'The Problem With Programming and How To Fix It' (alarmingdevelopment.org)

Jonathan Edwards has been programming since 1969 (starting on a PDP-11/20). "Programming today," he writes, "is exactly what you'd expect to get by paying an isolated subculture of nerdy young men to entertain themselves for fifty years. You get a cross between Dungeons & Dragons and Rubik's Cube, elaborated a thousand-fold."

theodp summarizes the rest: To be a 'full stack' developer, Edwards laments, one must master the content of something like a hundred thousand pages of documentation. "Isn't the solution to design technology that doesn't require a PhD...?" he asks. "What of the #CSForAll movement? I have mixed feelings. The name itself betrays confusion -- what we really want is #ProgrammingForAll. Computer science is not a prerequisite for most programming, and may in fact be more of a barrier to many. The confusion of computer science with programming is actually part of the problem, which seems invisible to this movement."

It wasn't always this way, Edwards notes, citing spreadsheets, HyperCard, and the many incarnations of Basic as examples of how programming technology can be vastly easier and more accessible. "Unfortunately application programming got trampled in the internet gold rush," Edwards explains. "Suddenly all that mattered was building large-scale systems as fast as possible, and money was no object, so the focus shifted to 'rock star' programmers and the sophisticated high-powered tools they preferred. As a result the internet age has seen an exponential increase in the complexity of programming, as well as its exclusivity."
"It is long past time to return to designing tools not just for rock stars at Google but the vast majority of programmers and laypeople with simple small-scale problems," the essay concludes, arguing we need new institutions to fund changes in both the technology and culture of programming.

"We've done it before so we can do it again, even better this time."

Comments

Re: Idiocracy

[MightyMartian]

So I'm thinking you're probably the very efficient and brilliant coder type that, put off in a room by yourself, probably does pretty good, but in reality, everyone hates your guts, hates interacting with you, you have no chance of moving up in the organization, because you have such an abrasive and corrosive personality coupled with extraordinary arrogance that the thought of you ever having any authority over anyone sends chills through both your managers' and your peers' spines. Eventually, because, you know, you don't get or even like women (the feeling is mutual of course), you'll write some long diatribe on the superiority of male coders and why women should be happy to just answer the phones in between squeezing out babies, and you'll be fired, become a hero on Breitbarts, probably get hired by a right wing think tank, and do fairly well because you'll be working with all the other spectrum disorder malcontents whose parents didn't have the good sense to send them to cognitive therapy for long enough for you to learn how move through life as a functioning and tolerable adult.