Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Whatever happened to programming?

reprog.wordpress.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 113 posts

Re: Whatever happened to programming?

#91

Post by lollynoob »

jrockway wrote: post #56
jdietrich wrote: post #30

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…

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. This is the price you pay for being able to work with other people. If you never wanted to reuse anyone else's code or talk to anything else on the Internet, you would not need to know any of this. To stand on the shoulders o…

"Standing on the shoulders of giants" is exactly what's wrong with programming, and technology in general. If we keep doing this, we'll eventually build up so much information that when the foundations (the "giants") need repair or improvement, nobody will know how to fix them. You should never rely on someone else's work without fully understanding it yourself, and in programming that usually means it's best to write things from scratch. There needs to be more praise for re-inventing the wheel.

Re: Whatever happened to programming?

#92

Post by arethuza »

tseabrooks wrote: post #81
arethuza wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It all depends on the context - sure on some platforms (mostly embedded) it's just your binary and the hardware. Anything else, where you start having dependencies on components sourced from elsewhere then you are in this situation. Personally, I don't really see what the problem is - looking at and using other peoples software is usually a great learning experience.

This is why I'm an embedded engineer. I don't want to muddle through all of the 'bajillion' different frameworks, languages, etc. Need a window manager? Wrote one. Need a function not implemented in our custom graphics driver? Implemented it. Want to toy around with speeding up software bitblt? Go for it, and good luck. Though that doesn't mean we don't use third party libraries, I just think we have far more flexibi…

Well, I don't know about you, but I suspect that my efforts to write an IDE, OS kernel, database engine, virtual machine host environment are probably going to be rather worse than the ones that already exist. So I'm quite happy to use existing ones.

Re: Whatever happened to programming?

#93

Post by arethuza »

lollynoob wrote: post #91
jrockway wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. This is the price you pay for being able to work with other people. If you never wanted to reuse anyone else's code or talk to anything else on the Internet, you would not need to know any of this. To stand on the shoulders o…

"Standing on the shoulders of giants" is exactly what's wrong with programming, and technology in general. If we keep doing this, we'll eventually build up so much information that when the foundations (the "giants") need repair or improvement, nobody will know how to fix them. You should never rely on someone else's work without fully understanding it yourself, and in programming that usually means it's best to writ…

Please tell me you are trolling.

Re: Whatever happened to programming?

#94

Post by logicalmind »

jrockway wrote: post #50

Programming for the sake of programming and programming to solve real-world problems are two different things. The first is more fun, the second is more profitable. Since most people want money rather than fun, most programming is of the second type. 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 st…

I think your comment hits the nail on the head. I've worked with web apps for a long time and I quickly learned that all I was doing was writing software for some business process. This isn't the sexiest work or the most interesting, but it has never stopped me from doing interesting things.

For example, I try constantly make less work for myself. So much of the code we write is boilerplate so I have various tools that generate as much code as possible. I have written mini languages that specify the important parts and then generate all of the plumbing around it. I won't run out of interesting problems until I can generate an application by specifying the important parts (to the business) and generating everything.

Re: Whatever happened to programming?

#95

Post by iron_ball »

jasongullickson wrote: post #80
pistoriusp wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is precisely why I think I enjoy developing for the iPhone more than web development. Yes, Cocoa is a massive library, but it has 99% of the things that I need. I think in objective-c and cocoa. When it comes to web development I'm doing 100's of tiny little things in 2 different languages with 2 different markups to get something done.

Tone and I were discussing just this subject over lunch yesterday. We were talking about why some people love working in Objective-C and why others abhor it and came to the general conclusion that it is more of a philosophical issue than a technical one. That the bits given to you by Cocoa provide the minimum functionality required while the frameworks of other environments try to cover every piece of functionality i…

This actually helps sum up why I like doing Flash work in Actionscript. AS3 has a single fairly narrow standard API with consistent structure and conventions. Flex has a much larger API, but still with consistent structure and conventions. When I stray from the comfort of my (admittedly user-unfriendly) marketing microsites toward the wooly harum-scarum of HTML/PHP/non-jQuery-Javascript, I feel slightly sick to my stomach.

