14 has no meaning outside of the month. 14 literally means the 14th day of the month. The month is the context. The fourteenth day of what? March. So when people say dates, it is perfectly normal to begin with the context and then the day. "What's the date?" "It's the month of March, and we are in the 14th day of it."
Why not then begin with the year, since that is the even broader context? "The year is 2015, in the month of March, on the 14th day." Because when people make appointments with each other, they do not normally make them more than a year ahead. "When shall we meet again?" "April 20th." It would be so unusual to make an appointment for April 20 of some other year, that we leave off the year. When we have to give a year --- "When was the Battle of Antietam?" --- we are already in the habit of saying month and then day, so we stick with it, and append the year, "September 17, 1862."
How do you say it? 3/14/2015 goes along with how Americans say dates: "March third, Twenty Fifteen." I suppose the European way, 14/3/2015, with its nice descending specificity, corresponds to saying "The fourteenth of March, Twenty Fifteen," or even as I've heard it said, "Fourteen March, Twenty Fifteen."
But in normal conversation do you say anything like 2015-03-14, like, "I will see you again on Twenty Fifteen, March 14"?
If my work didn't give me a laptop for free, I would be tempted to snap up a new Chromebook Pixel.
The self-anointed tech pundits are all scratching their heads. "Why such a luxurious laptop to just browse the web?"
"Just browse the web." That's the first lie. Web browsers, especially Chrome, no longer just browse the Web. It is no less than a modern GUI toolkit and practically a whole operating system. HTML 5 specifies that web browsers can run background processes, run offline, open and save local files, stream video, support instant chat, draw raster and vector artwork (<canvas> and SVG), and put up a large variety of widgets from just a little bit of code.
Chromebooks don't just browse the Web, they aren't useless offline --- or actually, Windows and Macs offline are just as useless, the way we use them today. About the only thing I'm still waiting on in a Chromebook is an offline video editor. Everything else --- word processing, spreadsheets, drawing, photoshopping --- are now available and pretty good. In fact, I think they're better, maybe just because they're newer, made by programmers who are wiser.
And who wouldn't want all the nice things in a Google Pixel: a solid build, a nice screen, a good keyboard, long battery life. The only point I agree on is that the processor is a waste, for most people. I would rather Google had gone for an ARM processor while keeping everything else the same, resulting in 24-hour battery life. I would rather get away with forgetting to charge my laptop one night than have that much speed.
it makes sense that a device that requires you use the Google office apps rather than native apps, would require you use considerably more memory and power.
Yes, it's ridiculous, but think of it like this: how optimal do you think a Google spreadsheet, implemented over JavaScript, the DOM, and XML, in turn implemented over various abstraction layers that eventually get down to C++ and some kinda linkage to the native widgets of the underlying OS, is, compared to a Microsoft/GNOME Spreadsheet implemented directly in C++, with a little abstraction but not a lot between that C++ and the underlying OS?
TL;DR: A device that forces you to run desktop apps inside a web browser will always need more power than a device that allows optimized apps to run.
Are you forgetting the other Chromebooks, all implanted with low-end processors? The Pixel is noteworthy because it's overkill. James Kendrick writes, "My old Acer C720 Chromebook had budget hardware when released, and still runs Chrome OS well." (Okay, his "old" Chromebook came out just a year ago. But still, it has a Celeron. Others have ARM processors.) The consensus is that Chromebooks are snappy no matter the hardware.
Just like the year of Networking it will never happen. If it happens it will just keep creeping up until you notice it is everywhere and then look back and wonder when was the year of X.
It amazes me how many people don't get this, and want to write a PHP "Front Controller" that uses a querystring parameter to select the "page", and then slap a mod_rewrite rule on top to clean up the URL. Instead of—as it sounds like you discovered—putting each page in its own file in the filesystem and letting Apache "route" the request.
Right. I split the program into more files, instead of mod-rewriting everything through a gigantic PHP controller. Of course any database-backed app must eventually resort to the query string, PATH_INFO, or something. I usually use those to specify just the record ID or search filter, not an app section. Each section gets its own file.
The study was over a single application. From the article:
The researchers selected a small-scale application (about 4,500 lines of C# code) used by the academic staff at the University of Kelaniya for scheduling events and managing online documents for evaluation. 10 common refactoring techniques were applied to the code (e.g., Replace Type Code with Subclasses, Replace Conditional with Polymorphism).
