Developer inequality and the technical debt crisis

Or, put more empirically, if the web is terrible, why did it succeed by orders of magnitude over what preceded it?

I have fantasies, like every other dev, of controlled, predictable, statically verifiable, friendly, elegant, safe systems that also reach billions of people, with instant distribution, nominal cost, and low barrier to entry. Maybe these things are not (a posteriori) compatible.

We used to call this “rich vs reach”. Still seems true, perhaps essentially so.

> First page of google for Jonathan Edwards produces a 17th century philosopher and a singer.

Because all real programmers are on the first page of Google when you search for their name.

It's also worth noting the historical Jonathan Edwards is a pretty important figure in American history. The First Great Awakening set the tone for American religion; it's standard material in any high school History class. And if there's one person you teach about from that period, it's Edwards. In fact, I would be somewhat surprised if most Americans don't recognize the name. So being out-ranked by him isn't exactly unexpected

> Adding "Jonathan Edwards programming" produces Subtext

Right. So even if you haven't heard the name before, some very simple google searching turns up the fact that he isn't a non-programmer.

And even without that, you could flip through his prior blog posts and figure out that non-programmer isn't an accurate description.

> yawning about how programming needs to be more academic?

I mean, the article says basically the exact opposite of this?

> Honestly, I have no idea who he is.

Yeah, I don't know who most of the world's programmers are. So they must not be real programmers (well, unless googling their name turns up their github account? But self-hosted projects don't count!).

But in 10 seconds of Google you figured out that non-programmer probably isn't a great description. And in a few more you might've figured out he's a fellow at MIT's CSAIL, which isn't particularly well-known for hiring programming-illiterate people.

My point was that it's usually a good idea to actually research the author of a piece before firing off the ad homs.

  > The author is kind of all over the place,

He then tries to give examples of solutions, and they're bad suggestions. Still, he's right about the problem. We are in a kind of dark age at the moment, and the technology web stack is an unnecessary horror.

Regarding databases, I think what you're proposing is a step in the wrong direction. Databases is one of the major problems of our age, and cause of software being so difficult to get right. Many programmers will use a database to solve any problem.

There's an endemic problem of developers exposing databases as APIs, and then getting immediately bogged in complexity. We need less of that.

1. As a user, I want to access this application through my web browser.

2. As a user, I want to know how many times I have clicked the button.

3. As a user, I want to know how many times the top 10 users have clicked the button.

4. As a user, I want the interface to update immediately when I click the button.

5. As a designer, I want the ability to easily change fonts, colors and layouts.

6. As a product owner, I want the ability to push updates to my users automatically.

Your technical requirements all roll up to these user stories. If you wanted to do this as an iOS app, it would be pretty trivial: you could almost build the whole thing in InterfaceBuilder. But the web browser is an abstraction layer we've built because it carries with it certain architectural advantages.

The web browser makes simple requirements much more difficult, I will grant you that. But it makes other requirements much simpler: rather than having to provide a mechanism by which to upgrade users' compiled applications when I want to add a red button and a blue button, I just push the changes out to the server and every user sees both the red and blue buttons. I also no longer have to write network code to connect to a server: my web browser does that. When is the last time anyone wrote a network stack for an application? Everything is REST services and JSON now.

Yes, writing web applications is very complex. But that complexity allows us to do things that were very, very difficult only a decade ago. The cost of being able to do hard things easily is that trivial things are somewhat less trivial to do than they would be in other environments.