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Writes large correct programs (2008)

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Re: Writes large correct programs (2008)

#51

Post by polishdude20 »

riehwvfbk wrote: post #12
azeirah wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah.. The dumb thing is that it isn't even _that_ hard to fix this kind of stuff... It does take time and commitment though. But _hard_? No.

But that is hard. I think you (and many software developers) are using the word "hard" to mean "intellectually challenging", as in "Leetcode Hard". But things that require a lot of effort, time, and coordination of people are also hard, just in a different way. Imagine a codebase with a wart. And yes, without enough tests. Let's say the wart annoys you and you want to fix it. But first you have to convince your emplo…

The first easy or hard question should be "There is a wart that annoys you, is it really that bad?"

Re: Writes large correct programs (2008)

#52

Post by PaulRobinson »

When choosing my degree back in the mid-1990s, I chose a BEng in Software Engineering, and not a BSc in Computer Science because I wanted to enter a career writing software, not a deep study of the theory of a branch of applied mathematics.

I was fortunate enough to have figured this out for myself, and whenever I met a CS grad in my early career it was obvious that the production of actual software terrified them.

Meanwhile I'd learned how to build (and how not to build), working programs in C including a simple OS on an M68k chip on a VME bus. I struggled with my final year project because it became too theoretical and CS-ish (trying to write a Prolog to SQL interpreter), so my grade took a hit, but I am really glad I entered industry with useful, practical skills that employers valued.

There's always going to be a place for pure CS, I'm glad it exists as a discipline, but more kids should understand the difference, and more colleges should be offering degrees that teach people how to software is built (and how to build software yourself), not just write papers.

Re: Writes large correct programs (2008)

#53

Post by MrMcCall »

tsujamin wrote: post #4

This reminds me strongly of reaching the final year industry projects in my software engineering degree, and seeing a significant portion of my colleagues unable to develop software in any meaningful way. There was a curriculum correction in the years afterwards I think, but so many students had zero concept of version control, of how to start working on a piece of software (sans an assignment specification or scaffo…

Our final CS course, Operating Systems, was in C, after all the previous courses were in Pascal. Luckily, I had already gotten access to various Unix systems and had taught myself C (thanks, K&R !!). And I say luckily because it was expecially lucky for my SWE group members who would otherwise have not graduated. I was already 10x at that point because of early access and passion for the craft. Most if not all of them had already decided that programming was not their career path, so it was in everyone's benefit and happiness.

Funny enough, there was no version control at our uni (a pretty good one, but not primarily technical), and that OS we tweaked for the course was the current version of Tanenbaum's Minix that Linus transformed into Linux. 20 minutes for a recompile and test loop to fix that stupid mistake in the semaphore logic was painful, but that's life on a 286.

It took real passion to want to bang through that learning curve. It really weeded out the folks who were just looking for an engineering job, at least for the handful (4) of people I knew in the program.

Re: Writes large correct programs (2008)

#55

Post by dragonwriter »

azeirah wrote: post #9
jffhn wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"it seems to work and we don't dare change it" What they mean is: "we don't understand it and we don't have good tests, so there is a high probability that it doesn't work and that doing even the most trivial and seemingly harmless modification would cause an issue to surface, so we don't dare to change it else we wouldn't be able to pretend that it works anymore and might have to fix a lot of issues that we would h…

Yeah.. The dumb thing is that it isn't even _that_ hard to fix this kind of stuff... It does take time and commitment though. But _hard_? No.

It’s a hard social problem in many contexts, even if it is not a hard technical problem.

Re: Writes large correct programs (2008)

#56

Post by cornel_io »

Thorrez wrote: post #18
herodotus wrote: post #15

When I was a prof (many years ago), I was working on a database for a political campaign. The code was a mess. I asked a couple of my colleagues (successful comp. sci. profs) to help out. It became clear very quickly that there are two kinds of comp. sci. profs: those who can program and those who cannot.

One of my computer science professors when his laptop wasn't connecting to the projector: "I hate computers."

That sounds like the correct response if he knows anything about the field: shitty peripherals are an unsolvable problem from top to bottom. The hardware sucks, the software sucks more, there's absolutely nothing you can do to fix it as an end user (unplug it and try again is where "debugging" ends), and the production chain will never improve along the quality axis because the margins are tiny and people are very price sensitive.

Re: Writes large correct programs (2008)

#57

Post by cornel_io »

andrewaylett wrote: post #54

Computer Science is to Software Engineering as Physics is to Civil Engineering. Software Engineering is to programming as Civil Engineering is to construction.

I don't think that's really true in practice, though at a competence level it absolutely is. Except at the biggest places, even low level programmers are both empowered and expected to make architectural decisions that have big impact on maintainability, testability, and performance. Addition of a bad-but-fast coder to a team is the worst possible outcome because they are really productive at screwing up the whole codebase in ways that will take even more time to peel apart. It's actually worse if their code is in the "functional but ugly" category, since PMs love those people as long as they're really fast, and they hate when other engineers complain about their work.

In construction, the random guy pulled in to swing a hammer may cut something wrong once or twice and waste a little time and money, but he's never going to be trusted to design the way the support beams hold up the whole house, so the damage is very limited. Software is not like that, we expect everyone to do some amount of design and engineering, whether or not they have any ability to do so. If as much software dev was driven by very low-level grunt work as is the case in construction, LLMs would already have revolutionized the field a lot more than they have; as it is, we've probably got another couple years to wait.

Re: Writes large correct programs (2008)

#58

Post by almostgotcaught »

herodotus wrote: post #15

When I was a prof (many years ago), I was working on a database for a political campaign. The code was a mess. I asked a couple of my colleagues (successful comp. sci. profs) to help out. It became clear very quickly that there are two kinds of comp. sci. profs: those who can program and those who cannot.

> those who can program and those who cannot.

Everyone in my PhD cohort that couldn't write code worth a shit stayed in academia and everyone the could went into industry because the money was way better. So it's quite natural.

Re: Writes large correct programs (2008)

#59

Post by aleph_minus_one »

MrMcCall wrote: post #53
tsujamin wrote: post #4

This reminds me strongly of reaching the final year industry projects in my software engineering degree, and seeing a significant portion of my colleagues unable to develop software in any meaningful way. There was a curriculum correction in the years afterwards I think, but so many students had zero concept of version control, of how to start working on a piece of software (sans an assignment specification or scaffo…

Our final CS course, Operating Systems, was in C, after all the previous courses were in Pascal. Luckily, I had already gotten access to various Unix systems and had taught myself C (thanks, K&R !!). And I say luckily because it was expecially lucky for my SWE group members who would otherwise have not graduated. I was already 10x at that point because of early access and passion for the craft. Most if not all of the…

> It really weeded out the folks who were just looking for an engineering job

Wanting an engineering job means that engineering is such an important part of your life that you desire that your job (i.e. many hours each day) centers around it.

The breed of people that you mentioned to be weeded out were not looking for an engineering job, but for some well-paid (often management) job that formally requires engineering qualifications, but where the daily business has barely to do anything related to engineering.

Re: Writes large correct programs (2008)

#60

Post by spondylosaurus »

almostgotcaught wrote: post #58
herodotus wrote: post #15

When I was a prof (many years ago), I was working on a database for a political campaign. The code was a mess. I asked a couple of my colleagues (successful comp. sci. profs) to help out. It became clear very quickly that there are two kinds of comp. sci. profs: those who can program and those who cannot.

> those who can program and those who cannot. Everyone in my PhD cohort that couldn't write code worth a shit stayed in academia and everyone the could went into industry because the money was way better. So it's quite natural.

Those who can't do... teach?
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