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Something about this article strikes me as a thinly-veiled complaint about poorly designed object-oriented systems. Take, for example this comment by the author: >Even if the money were half of what today’s coder gets paid it might still be a better job because one is spared the tedium of looking at millions of lines of Java that do almost nothing! What all those millions of lines of code are is abstractions, decoupl…
I wonder why "data engineer" isn't one of the suggested terms. Scientists do not really program science, nor do programmers research programs, as their respective fields of expertise.
To be nitpicky, in the US, engineer means you graduated from an ABET accredited program in something like: Chemical engineering, mechanical engineering, civil engineering, electrical engineering, industrial engineering, computer engineering....etc. That is not to say programming isn't a difficult job that requires a lot of analytical and creative thinking similar to an engineer. The difference is in getting a degree…
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SQL is not more expressive than Turing Complete languages, no.
They’re all Turing complete inc SQL with case and recursion. I meant density, 1 line of a code, a SQL window function with a filter clause would probably take a page of Java to achieve the same result.
``` Words.stream() .map(word -> String.toUpperCase(word)) .filter(word -> word.startsWith('A')) ```
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To be nitpicky, in the US, engineer means you graduated from an ABET accredited program in something like: Chemical engineering, mechanical engineering, civil engineering, electrical engineering, industrial engineering, computer engineering....etc. That is not to say programming isn't a difficult job that requires a lot of analytical and creative thinking similar to an engineer. The difference is in getting a degree…
A Computer Engineering degree does not require ABET accreditation - it didn't when I went to UCSD... the difference between Computer Science and Computer Engineering was just 4 classes. Exactly the same calc/physics classes between the two, which were engineering level.
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The fact that R has such buy-in despite being a rather awful programming language (a friend of mine worked on the next Lisp-like version of R under Ross Ihaka, and the next version is based on the fact that current R is a bit awful) is precisely because it offers such convenience to non-programmers. In my sister company, they have data scientists, and data engineers. The data scientists write their algorithms in the…
Base R is annoying, but IMO the tidyverse alone makes the language worthwhile.
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Hah! At my company a decent proportion of engineers spend their lives scrambling to productionalize and operate the Lovecraftian concoctions of R and Python that our data scientists cook up on their laptops.
As a data analyst who is pushing towards data science, do you have any resources or advice on how to steer away from these "Lovecraftian concoctions" you're speaking of?
Something about this article strikes me as a thinly-veiled complaint about poorly designed object-oriented systems. Take, for example this comment by the author: >Even if the money were half of what today’s coder gets paid it might still be a better job because one is spared the tedium of looking at millions of lines of Java that do almost nothing! What all those millions of lines of code are is abstractions, decoupl…
Crappy million-line Java apps are generally crappy not due to raw line count but rather due to leaky abstractions and badly designed APIs, so you do have to navigate through a lot of that code.
The basic premise of the article is that systems programming=irrelevant bloat and abstraction while data reduction=definite purpose and utility People writing python notebooks to do data analysis are probably fairly comparable to the scientific computing programmers of the past, but I feel like this picture tends to dismiss the computer science side of systems programming:things like GUIs, network code, processes and…
Yeah, the author's take is myopic. What they call bloat, people from the 70s would call wondrous: ubiquitous networking with and without wires, beautiful graphical interfaces, encryption everywhere (and expanding), far more open systems than proprietary re-engineered ones, the list goes on and on.
There is nothing myopic about his perspective.