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Whatever happened to programming?

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Re: Whatever happened to programming?

#101

Post by jdietrich »

MikeTaylor wrote: post #88
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…

jdietrich, you have EXACTLY nailed what I was trying to say (but in about 1/10th as many words as I needed). Thank you. I have linked to, and quoted, this comment in my followup article, http://reprog.wordpress.com/2010/03/04/whatever-happened-to-... -- hope that's OK.

Thank you for your kind words. You are most welcome to quote me.

Re: Whatever happened to programming?

#102

Post by whimsy »

lollynoob wrote: post #98
arethuza wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Do you build buildings like that? You certainly do!

Please don't tell me each building project reinvents concrete, or steel girders, or cranes, et cetera, et cetera. These are all technological wonders, and using them means standing on the shoulders of giants.

It just looks different in physical construction.

Re: Whatever happened to programming?

#103

Post by ilovecomputers »

sgacka wrote: post #32
ilovecomputers wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where does mathematics come into play in your evaluation? I just spent last quarter on discrete mathematics and digital design and it has given me a different perspective on programming in my learning experience. I wouldn't call myself a programmer yet ( Joe Hewitt has made that apparent to me: http://twitter.com/joehewitt/status/9813494038 ), but it seems like modern software engineering is a form of alchemy now. I…

Math has always been a part of technical design. I think "programming" is starting to become a field where the actual authoring of code and the design of logic fuse completely. So the future of programming combines the design (engineering, mathematics, etc.) with writing code. From my somewhat inexperienced standpoint, I think programming has gone from instructing the computer to complete a task, to telling the compu…

I think you have the wrong idea about programming. Programming has always had algorithms (the ability to find its way around a map). This "old-style programming" is called procedural programming, but even that paradigm had capabilities to implement algorithms. This is the computer science aspect of programming. Actually, it's not an aspect at all, it's the foundation of programming.

No, programming is a result of mixing math and linguistics to achieve information processing. Of course that's my inexperience evaluation and I bet a veteran of this field would quickly tell me that I too have an incorrect notion. But see, that's the thing. It shouldn't be this hard to comprehend! Sadly, as Scott Rosenberg says in his book Dreaming in Code, the reason why programming is imperfect is because people made it that way and people are imperfect.

Re: Whatever happened to programming?

#104

Post by locopati »

gamble wrote: post #99
locopati wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Depends on how you look at it. I work on an internal CMS that has <100 users but powers large websites serving millions. The app is internal but the product goes to the external-facing websites.

Re: Whatever happened to programming?

#105

Post by gte910h »

jrockway wrote: post #59
gte910h wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last I checked, BOA in ATL couldn't find enough super good math/finance/C++ programmers, for instance.

It's because the people that are good with math, finance, and programming don't want to use C++ (or live in Atlanta). Remove the C++, and it becomes much easier to find people. Look at how successful companies like Jane Street Capital are in recruiting, for example, even though the pool of people that know OCaml is much smaller than the pool of people that know C++. (My experience with people that know math and finan…

>My experience with people that know math and finance is that they do all their work in Excel

We are not talking the same sort of people. We're talking the type of people who require huge super computers to run their algorithms.

Re: Whatever happened to programming?

#106

Post by gte910h »

Maro wrote: post #79
jrockway wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because the people that are good with math, finance, and programming don't want to use C++ (or live in Atlanta). Remove the C++, and it becomes much easier to find people. Look at how successful companies like Jane Street Capital are in recruiting, for example, even though the pool of people that know OCaml is much smaller than the pool of people that know C++. (My experience with people that know math and finan…

I'm good at math and programming and all the stuff required to work as a quant and I'd much rather write C++ than anything else.

Well then enjoy: http://careers.bankofamerica.com/JobDetails.aspx?SearchPage=...

Re: Whatever happened to programming?

#107

Post by nradov »

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…

The obvious solution is to move up to a higher level of abstraction. Create some sort of new language or tool that allows for creating the entire application in a single environment, and then compile that down to Python, XTHML, CSS, JavaScript, etc as "object code". There have been a few rough attempts at tools like this already but nothing that really worked yet. Seems like a good opportunity if someone can figure out a good abstraction that isn't too leaky.

Re: Whatever happened to programming?

#108

Post by ndl »

Years of research and countless dollars have gone into making programming a systematic, controllable process. Old school managers frequently wish that a dev team would output like an assembly line.

Simultaneously, we're expected to be into the newest and coolest technologies.

Put these together, and we're supposed to systematically glue everything that's new.

Seriously, it's not all bad, though. I like being able to generate a test UI in under an hour or a basic web spider in one python file. The art's just different. It's no longer packing your entire logic into beautiful lines of BASIC. It's now more about choosing the right platform to do something that the user will appreciate.

If you're into the pre-library styles, I recommend looking at alternative hardware. When I wrote my first CUDA project, I had to figure out how to get random numbers with sufficient randomness for our physics simulation. You might also look at robots or embedded devices. There's plenty to tinker with on devices that don't have libraries available.

Re: Whatever happened to programming?

#109

Post by blogdog »

A very interesting observation.. I tend to agree that the sheer number of frameworks and libraries makes programming into coping with flaws or badly documented "features". The other thing is that the programming world is much like an archipelago, where different islands develop their own programming culture, like .NET or JEE or PHP. And the islands are floating apart: It will become increasingly difficult to establish the better choice because of long learning curves. It is important to admit there are other cultures out there, that even might do a better job in particular areas. However, as much as frameworks get more sophisticated and cater to the programmers ideal of elegant and abstract formulation of the code, Managed Code, Reflection and even OO have a overhead cost in cycles and bytes, particularly when scaling up. As a 45+ programmer I sometimes weep about "elegant" code that drives your machine to the edge but only does a fairly simple job. Stacking API's and frameworks does certainly not always contribute to efficient and simple executables. Sometimes we just need to get back to the root, or at least understand what happens in the machine when we use a certain framework or library. For programmers that will remain a challenge, and fortunately will force us to reflect occasionally...

Re: Whatever happened to programming?

#110

Post by flaub »

metamemetics wrote: post #55
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…

I would rather have decoupled components that improve in quality independently and are the best at what they do. If you really want a more unified development method, look into Pyjamas http://pyjs.org/ . It's a port of google web-toolkit to python. You just write everything in python and then it compiles the javascript front end for you.

And another port of GWT for .NET is http://dotweb-toolkit.com. It uses a decompiler in order to translate .NET assemblies into javascript.
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