41–50 of 113 posts
I've been feeling like this lately, every now and then there are some interesting problems to solve but more often than not it's all just plumbing...
I seem to spend way too much time on what I call "guessing the magic password" - tracking down that one bit of punctuation in some obscure value in some xml configuration file that makes my whole system fail silently in one environment. I might spend 5 hours beating my head against a wall, only to finally figure out that this brittle system over here needed me to put some proprietary prefix on some host name in this one context. And at the end of it, I don't feel accomplished. I feel like I'm wasting my life! Figuring out which parameters to pass to which APIs in what order is a step above "guessing the magic password" - but it's not that big a step.
A few things come to mind. You can try to make sure you are one of the people writing the libraries. You can implement the next platform and use all the aesthetic sense you have in you to try to make it a joy for others to use. Put yourself in the position of the programmers who write the systems that make the rest of us age faster, and try to do a better job. Or content yourself with getting your programming joy from your elegant side-projects.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm pretty sure this complaint has existed as long as there have been programmers. If you want to program as they did in 1985, go work for a game company. Or find an investment bank looking for C++ developers; they're out there.
Last I checked, BOA in ATL couldn't find enough super good math/finance/C++ programmers, for instance.
Those were two excellent reasons that I had no interest when their recruiter came calling to ask if I was interested in applying to work there.
More seriously, abstraction is not the issue. The issue is poorly written libraries and languages that require you to worry about the small details. Your brain can handle many small details or a few big ones, but not both. I recommend picking the latter, and using libraries and languages that allow you to do so.
Hint: Lisp is really pretty swell.
My biggest gripe with modern programming is the sheer volume of arbitrary stuff I need to know. My current project has so far required me to know about Python, Django, Google App Engine and it's datastore, XHTML, CSS, JQuery, Javascript, JSON, and a clutch of XML schema, APIs and the like. Don't get me wrong, I'm grateful for all of it, but it just doesn't seem like what I was promised when I followed SICP for the fi…
Ever worked with Spring / Hibernate / Struts / EJBs / Oracle? If pain should have a definition when related to programming, then that's it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
By that example, I meant to highlight the DRY aspect of programming and how I realized, as an early beginner at the age of 15, that frameworks and libraries provide a good foundation so you can focus on more complex issues. The SQL I kept repeating in that application was simple CRUD functions on MySQL tables. I know that SQL is so much more than that.
Sql isn't more than that. That's the whole beauty of relational programming, you only have to write queries and views, and this simple abstraction does most of the work that you need to do (with pl/sql or t-sql it is turing complete and you don't even need to leave the rdbms).
"select name, pass, hash, email, realname from user where id = ?"
versus
session.get("User", x)
A Pharmacist (not sure what you call them in the US) spends years at Uni learning all about drug manufacture, how the body works etc, and now all they do is type script in the computer and hand over bottles of tablets
What does a signwriter do now? It used to be a skilled craft, now all it requires is typing text in a computer that then cuts the letters from a roll of vinyl sheet
Or Carpentry or any number of other trades?
If you want to program something fun, nothing is stopping you. Thanks to the libraries, you can concentrate on what interests you, rather than the details of how some standards committee thinks the word "referrer" is spelled.