Not only did they study just one application, but they limited refactoring to these 10 fancy techniques specific to object-oriented programming (from the research paper itself):
R1- Introduce Local Extension R2- Duplicate Observed Data R3- Replace Type Code with Subclasses R4- Replace Type Code with State/Strategy R5- Replace Conditional with Polymorphism R6- Introduce Null Object R7- Extract Subclass R8- Extract Interface R9- Form Template Method R10- Push Down Method
In contrast, here are some things I do when refactoring:
- escape HTML in variables before embedding them in HTML, to seal against scripting attacks - rewrite database queries to use parameters, instead of variables directly from user input, to seal against SQL injection - move repeated code into functions - Make app use just one database connection library instead of two. Yes, that's right, the app made two connections to the same database, through two different PHP libraries, on the same page. The only reason I can guess is that the last programmer meant to move from one library to the other, but left the company when he was right in the middle of doing so.
and a dozen other basic programming techniques. You had better believe that such refactoring improved code quality. Typically the code shrinks down to 30-70% its original size. Often it runs several times faster. For sure it is safer. And having merged code that was copy and pasted all over the palce, it is a lot easier to make changes to thereafter.
Theoretically, I shouldn't have to do these kinds of things, because a professional programmer should not strew such code behind them. But every single one of my fellow programmers or forebears here has committed these atrocities. For what it's worth, I work on a corporate intranet. So I probably see worse acts than at companies dedicated to software.
You will always have to write some code of your own. Even if you use a CodeIgniter, AngularJS, and every prewritten function on StackExchange, still, you will have to write some code to configure the frameworks and to pull it all together.
You will always use some of someone else's code, too. Aren't you using Linux or something? You didn't write your own OS, did you? You're using a database, like MySQL or PostgreSQL or something, right? You didn't write your own database system, did you? And are you using a web server like Apache or Nginx?
So the question is not, should I write my own code or use someone else's. The question is where to draw the line.
I'm a web programmer, your typical LAMP developer (well, LAPP --- I use PostgreSQL). Like many PHP programmers, I first concentrated too much on the PHP. PHP is not the best language, as many have said, but I don't think it's quite as bad as people make it out to be. Anyway, I never took up any of the PHP frameworks. They seemed like too much trouble to adapt. (I should point out that I started with an intranet with a dozen or so applications already built.) I would research PHP frameworks from time to time, but always rejected them all, and felt a little self-doubt in doing so: "Do I suffer from Not-Invented-Here Syndrome?"
But PHP, and scripting languages in general, provide the right level of abstraction, I think. It takes care of memory management. It provides a bunch of functions for HTTP. It has its own templating syntax. It's great if you don't overuse it. In other words, in the MVC pattern, PHP does great for the View and, together with Apache, the Controller. But if you write a lot of your Model in PHP, with all this data processing, checking, calculations, etc. --- well, that's what the database is for, I think.
So, instead of eventually adopting a PHP framework, I learned more and more about Apache and PostgreSQL, and I learned that a lot of the things that I was doing in PHP could be done in SQL or in the Apache configuration, with a lot less typing (a lot more reading but a lot less typing). While most people are busy trying figure out how to write the practically all of the MVC in PHP, I realized that Apache was part of the Controller, PostgreSQL was part of the Model, and the browser was part of the View. I use PHP just to help them out, only when needed.
These are prepositions, any words that can fill in the blank in the sentence The squirrel ran ____ the tree, more or less: Up, down, around, about, in, out, to, from, off, and so on.
Conquerors and rich people mixed Latin and Greek into Anglo-Saxon way back when. There is no difference in meaning between, for example, get and obtain, any more than if I began saying the Spanish gato instead of cat. So we have lots of words that mean the same thing.
Respect is Latin, meaning look back. So when you say:
So I wouldn't feel too anxious about that, especially w.r.t. web programming.
you mean I wouldn't feel too anxious about that, especially looking back at web programming or looking at web programming or thinking about web programming. Even other pure English prepositions, like with or in, would work: I wouldn't feel too anxious about that, especially with web programming or especially in web programming. Since you already said about, you can even just leave it out: I wouldn't feel too anxious about that, especially web programming.
Are they not interchangeable? Could you have said I wouldn't feel too anxious w.r.t. that, especially w.r.t. web programming?
