Programming is Terrible

Looking at current jobs listings it's difficult to find things that I am particularly well suited for, even in web programming.

Since I was using PHP well before the current crop of mature frameworks and CMS the majority of my experience is in trial and error development of my own database access patterns , anti XSS , anti SQL injection and all of that other stuff that you used to do yourself in the early 2000s. As a result I have handwritten countless numbers of CMS systems and frameworks and am comfortable taking a bunch of hardware , building a Linux server out of it and mounting it in a rack.

But nowadays the conversation is not so much about that stuff, it's "what do you know about EC2?" , "What do you know about codeigniter?" , "What do you know about Wordpress?". So, my knowledge has been abstracted (generally by people who would do a better job it than I did).

It's quite a hard thing to explain to your family when they say "But you've been doing programming for years! You must know everything about it now!"

Every time I think along these lines something comes along that pushes us closer to the metal again.

10 years ago I thought that the usefulness of my knowledge of assembly language had reached its end. After all, what use was it when I was writing enterprise applications in Java! And then our server apps started crashing (the whole JVM would core dump). So there I was, looking at a memory dump, x86 opcode table in hand as I tracked down what turned out to be a null pointer access in a native library from one of our vendors.

And then came my stint writing software for wireless credit card/debit card systems. On a Z80. In 2001.

Then came GBA development, counting every megabyte, worrying about image sizes and trying to make things look decent in a reduced palette and the eternally-too-small RAM.

And now, here I am in 2013, counting the megabytes once again, fighting against eternally-too-small RAM (especially on iPad 1), trying to keep my iOS apps small enough, using the same old smoke & mirrors and dirty tricks to give the illusion that the app is doing what it actually isn't. I'm intercepting mach kernel messages. I'm poking around memory structures. And, of course, I once again find myself disassembling code from memory dumps, opcode table in hand. In 2013.

I'm tempted to say that this will be the last wave of constrained systems, but I'd probably be wrong.

The way to write software efficiently is to have a small team of skilled, experienced and motivated people deliver it incrementally.

The space shuttle team developed a process to deliver software that was not bug-ridden. This was costly.

And there are collections of patterns to improve robustness of systems that are discussed in books about Erlang.

For anyone who's curious, academic research into verification extends far beyond "Well typed software". For example:

Klee: Unassisted and Automatic Generation of High-Coverage Tests for Complex Systems Programs [PDF, very approachable] http://www.stanford.edu/~engler/klee-osdi-2008.pdf

That paper is a nice example of how constraint based model checking can provide code coverage well beyond what a human developer can accomplish.

By fractal I mean that you can have good abstractions, but you can't afford black boxes, and design has to happen at a whole-system level or you're leaving something on the table. It's surprising how often decisions at very low levels affect the high level user experience.

Any time cost, reliability or security are on the line, there will be very few pieces of your product that are mysterious to you.