Commentary On How To Make Novice Programmers More Professional (slashdot.org)

Over the weekend, my colleague David ran a story that sought people's suggestion on how to make (force, encourage, advice) a novice programmer to be more professional. Several people have shared their insightful comment on the topic. One such comment, which has received an unusual support on not just Slashdot but elsewhere, is from William Woody, owner of Glenview Software (and who has previously worked as CTO at Cartifact, architect at AT&T Interactive). He writes: The problem is that our industry, unlike every other single industry except acting and modeling (and note neither are known for "intelligence") worship at the altar of youth. I don't know the number of people I've encountered who tell me that by being older, my experience is worthless since all the stuff I've learned has become obsolete. This, despite the fact that the dominant operating systems used in most systems is based on an operating system that is nearly 50 years old, the "new" features being added to many "modern" languages are really concepts from languages that are between 50 and 60 years old or older, and most of the concepts we bandy about as cutting edge were developed from 20 to 50 years ago. It also doesn't help that the youth whose accomplishments we worship usually get concepts wrong. I don't know the number of times I've seen someone claim code was refactored along some new-fangled "improvement" over an "outdated" design pattern who wrote objects that bear no resemblance to the pattern they claim to be following. And when I indicate that the "massive view controller" problem often represents a misunderstanding as to what constitutes a model and what constitutes a view, I'm told that I have no idea what I'm talking about -- despite having more experience than the critic has been alive, and despite graduating from Caltech -- meaning I'm probably not a complete idiot.) Our industry is rife with arrogance, and often the arrogance of the young and inexperienced. Our industry seems to value "cowboys" despite doing everything it can (with the management technique "flavor of the month") to stop "cowboys." Our industry is agist, sexist, one where the blind leads the blind, and seminal works attempting to understand the problem of development go ignored. You can read the full comment here or here.

Comments

Re:tl;dr

[bobbied]

They say the brain is the second thing to go.. I forget what the first thing was.....

And they don't know about solved problems (;-))

[davecb]

A surprising amount of the resistance is plain fear: if you describe a solved problem in computer science, some number of the PHBs and some of the engineers will be frightened, and push back. Others will cover their ears and say "naa, naa, naa, can't hear that". After all, if they knew it was a solved problems and did the wrong thing, they could get in trouble!

The frightened folks need to keep an eye on the news: I reccomend the morning paper.

The person proposing a known fix should do so either very early in the project's life when it's easy to change, or very late, after a fiasco when it has to change. The middle is A Bad Time to change horses.