I think this misses the gist of his complaint, which was:
sites that require Javascript to perform even the simplest thing, like ButtonPress or to display the main article text
Note he said, "even the simplest thing." He means simple things, like showing the text of the article, just as he said. And though he also mentions something interactive, like pressing a button, I agree with him that simple things like sign-in forms and the button at the bottom of the form to submit it should be straight HTML submit buttons. Sure, decorate it with CSS, and check the whole form with JavaScript so that the user need not meet a big error page afterward and have to go back and type it all again.
You say:
To have any level of quality in the code delivering a web app, even a 'simple' one, you're going to have to use an html5 browser with javascript enabled.
If I take your sentence literally, it's false at every turn.
Later you say:
When I select 20 items to be removed, I don't have to wait for 20 page reloads on a slow connection.
Checkboxes. Delete button.
And you mention a "slow connection." Few people have a slow connection anymore. But a slow connection will hurt an AJAX app worse than a single-transaction form that you fill out and then submit. On a non-AJAX form, checking boxes will still be instantaneous. On an AJAX form, clicking each delete link will seem sluggish. It's only on submit that the HTML form would seem slow.
Don't get me wrong. JavaScript is fine and can make things a lot better for the user, like field checking. Even AJAX is helpful in a lot of cases. But what the parent seemed to be saying, and what I agree with, is that on many sites all that extra stuff has made pages slower and flakier.
In my experience, web development is a cocktail of competing programming languages, frameworks and standards. Rarely a developer gets exposed to a single technology for a substantial period to learn it inside-out. Even still, in web development world, deep in-depth knowledge in anything will be outdated in few years' time as new technologies roll out. So, what matter's today? Knowledge on a particular technology or re-usable engineering skills ?
Yes, even in Web development, you can spend years using the same stuff. Many developers do, especially those writing in-house web apps at big companies. I've spent ten years in the IT department for a hospital group, and I've been slowly refining my skills with the same everyday tools since Day 1: Linux, PostgreSQL, Apache, PHP, HTML 4, CSS, and JavaScript. SQL gives me the most mileage, and it's the oldest. As I move what code I can from PHP to SQL, it shrinks, speeds up, and covers more situations.
I've never taken any classes in engineering or computer science. I've heard mixed opinions on their usefulness. My background in English, especially composition, helps me everyday. I recommend The Elements of Style, On Writing Well, and The Mac Is Not a Typewriter.
So I wouldn't feel too anxious about that, especially w.r.t. web programming
I'm more anxious about the overuse of acronyms. For example, w.r.t. stands for with regard to, a longwinded phrase for about. The word about is five keystrokes; w.r.t., with periods, is six --- plus all the keystrokes that I have to make to look up the new crop of acronyms.
Most people can learn how to write a program that works. Few master design. Paul Graham wrote a great essay on design that captures what I mean: Taste for Makers. This is crucial because, as Brian Kernighan said, "Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming."
I've worked with just a few web programmers and interviewed just a few more. But in talking with friends and coworkers, reading articles, and in general just living in America, I get the impression that a sense of design is not a prominent part of American culture. In general we think that bigger is better, newer is better, and expensive is better. In general these are really bad criteria.
Then again, maybe it's that people can't even program. Jeff Atwood tells about how many programmers struggle with even simple FizzBuzz Questions:
Write a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100. But for multiples of three print "Fizz" instead of the number and for the multiples of five print "Buzz". For numbers which are multiples of both three and five print "FizzBuzz".
Slashdot Mirror
It's 14/3/2015 in the sane world.
14 has no meaning outside of the month. 14 literally means the 14th day of the month. The month is the context. The fourteenth day of what? March. So when people say dates, it is perfectly normal to begin with the context and then the day. "What's the date?" "It's the month of March, and we are in the 14th day of it."
Why not then begin with the year, since that is the even broader context? "The year is 2015, in the month of March, on the 14th day." Because when people make appointments with each other, they do not normally make them more than a year ahead. "When shall we meet again?" "April 20th." It would be so unusual to make an appointment for April 20 of some other year, that we leave off the year. When we have to give a year --- "When was the Battle of Antietam?" --- we are already in the habit of saying month and then day, so we stick with it, and append the year, "September 17, 1862."
It's 14/3/2015 in the sane world.
Nope, it's 2015-03-14 in the sane world.
