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Burn the Programmer

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Re: Burn the Programmer

#131

Post by ben_w »

derefr wrote: post #117
pfarnsworth wrote: post #72

No. The only people that seem to get upset about this is the media, because their power is being usurped by Facebook, and Silicon Valley itself. Go 30 mins outside of the Bay Area and everyone thinks Silicon Valley is great, and programmers work magic. Living in this tech bubble gives a skewed view of the world, but really no one cares.

Even the people whose jobs are being displaced by automation?

I get the impression that right now they’re too busy blaming offshoring and immigrants to realise that their jobs have been automated and nobody is doing them.

Re: Burn the Programmer

#132

Post by LyndsySimon »

ben_w wrote: post #113
LyndsySimon wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, that depends entirely on your role. I've found that my place is within a team of 5 If all I were doing every day was implementing yet another CRUD form, then I would feel the same way you've described.

You’ve just reminded me of a line from one of the Wicca books I read as a teen. The whole coven size <= 13 thing was down to how big teams can get before people tread on each other’s metaphorical feet.

Covens of >13 are dealt with a great deal in Sterling's "Emberverse" series...

Re: Burn the Programmer

#133

Post by SilasX »

anon151516888 wrote: post #118
SilasX wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly how I felt about Ruby on Rails.

It's also why I prefer more "straightforward" libraries such as Tornado or CherryPy.

Wait, that's contrasting to other Python libraries that use the Rails/Spring magic? Which ones?

Re: Burn the Programmer

#134

Post by walshemj »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #130
j2kun wrote: post #29

It makes me wonder if there are any realms of wizardry where the highest ranking wizards spend all their time on management skills and never get to practice their magic. "Oh, these days I just review a lot of spell-design scrolls and mentor junior acolytes. Magic is more of a people business, you know."

Charles Stross's novels parallel this, unsurprisingly. Bob doesn't do much fieldwork anymore, and rarely even gets to light up a Hand of Glory.

Not in the latest ones spoiler alert hes now a bit dangerous to use in case he loses it and kills a few K people by accident.

Re: Burn the Programmer

#135

Post by jhanschoo »

The notion of a terribly powerful yet unintelligible wizard really isn't that novel a situation. Lawyers have long suffered that role, and among several communities (e.g. anti-vax, alternative med.), medical doctors too.

Re: Burn the Programmer

#136

Post by walshemj »

arethuza wrote: post #18
yetihehe wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on what those "wizards" do. If it's just making some formula in spreadsheet work, it's not too awesome. If it's stopping time[1], that might be more "magical". [1] https://hackaday.com/2017/11/09/stop-motion-with-the-time-gl...

"it's not too awesome" Maybe if you had seen some of the eldritch devious monstrosities I've seen people create in Excel (even without VBA) you might reconsider that statement. Be very worried if someone says "we have this Excel spreadsheet that needs to be turned into an app"....

I have also seen a company (tech) who used an excel spreadsheet as part f its accounts system turns out it was faulty and was a factor to the company going bust - the main one was ICANT tho

Re: Burn the Programmer

#138

Post by Jach »

jimbokun wrote: post #52
stryan wrote: post #10

Considering how many programming abstractions most programmers work above now, I'd say it's more like magic now then ever before. Draw the circle (add the boiler plate code), recite the words (dig up the proper API method), perform the gestures (compile with certain flags) and your spell (desktop app) will work. If you don't, it'll do nothing or worse, blow up in your face. As a side note, if anyone's interested in l…

This is exactly the reason I despise Spring with a deep and abiding passion. "Just add this dependency, and add these annotations to your class, and it will all Just Work." "But...what do those annotations actually do ?" "Stop asking so many questions!" I mean, I know the answers are out there, it's open source after all. But so much of it seems deliberately designed to obfuscate the flow of execution and make reason…

When I'm really disturbed by how something actually works, my approach is to try to implement something similar myself. Object oriented C (structs with function pointers) long ago gave me some insights including why Python has an explicit 'self' for everything. There's a similar exercise you can do in C to better understand the prototype chaining way of doing OOP. Have you tried to make a simple version of e.g. @Autowire that is still capable enough to let a Java app of many modules have one module only depend on an API module and not the implementation module with everything just working without explicit injection? Sounds interesting to me, I bet that would be more enlightening than a summary page, or at least make the summary page more understandable...

Re: Burn the Programmer

#139

Post by hinkley »

jimbokun wrote: post #52
stryan wrote: post #10

Considering how many programming abstractions most programmers work above now, I'd say it's more like magic now then ever before. Draw the circle (add the boiler plate code), recite the words (dig up the proper API method), perform the gestures (compile with certain flags) and your spell (desktop app) will work. If you don't, it'll do nothing or worse, blow up in your face. As a side note, if anyone's interested in l…

This is exactly the reason I despise Spring with a deep and abiding passion. "Just add this dependency, and add these annotations to your class, and it will all Just Work." "But...what do those annotations actually do ?" "Stop asking so many questions!" I mean, I know the answers are out there, it's open source after all. But so much of it seems deliberately designed to obfuscate the flow of execution and make reason…

This phenomenon came to a head with J2EE. The original spec was designed apparently by people who did not know the 8 fallacies of distributed computing. It also coevolved with XML, and I think the entire experience colors the configuration as code philosophy in a bad, or even sinister, light.

When I see people design systems where, when they break, the only way to diagnose the problem is to do a code review, (not read the logs, or fire up a debugger), I wonder how they got along in their education without understanding the importance of debuggers, or why they hate their fellow programmers so much.

Spring comes out of a book that tried to reject the arcane nature of J2EE. I wonder sometimes if Mr Johnson recognizes hay the Beast he created is just as bad as the one he slayed. And how well he sleeps at night.

It got so bad they made a mini version of Spring, and even that is very declarative, and nearly impossible to explore.

Re: Burn the Programmer

#140

Post by randallsquared »

thinkpad20 wrote: post #56
jimbokun wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly the reason I despise Spring with a deep and abiding passion. "Just add this dependency, and add these annotations to your class, and it will all Just Work." "But...what do those annotations actually do ?" "Stop asking so many questions!" I mean, I know the answers are out there, it's open source after all. But so much of it seems deliberately designed to obfuscate the flow of execution and make reason…

That's exactly how I feel about express middleware...

Come to https://github.com/zeit/micro ... :)
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