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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
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!
"'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.