the company (PowerQuest) decided to add some other programmers to the team to help me :)
Measuring productivity is hard. Butt-in-seat time is easy.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
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
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."
Part of it I think is there is a lot of software features that don't make it into production and then a lot of supporting code to control the testing servers, test data generation etc etc. My work on my project for example, about 10 server devs, 5 client side, and 3 "tools" guys that keep the CI servers running, deploy all the test environments and generally automate things. So that is 30% right off the top that a customer will never "see". Then for one reason or another an API server side creates has maybe a 50% chance of actually having a client side developer call it, and often in a year or two by the time they get around to their side of the feature the UI has been completely re-thought up and so they need different data at different times, or different business rules etc. Obviously there is room for improvement here but the end result is roughly the same: maybe a factor of 2X could be generated, but still would have over 50% of the time wasted on non-customer generated activity. A profitable business will suck in business analysts, manual and automatic testers, the IT/devs that support those systems, potentially coder/technical sales guys (a la something like big Oracle Sql Server project) or coder/custom configuration guys (a la SAP and the like).
The beauty of the "one person" project is (we assume since we have little public evidence to the contrary): is they made something useful that actually hit a market demand the first time out. They had less need for support stuff because they don't have a dozen internal stakeholders and another dozen testers all demanding testing environments updated at different schedules with different featuresets turned on and off etc. Once they hit a homerun and be come popular I bet a whole lot of "business processes" get slapped on/around that golden goose and the efficiency goes way down. Of course those that choose not to make a business/worry about profitability like the Notepad++ guy can happily keep coding whichever features s/he want to add without adding a whole lot of bloat.
I am surprised no one mentioned apk. He single handedly created a host files solution to block spam and malware. The one man team is not dead. The legend of APK lives on.
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).
Measuring productivity is situation sensitive where everyone is in a different situation and the number of situations are infinite and can vary wildly between any two people. You also have the whole issue of "quality" where increased quality can reduce the current situation's productivity for an overall increase of productivity in the future.
The scaling of productivity to the number people on the team can be very strange. going from one person to two can over double output, doubling yet again may be slightly less than double the output, yet another doubling may be more around 50% increase, doubling yet again may be more like 25%, and doubling yet again may have negative performance gains.
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.
But in order to get Minecraft or Cave Story or any of the other solo success stories onto game consoles everywhere
Have a look at the nowhere demos.
From the FAQ:
I see nothing about a console port. My point is that it takes a larger team to shepherd a game through console makers' bureaucracy.
Cool piece of software, thanks for posting! I've got a box of it floating around somewhere still. Thanks for the effort, you helped the rookie me and my parents.
Man blir trött av att gå och göra ingenting.