How do you say it? 3/14/2015 goes along with how Americans say dates: "March third, Twenty Fifteen." I suppose the European way, 14/3/2015, with its nice descending specificity, corresponds to saying "The fourteenth of March, Twenty Fifteen," or even as I've heard it said, "Fourteen March, Twenty Fifteen."
But in normal conversation do you say anything like 2015-03-14, like, "I will see you again on Twenty Fifteen, March 14"?
TV is dead anyways
Not only are people cutting the cord, but the new generation is not even buying the large screen to put in their living room. Instead, they're using their laptops and tablets.
If my work didn't give me a laptop for free, I would be tempted to snap up a new Chromebook Pixel.
The self-anointed tech pundits are all scratching their heads. "Why such a luxurious laptop to just browse the web?"
"Just browse the web." That's the first lie. Web browsers, especially Chrome, no longer just browse the Web. It is no less than a modern GUI toolkit and practically a whole operating system. HTML 5 specifies that web browsers can run background processes, run offline, open and save local files, stream video, support instant chat, draw raster and vector artwork (<canvas> and SVG), and put up a large variety of widgets from just a little bit of code.
Chromebooks don't just browse the Web, they aren't useless offline --- or actually, Windows and Macs offline are just as useless, the way we use them today. About the only thing I'm still waiting on in a Chromebook is an offline video editor. Everything else --- word processing, spreadsheets, drawing, photoshopping --- are now available and pretty good. In fact, I think they're better, maybe just because they're newer, made by programmers who are wiser.
And who wouldn't want all the nice things in a Google Pixel: a solid build, a nice screen, a good keyboard, long battery life. The only point I agree on is that the processor is a waste, for most people. I would rather Google had gone for an ARM processor while keeping everything else the same, resulting in 24-hour battery life. I would rather get away with forgetting to charge my laptop one night than have that much speed.
Why not just run apps natively then, instead of in the crappy browser environment? Oh, right, Google lock-in.
Do apps written in JavaScript lock you into Google?
it makes sense that a device that requires you use the Google office apps rather than native apps, would require you use considerably more memory and power.
Yes, it's ridiculous, but think of it like this: how optimal do you think a Google spreadsheet, implemented over JavaScript, the DOM, and XML, in turn implemented over various abstraction layers that eventually get down to C++ and some kinda linkage to the native widgets of the underlying OS, is, compared to a Microsoft/GNOME Spreadsheet implemented directly in C++, with a little abstraction but not a lot between that C++ and the underlying OS?
TL;DR: A device that forces you to run desktop apps inside a web browser will always need more power than a device that allows optimized apps to run.
Are you forgetting the other Chromebooks, all implanted with low-end processors? The Pixel is noteworthy because it's overkill. James Kendrick writes, "My old Acer C720 Chromebook had budget hardware when released, and still runs Chrome OS well." (Okay, his "old" Chromebook came out just a year ago. But still, it has a Celeron. Others have ARM processors.) The consensus is that Chromebooks are snappy no matter the hardware.
Just like the year of Networking it will never happen. If it happens it will just keep creeping up until you notice it is everywhere and then look back and wonder when was the year of X.
Will this be the decade of Linux gaming?
Just like snydeq always posts links to InfoWorld, MojoKid always posts links to Hot Hardware.
It amazes me how many people don't get this, and want to write a PHP "Front Controller" that uses a querystring parameter to select the "page", and then slap a mod_rewrite rule on top to clean up the URL. Instead of—as it sounds like you discovered—putting each page in its own file in the filesystem and letting Apache "route" the request.
Right. I split the program into more files, instead of mod-rewriting everything through a gigantic PHP controller. Of course any database-backed app must eventually resort to the query string, PATH_INFO, or something. I usually use those to specify just the record ID or search filter, not an app section. Each section gets its own file.
The study was over a single application. From the article:
The researchers selected a small-scale application (about 4,500 lines of C# code) used by the academic staff at the University of Kelaniya for scheduling events and managing online documents for evaluation. 10 common refactoring techniques were applied to the code (e.g., Replace Type Code with Subclasses, Replace Conditional with Polymorphism).
