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'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."
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."
What you get when you let coders decide where to go is nothing. Ever. At least nothing that's ever done. Mostly because you get this and that and something else because all of those things are absolutely necessary, and then eternity to accomplish it all. If programmers were to make a toaster, it could toast anything from bread to waffles to muffins and even your sweater, because someone sometimes thought it might be helpful (but we don't remember who said that, but we also can't remove that sweater-module anymore without breaking the rest), it would measure its own temperature based on all the toasting done before to determine the perfect toasting temperature and time (both would be measured by three different sensors and devices), you'd have to give detailed feedback on your toasting and eating experience that would then be used to create a heuristic based on world wide averages... Well, that's the theory. Right now it's basically a stove top with a pan attached.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I see that many professionals might be able to use basic programming skills to be more efficient and productive. But most programming tasks require basic logic, math, reading comprehension and critical thinking skills. The very skills many entities in our education system are failing in their attempts to teach. Not to mention the drift away from the 3 R's and the moves to gender and social focus points of our educational curriculum
;)
I wonder what percentage of individuals have the core foundation to even absorb how to write code.
Just my 2 cents
I don't get why the notion of "full stack developer" is such a big deal. I mean, do people go to build a home and say, "I want an 'all trades craftsman'."? Or do people go looking for a doctor and say, "I want an 'all specialties surgeon'."?
Of course not. Certainly there are people in every skilled profession who could be classified as generalists. They can probably handle most small things that are not very highly specialized and, if they are good at their profession, they know when something is outside of their skillset and can provide a link to a specialist that can handle it.
I am not saying that we should make technology and programming more difficult than they need to be. But, let's face it, there is a tremendous amount of knowledge, skill, and experience one must acquire in order to be a good programmer. It is very difficult to acquire all of that for what would qualify as "full stack."
I think it was Stroustrup (or maybe Dijkstra), speaking on the idea of making programming "easier" so more people could be programmers with far less training and education, who said something to the effect of "I wouldn't want a surgeon operating on me who only had 6 weeks of training."
Maybe I misread/misunderstood this article but I read this as, 'let's dumb down computer programming".
Yes! Good! We need to get over this god-complex if we're ever going to sort out our profession. Programming *needs* to be easier, you can't just continually hire super-intelligent people because there just aren't enough of them. And even when you do, they still produce poor bug-ridden code, because the task is just too hard.
The level of complexity in computing is all but impossible for any reasonable human to handle. A really big portion of my days is spent finding things in other people's code (ie mainstream libraries) that don't work as they should, and god knows what mistakes I am personally putting out into the world. If big players (eg this week I found horrible problems with Google & Dropbox code) can't provide consistently working libraries what hope do the rest of us have, with tight deadlines and limited intelligence.
Every other profession, medicine, law, accountancy, engineering, have to deal with the fact that not everyone is a genius, and have systems and checks in-place that means people don't have to be flawless to work in them. Until computing is the same, it will remain a wild-west hobby. Programmers need to get over their pride.
... people don't want to learn. No doubt tools can always be better but knowing how to improve them is a non trivial undertaking. They want easier to use tools but those "easy to use tools" take decades of research and development to make. If good tools were so easy to make they would already exist.
Computers programs are only as good as the coneptual and modelling approach you use. Consider many 2D videogames who render spries as largely square/rectangle block, if you want two sprites to do something complex like melt into one another, that would require 1) faking it or 2) coming up with an entirely new way to model and animate sprites that broke them down into individual pixels/atomic components.
The problem with computers for normal people, is that computers force you to specify and make clear your thoughts and most peoples thoughts are hopelessly vague. That's why people are frustrated they simply do not know nor understand the complexity of the work they are asking when the want some problem "they think is easy" to be be rigorously quantified before you can code up a solution in a program.
He seems a lot smarter than I am and so I do not want to dismiss what he is saying... but I cannot possibly see how programming is harder than it used to be.
It seems like he is looking at the languages and tool chains used in the enterprise, and complaining that they are not suitable to get Joe Sixpack programming, while ignoring all the incredibly easy ways for somebody to make something useful at home. And, I'm sorry to say it, but the most obvious counter-example to what he is saying is... Python.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
It's not the 80s anymore. Useful systems are complex, have many layers, and tend to grow new layers over time.
In the 90s, a web page was a static .html file. Some minimum understanding was enough to make one.
Later, CGIs were added. Now you need some understanding of HTTP.
Add a database. Now you need to understand SQL, and related matters, like SQL injection.
Add JavaScript. A whole new language to deal with.
Add dynamic content. Suddenly, the page isn't a static thing, there's a DOM that's being modified in real time.
Add a growing internet, with many users of your page. Now you need to know how to make a scalable system, and how to design a proper database.
