Whatever happened to programming? • Hacker News Board

Re: Whatever happened to programming?

#61

Post by arethuza » Thu, Mar 04, 2010, 9:28 AM UTC

jdietrich wrote: post #30

My biggest gripe with modern programming is the sheer volume of arbitrary stuff I need to know. My current project has so far required me to know about Python, Django, Google App Engine and it's datastore, XHTML, CSS, JQuery, Javascript, JSON, and a clutch of XML schema, APIs and the like. Don't get me wrong, I'm grateful for all of it, but it just doesn't seem like what I was promised when I followed SICP for the fi…

It all depends on the context - sure on some platforms (mostly embedded) it's just your binary and the hardware.

Anything else, where you start having dependencies on components sourced from elsewhere then you are in this situation.

Personally, I don't really see what the problem is - looking at and using other peoples software is usually a great learning experience.

Re: Whatever happened to programming?

#62

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Mar 04, 2010, 9:32 AM UTC

eplanit wrote: post #12

The author captures the sentiments of a generation of programmers quite well. In the 80s, at the beginning of my 'professional' programming career, I wanted to not believe those who foresaw our careers as being like engine and automotive engineers of the early 20th century. That is, destined to become "parts changers". Early-phase technology workers with those sophisticated machines were true 'engineers', and were pa…

[deleted]

Re: Whatever happened to programming?

#63

Post by rw140 » Thu, Mar 04, 2010, 9:34 AM UTC

sshumaker wrote: post #54

The whole point of libraries and higher level languages is that they allow you to work at a higher level of abstraction. As the languages and libraries improve, difficult problems become trivial, while impossible problems become merely difficult. Given enough time, problems eventually become trivial enough to be solved by non-programmers. There will always be a frontier - problems that have barely just become solvabl…

I'd take the view that the emphasis has shifted from 'can we do this? / is it possible' to 'how shall we do this? / what will make our users happiest'. Both of these are great aims, but the former is probably more fun. There will still be edges where the emphasis is still on 'is it possible' but as the technology matures, you'll probably have to seek them out, rather than be there automatically.

Re: Whatever happened to programming?

#64

Post by samratjp » Thu, Mar 04, 2010, 9:34 AM UTC

It's a pity that so many friends of mine gave up programming after starting out with Java... But, at least MIT didn't ditch Scheme for Java @intro level. Better Python than Java any day :-)

Re: Whatever happened to programming?

#65

Post by samratjp » Thu, Mar 04, 2010, 9:35 AM UTC

pw0ncakes wrote: post #9

wowus wrote: post #8

I weep for the software industry. Our lives are going to suck in 10 years.

I'm pretty sure this complaint has existed as long as there have been programmers. If you want to program as they did in 1985, go work for a game company. Or find an investment bank looking for C++ developers; they're out there.

So where would it be in 2010?

Re: Whatever happened to programming?

#66

Post by wedesoft » Thu, Mar 04, 2010, 9:48 AM UTC

This was maybe the main reason why I switched to Ruby. The largest part of my time was spent on integrating other people's work. Don't get me wrong. It would take me more time to write the code from scratch and it would have introduced redundancy. But it just didn't feel right spending so much time on getting other people's stuff play together. I think the problem is that C/C++ and Java don't scale semantically.

Re: Whatever happened to programming?

#67

Post by ern » Thu, Mar 04, 2010, 9:48 AM UTC

msluyter wrote: post #35

Yep. I've been going and digging up old ACM and other programming contest problems just so that I don't forget how to actually code something from (near) scratch. I was disturbed to discover how rusty I was.

I started doing Project Euler problems for the same reason last year. I even sat up with friends one night working on a few problems, just to recapture that college feeling.

But I know writing algorithmically interesting problems are not likely to appear at work, and I've made my peace with that, along with the paycheck I get for writing enterprise systems.

Re: Whatever happened to programming?

#68

Post by nhoj » Thu, Mar 04, 2010, 10:10 AM UTC

It seems the author of the article is stuck in a problemscape where all the problems he would find interesting are already solved.

One solution is to move to a new area of software development that offers challenging problems.

I am currently, like many others it seems, working with creating enterprise CRUD-apps and integrating them. I try to find joy in reaching for a skill level where I can produce solutions quickly, solutions that are easy to change, solutions that immediately lets you know where and why an error has occurred, solutions that are secure, solutions that scale, solutions ran in the cloud instead of on servers that it takes it operations months to set up etc. There really aren't that many people out there that can do all of the above well (me included) and there are lots of money to be saved for your employee/clients doing those things well. I think we would see a lot less attempts at off-shoring if more people in enterprise-it would strive for that kind of knowledge.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, maybe one shouldn't have too high expectations of the technical challenges in problemscapes that have been mostly solved already but that, at least in my area, there are still challenges to be found. They are just of another kind and maybe you can find them interesting? They keep me interested enough at least.

sigh Why am I posting on hacker news again?

Re: Whatever happened to programming?

#69

Post by jrockway » Thu, Mar 04, 2010, 10:18 AM UTC

jey wrote: post #58

jrockway wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My current project has so far required me to know about Python, Django, Google App Engine and it's datastore, XHTML, CSS, JQuery, Javascript, JSON, and a clutch of XML schema, APIs and the like. This is the price you pay for being able to work with other people. If you never wanted to reuse anyone else's code or talk to anything else on the Internet, you would not need to know any of this. To stand on the shoulders o…

I think you missed the main thrust of his complaint: back when everyone was hacking in FORTRAN and COBOL, you really didn't need to know much more than the language, its standard library, and stuff specific to the problem you were solving. At worst maybe you'd have to learn BLAS and LAPACK if you were doing numerical stuff. The APIs/overhead/junk memorization situation has been steadily worsening since then. But at l…

Nobody is forcing you to want to interact with the real world.

The reality is that "back in the day", computers weren't useful to very many people. Now they are.

Re: Whatever happened to programming?

#70

Post by pistoriusp » Thu, Mar 04, 2010, 10:24 AM UTC

jdietrich wrote: post #30

My biggest gripe with modern programming is the sheer volume of arbitrary stuff I need to know. My current project has so far required me to know about Python, Django, Google App Engine and it's datastore, XHTML, CSS, JQuery, Javascript, JSON, and a clutch of XML schema, APIs and the like. Don't get me wrong, I'm grateful for all of it, but it just doesn't seem like what I was promised when I followed SICP for the fi…

This is precisely why I think I enjoy developing for the iPhone more than web development.

Yes, Cocoa is a massive library, but it has 99% of the things that I need. I think in objective-c and cocoa.

When it comes to web development I'm doing 100's of tiny little things in 2 different languages with 2 different markups to get something done.