Not only did they study just one application, but they limited refactoring to these 10 fancy techniques specific to object-oriented programming (from the research paper itself):
R1- Introduce Local Extension
R2- Duplicate Observed Data
R3- Replace Type Code with Subclasses
R4- Replace Type Code with State/Strategy
R5- Replace Conditional with Polymorphism
R6- Introduce Null Object
R7- Extract Subclass
R8- Extract Interface
R9- Form Template Method
R10- Push Down Method
In contrast, here are some things I do when refactoring:
- escape HTML in variables before embedding them in HTML, to seal against scripting attacks
- rewrite database queries to use parameters, instead of variables directly from user input, to seal against SQL injection
- move repeated code into functions
- Make app use just one database connection library instead of two. Yes, that's right, the app made two connections to the same database, through two different PHP libraries, on the same page. The only reason I can guess is that the last programmer meant to move from one library to the other, but left the company when he was right in the middle of doing so.
and a dozen other basic programming techniques. You had better believe that such refactoring improved code quality. Typically the code shrinks down to 30-70% its original size. Often it runs several times faster. For sure it is safer. And having merged code that was copy and pasted all over the palce, it is a lot easier to make changes to thereafter.
Theoretically, I shouldn't have to do these kinds of things, because a professional programmer should not strew such code behind them. But every single one of my fellow programmers or forebears here has committed these atrocities. For what it's worth, I work on a corporate intranet. So I probably see worse acts than at companies dedicated to software.
The condescending My Docs, My Music, et al should also go.
WHY?! This actually teaches / encourages people to store their documents / pictures / music in *one spot*...
It's the word My that is redundant, cluttersome, and a bit too condescending.
I was surprised in 2005 that so much was being done by human hands.
You will always have to write some code of your own. Even if you use a CodeIgniter, AngularJS, and every prewritten function on StackExchange, still, you will have to write some code to configure the frameworks and to pull it all together.
You will always use some of someone else's code, too. Aren't you using Linux or something? You didn't write your own OS, did you? You're using a database, like MySQL or PostgreSQL or something, right? You didn't write your own database system, did you? And are you using a web server like Apache or Nginx?
So the question is not, should I write my own code or use someone else's. The question is where to draw the line.
I'm a web programmer, your typical LAMP developer (well, LAPP --- I use PostgreSQL). Like many PHP programmers, I first concentrated too much on the PHP. PHP is not the best language, as many have said, but I don't think it's quite as bad as people make it out to be. Anyway, I never took up any of the PHP frameworks. They seemed like too much trouble to adapt. (I should point out that I started with an intranet with a dozen or so applications already built.) I would research PHP frameworks from time to time, but always rejected them all, and felt a little self-doubt in doing so: "Do I suffer from Not-Invented-Here Syndrome?"
But PHP, and scripting languages in general, provide the right level of abstraction, I think. It takes care of memory management. It provides a bunch of functions for HTTP. It has its own templating syntax. It's great if you don't overuse it. In other words, in the MVC pattern, PHP does great for the View and, together with Apache, the Controller. But if you write a lot of your Model in PHP, with all this data processing, checking, calculations, etc. --- well, that's what the database is for, I think.
So, instead of eventually adopting a PHP framework, I learned more and more about Apache and PostgreSQL, and I learned that a lot of the things that I was doing in PHP could be done in SQL or in the Apache configuration, with a lot less typing (a lot more reading but a lot less typing). While most people are busy trying figure out how to write the practically all of the MVC in PHP, I realized that Apache was part of the Controller, PostgreSQL was part of the Model, and the browser was part of the View. I use PHP just to help them out, only when needed.
The patents:
- 7,334,720
- 7,942,317
- 8,033,458
- 8,061,598
- 8,118,221
- 8,336,772.
Please stop posting sensationalistic InfoWorld articles submitted by snydeq.
Yay.
Since you already said about, you can even just leave it out: I wouldn't feel too anxious about that, especially web programming.
Maybe not, now that I look back at it.
For is another word that would work: I wouldn't feel too anxious about that, especially for web programming.
With or in are probably best, though.
These are prepositions, any words that can fill in the blank in the sentence The squirrel ran ____ the tree, more or less: Up, down, around, about, in, out, to, from, off, and so on.
Conquerors and rich people mixed Latin and Greek into Anglo-Saxon way back when. There is no difference in meaning between, for example, get and obtain, any more than if I began saying the Spanish gato instead of cat. So we have lots of words that mean the same thing.