Add cloud computing, where the underlying infrastructure itself can be scaled in real time, and where you can get extra database servers if you need them for a couple hours.
Add internationalization, and now the programmer has to be aware of Unicode, different date formats and so on.
With each added feature and with each added layer the complexity grows. And you can't just throw your hands up and say "fuck this, let's do it like we did in the 90s", because all those things were added for a reason. Without Unicode, you have problems with your international clients. Without dynamic content your page is clunky and slow compared to the competition. Without planning for scalability, your infrastructure falls down right when your business is on the front page of Reddit.
I get the nostalgia for the good old and simple times, but that never lasts. As soon as a new tech emerges, people build on top of it, and then on top of that, and so on, and things escalate until it's hard for a single person to deal with all of it anymore.
Anyone can program.
Hell when I started I could crank code like it was nothing. But guess what. That code was total crap. I mean it was *very* *very* *very* badly written.
Once I learned a good amount of CS I became much better. I did not make terrible memory mistakes. Big 'oh' is a thing and it matters at all levels memory, cycles, instructions, time, etc. It maters it takes a decent math foundation to understand it.
Once I got the CS degree I still was fairly 'mediocre' at it. At least my code was not terrible. It was not exactly great either. That has take years of practice and time. Tooling around it has helped pick off the silly 'typo' mistakes. But not all. Also more practice. This is an art. We are craftsman. We can use science and math to build our art. But art it is. Once you realize that you can figure out how to make CS great again.
One of the biggest lessons is. Do not worry about 'stacks'. HR worries about them because the managers think they need to worry about them. What you want is well rounded individuals who can grok the idea of how the stack you are using works and is not an ass to work with.
We have ended up with giant sweeping stacks that no one person can understand because of 'crunch'. Everyone in the industry wears it like a badge 'I work X hours per week'. That sort of work ethic create crap. You are not stopping and using the the thing holding your ears apart on how people will use your 'latest greatest API which is trending #1 on stackoverflow'.
Leaky abstractions are dead easy to make. Ones that 'just work'. Those are hard to make. I am currently in the process of picking up spring. What an un-holy mess of a stack. Oh you can do great things fairly quickly. But the one thing everyone bitches about is 'how do I debug this bitch with its 200 line stack traces'. That is one of the 'popular' ones! So everyone is floundering around trying different stacks and transpilers to spackle over the defects of a poor language choice in our browsers. We are also winding up to create the worlds largest lockin of code ever with webassembly. Then deriding our languages for the 'bad' things that are going on (hell I just did it). So we invent 3 more that do pretty much the same mistakes eventually.
So yeah CS/Programming is hard. Because we are too busy trying to be the next vendor lockin and putting in way too many hours on stacks that just do not help get shit done. But hey at least I am trending and have a banging blog and youtube video series that no one gives a crap about!
You might as well suggest that people could master painting or mechanical engineering or something without putting in a time investment.
I'm all for getting more people to code. I'm all for an introductory language for new coders.
But when it comes to the big league heavy lifting coding, it is going to be complicated because it is complicated.
It isn't complicated because some "nerds" made it complicated. It was complicated before anyone coded at all. It is inherently complicated.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Everyone must be a surgeon.
Not those rare few uppity elites who can afford the education.
It's discrimination I say!
We need to change how the human body operates to make it easier for more people to work on.
Like I said - god complex.
You are not a surgeon. Also, we need waaaaaay more programmers than surgeons.
"'let's dumb down computer programming".
What's wrong with that? The trick would be HOW to dumb down computer programming without ending up with an intractable shambles like the last 50000 attempts to do so.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
Well, I like that it's wild west because, at the end of the day, merit still counts. You sound like some phb who thinks engineering is factory work. It's not.
I mean - I enjoy the wild-west nature. I just know it can't continue.
Until we have worked out how to build software in the same way an architect designs a building, where it can be proven to be strong enough to withstand the forces against it, we'll be in trouble.
It is that easy. The problem is that many people can't think logically or break down problems into manageable parts. By the way, I can show you "issues lists" of automobiles, or buildings, or airplanes, anything moderately complex. Every system that has complexity has issues. You software guys think that software is the only thing that have bugs.
The problem is that it's impossible. The complexity of software comes from the complexity of the underlying problem. No matter where you move the complexity, whether it's from the frontend to the backend, or from an application to a library or to the OS, it still exists. Someone needs to understand that complexity to create working software for it.
Lay people, especially managers, like to think "if we just used library X" that could take care of all the hard stuff. The reality is, using library X now becomes the hard part. It could be bugs, performance problems, bad behavior for certain edge cases, incompatible API changes or security problems. In many cases it could be worse to work across an abstraction layer like that, since the business-destroying bug you're running into is just one of thousands that the upstream developer has to deal with.