On the other hand, Django/jQuery is pretty sweet. I think it's a matter of working with orthogonal and well-designed systems, more than the number of systems.

Re: Whatever happened to programming?

#96

Post by sovok »

nw wrote: post #77
jdietrich wrote: post #30

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…

> 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. The situation seems ripe for a disruptive technology to emerge.

Curl tries to be this. I remember reading articles about it years ago, but it never really took of: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curl_%28programming_language%29

Re: Whatever happened to programming?

#97

Post by locopati »

gamble wrote: post #31
houseabsolute wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Javaschools, PHBs, and other failed attempts at the commoditization/regularization of the software engineer brought this about. Personally I am glad the same thing happened to other industries like shoemakers and car builders. They have been commoditized: so what? It's good for people who buy their product. The same is true of typical software engineering work. Although I disagree about the extent to which our work…

The problem with the software industry is that it isn't productized. Probably the majority of programmers are working for internal corporate IT departments cranking out CRUD apps because the company mistakenly believes it's a precious, unique snowflake that couldn't possibly make do with off-the-shelf software for routine business processes, even though they derive no competitive advantage from custom software. Most…

The assumption that cheap, standardized software is either cheap or standardized is a false one. Take the content-management space. For a complex site serving millions of viewers with 100k+ pages, off-the-shelf solutions can be quite expensive (when you account for the initial investment, the time-to-learn, the internal development work required to implement customizations) and often you need to customize the solution.

In the end, you end up with a custom solution layered on top of a specific implementation (so, no standardization even if you started from the vanilla off-the-shelf). Implementing a tool that's specific to the needs of the company can turn out to be a reasonable decision.

Re: Whatever happened to programming?

#98

Post by lollynoob »

arethuza wrote: post #93
lollynoob wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Standing on the shoulders of giants" is exactly what's wrong with programming, and technology in general. If we keep doing this, we'll eventually build up so much information that when the foundations (the "giants") need repair or improvement, nobody will know how to fix them. You should never rely on someone else's work without fully understanding it yourself, and in programming that usually means it's best to writ…

Please tell me you are trolling.

Why would I be trolling? Sure, it's an unpopular opinion, but I'm expressing it sincerely. The idea that you should continually build on the work of others is insane--do you build buildings like that? Constantly tacking on parts as they're needed, never re-analyzing the foundations? Of course not. Why, then, should the same work for software or science? All that results in is an excess of information; I'm suggesting that it's better to trim that excess by constantly rebuilding and refining the basics, rather than building monstrosities upon monstrosities.

Re: Whatever happened to programming?

#99

Post by gamble »

locopati wrote: post #97
gamble wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with the software industry is that it isn't productized. Probably the majority of programmers are working for internal corporate IT departments cranking out CRUD apps because the company mistakenly believes it's a precious, unique snowflake that couldn't possibly make do with off-the-shelf software for routine business processes, even though they derive no competitive advantage from custom software. Most…

The assumption that cheap, standardized software is either cheap or standardized is a false one. Take the content-management space. For a complex site serving millions of viewers with 100k+ pages, off-the-shelf solutions can be quite expensive (when you account for the initial investment, the time-to-learn, the internal development work required to implement customizations) and often you need to customize the solutio…

How many internal corporate apps are serving millions of viewers?

Re: Whatever happened to programming?

#100

Post by jey »

jrockway wrote: post #69
jey wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you missed the main thrust of his complaint: back when everyone was hacking in FORTRAN and COBOL, you really didn't need to know much more than the language, its standard library, and stuff specific to the problem you were solving. At worst maybe you'd have to learn BLAS and LAPACK if you were doing numerical stuff. The APIs/overhead/junk memorization situation has been steadily worsening since then. But at l…

Nobody is forcing you to want to interact with the real world. The reality is that "back in the day", computers weren't useful to very many people. Now they are.

You're taking a narrow definition of the "real world" by including webapps but excluding ATM machines.

I agree that all this "overhead" does have utility, I'm not saying we shouldn't have it -- but it's less pure/fun compared to the old stuff (IMO).

Post reply on HN