Respect is Latin, meaning look back. So when you say:
So I wouldn't feel too anxious about that, especially w.r.t. web programming.
you mean I wouldn't feel too anxious about that, especially looking back at web programming or looking at web programming or thinking about web programming. Even other pure English prepositions, like with or in, would work: I wouldn't feel too anxious about that, especially with web programming or especially in web programming. Since you already said about, you can even just leave it out: I wouldn't feel too anxious about that, especially web programming.
Are they not interchangeable? Could you have said I wouldn't feel too anxious w.r.t. that, especially w.r.t. web programming?
w.r.t. is with respect to and about is not an exact equivalent.
What, then, are the differences between with regard to, with respect to, and about?
I think this misses the gist of his complaint, which was:
sites that require Javascript to perform even the simplest thing, like ButtonPress or to display the main article text
Note he said, "even the simplest thing." He means simple things, like showing the text of the article, just as he said. And though he also mentions something interactive, like pressing a button, I agree with him that simple things like sign-in forms and the button at the bottom of the form to submit it should be straight HTML submit buttons. Sure, decorate it with CSS, and check the whole form with JavaScript so that the user need not meet a big error page afterward and have to go back and type it all again.
You say:
To have any level of quality in the code delivering a web app, even a 'simple' one, you're going to have to use an html5 browser with javascript enabled.
If I take your sentence literally, it's false at every turn.
Later you say:
When I select 20 items to be removed, I don't have to wait for 20 page reloads on a slow connection.
Checkboxes. Delete button.
And you mention a "slow connection." Few people have a slow connection anymore. But a slow connection will hurt an AJAX app worse than a single-transaction form that you fill out and then submit. On a non-AJAX form, checking boxes will still be instantaneous. On an AJAX form, clicking each delete link will seem sluggish. It's only on submit that the HTML form would seem slow.
Don't get me wrong. JavaScript is fine and can make things a lot better for the user, like field checking. Even AJAX is helpful in a lot of cases. But what the parent seemed to be saying, and what I agree with, is that on many sites all that extra stuff has made pages slower and flakier.
Linus will write his own boot system
linus is a kernel guy. . . . my guess is that this is not a 'linus thing'
Then again, he wrote Git ;)
The most famous example is Steve Jobs deciding that the average luser was too stupid for more than one button on their mouse.
No, he just hated buttons, because in style he was a minimalist. To him buttons were clutter. Steve Jobs made computers for himself.
From the original post:
In my experience, web development is a cocktail of competing programming languages, frameworks and standards. Rarely a developer gets exposed to a single technology for a substantial period to learn it inside-out. Even still, in web development world, deep in-depth knowledge in anything will be outdated in few years' time as new technologies roll out. So, what matter's today? Knowledge on a particular technology or re-usable engineering skills ?
Yes, even in Web development, you can spend years using the same stuff. Many developers do, especially those writing in-house web apps at big companies. I've spent ten years in the IT department for a hospital group, and I've been slowly refining my skills with the same everyday tools since Day 1: Linux, PostgreSQL, Apache, PHP, HTML 4, CSS, and JavaScript. SQL gives me the most mileage, and it's the oldest. As I move what code I can from PHP to SQL, it shrinks, speeds up, and covers more situations.
I've never taken any classes in engineering or computer science. I've heard mixed opinions on their usefulness. My background in English, especially composition, helps me everyday. I recommend The Elements of Style, On Writing Well, and The Mac Is Not a Typewriter.
So I wouldn't feel too anxious about that, especially w.r.t. web programming
I'm more anxious about the overuse of acronyms. For example, w.r.t. stands for with regard to, a longwinded phrase for about. The word about is five keystrokes; w.r.t., with periods, is six --- plus all the keystrokes that I have to make to look up the new crop of acronyms.
Most people can learn how to write a program that works. Few master design. Paul Graham wrote a great essay on design that captures what I mean: Taste for Makers. This is crucial because, as Brian Kernighan said, "Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming."
I've worked with just a few web programmers and interviewed just a few more. But in talking with friends and coworkers, reading articles, and in general just living in America, I get the impression that a sense of design is not a prominent part of American culture. In general we think that bigger is better, newer is better, and expensive is better. In general these are really bad criteria.
Then again, maybe it's that people can't even program. Jeff Atwood tells about how many programmers struggle with even simple FizzBuzz Questions:
Write a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100. But for multiples of three print "Fizz" instead of the number and for the multiples of five print "Buzz". For numbers which are multiples of both three and five print "FizzBuzz".