The State of the Art is Terrible
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The State of the Art is Terrible
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Re: The State of the Art is Terrible
#2Sounds like he is bemoaning the technical debt problem, writ large. While you can't resolve this from the gate level on up overnight, you can create your own "technical oases" that are largely free(er) of technical debt than the crud they float upon.
Re: The State of the Art is Terrible
#3People are going to look back at this as the 'golden age' of the web. Yes, things are a little screwy all over the place, but you can do ANYTHING you want now. NONE of the perfect software has been written. It's all waiting for improvement. You can do anything you want and profit from it.
And people just complain that life isn't easy enough. Psh.
Re: The State of the Art is Terrible
#4It's always good to go back to the start and remember how much worse things have gotten since any arbitrary time in the past. Before complaining about this rant, go out and explore some of our history:
[1] Sketchpad (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USyoT_Ha_bA)
[2] The Mother of All Demos (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfIgzSoTMOs)
[3] Hypercard (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-qth3mrbwc)
[4] Ward's Wiki (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki)
Then ask: what are we doing that should get added to this list?
Re: The State of the Art is Terrible
#5Wouldn't any accomplished professional look at their own industry and feel this way? I can't imagine any medical doctor who would look at state of the art in health care and say, "Our industry is perfect!"
I think sometimes as developers, we need to cut ourselves a little slack.
Sure we need to continue to move the state of the art forward. But sometimes we do get stuff done even in spite of our industry's imperfections. And some people find software pretty useful even with two different versions of PNG image loading code.
Re: The State of the Art is Terrible
#6Sounds like he is bemoaning the technical debt problem, writ large. While you can't resolve this from the gate level on up overnight, you can create your own "technical oases" that are largely free(er) of technical debt than the crud they float upon.
No offense intended, but you seem naive.
I really disagree with a lot of his solutions, and I think his argument is muddled and unclear, and I hate the idea of moving toward languages like PHP that cover for programming errors (that often mask logical errors you want the compiler to check) but I see where he's coming from.
My complaint is that a lot of the measures he proposes (self-modifying code? seriously?) are going to make the problem a lot worse.
Across the industry as a whole, 80 to 90 percent of software engineer time is spent cleaning up crap (sometimes one's own, but this is at least educational) that wasn't done right in the first place and, yeah, it's frustrating. You need to have an unusual degree of autonomy (effectively your own boss or at least CTO) to be able to create such "oases".
Re: The State of the Art is Terrible
#7Sounds like he is bemoaning the technical debt problem, writ large. While you can't resolve this from the gate level on up overnight, you can create your own "technical oases" that are largely free(er) of technical debt than the crud they float upon.
Ya that is a good way to sum it up, thanks for the brevity. I'm finding that even my thinking has been clouded with complexity, which leads to my large rambling posts. I'm trying to imagine a world where everything is more elegant from the ground up, which is perhaps possible now that we have hindsight, and then apply that to my own work.
Re: The State of the Art is Terrible
#8Wouldn't any accomplished professional look at their own industry and feel this way? I can't imagine any medical doctor who would look at state of the art in health care and say, "Our industry is perfect!" I think sometimes as developers, we need to cut ourselves a little slack. Sure we need to continue to move the state of the art forward. But sometimes we do get stuff done even in spite of our industry's imperfecti…
It's important to step back and take a broad-based perspective. Are you complaining about something that saps you 5% (which can be annoying) or 90%? People complain about both, and it's not easy to tell which is the case just from the volume of complaint.
Across the software industry, we lose an incredible amount of time to the maintenance of bad code. The average professional programmer writes about 250 lines of new code per month. Most large software companies have zombie legacy systems that have ceased to grow but have one or more full-time developers only on maintenance.
So, yes, there is a problem. The way we are doing things, as an industry, is terrible. On the upside, this means that there's a lot of profit potential in improving engineering practices.
Re: The State of the Art is Terrible
#9Sounds like he is bemoaning the technical debt problem, writ large. While you can't resolve this from the gate level on up overnight, you can create your own "technical oases" that are largely free(er) of technical debt than the crud they float upon.
No offense intended, but you seem naive. I really disagree with a lot of his solutions, and I think his argument is muddled and unclear, and I hate the idea of moving toward languages like PHP that cover for programming errors (that often mask logical errors you want the compiler to check) but I see where he's coming from. My complaint is that a lot of the measures he proposes (self-modifying code? seriously?) are go…
Ya I'm beginning to feel out of the loop compared to my peers. But I've been down so deep in some things that I'm profoundly aware of how flawed they are. I need smarter tools and was looking to things like self modifying code as a way to help programmers explore problem spaces and then maybe we could freeze the solutions when they perform properly. I definitely agree that maintaining code is fully 90% of this job.
Re: The State of the Art is Terrible
#10Sounds like he is bemoaning the technical debt problem, writ large. While you can't resolve this from the gate level on up overnight, you can create your own "technical oases" that are largely free(er) of technical debt than the crud they float upon.
Ya that is a good way to sum it up, thanks for the brevity. I'm finding that even my thinking has been clouded with complexity, which leads to my large rambling posts. I'm trying to imagine a world where everything is more elegant from the ground up, which is perhaps possible now that we have hindsight, and then apply that to my own work.
I think the second part needed to be long to make your point clear. I think it worked.
Since we aren't machines, sometimes we express ourselves in long rambling thoughts. That's okay and, when it's not we have Editors.