Does it forget?
Does the software industry learn?
71–80 of 102 posts
Re: Does the software industry learn?
#72Part of me says "of course we learn, look at how many bad practices are at least significantly less common than they were in the olden days". It's quite rare you come across a decently run tech company or team that doesn't use version control, or makes changes live in production without a testing environment, or doesn't use automated tests at all, or doesn't have a deploy process at all beyond 'use FTP'.
10-20 years ago that wasn't really the case, and such practices were much rarer even in more tech savvy teams and organisations.
Same with web development related stuff. People aren't using tables for layout anymore, nor are things like accessibility some sort of completely ignored concept that no one takes seriously. And people do actually use CSS for layout purposes rather than font tags and spacer images and whatever else the days of Geocities style web development had in store.
So it's definitely advanced in many areas.
Re: Does the software industry learn?
#73I think there's a myth that rewriting software is bad, or at least a symptom of badness, and "reusing" software is ideal. But writing software is really like creating plans: plans for what the machine should do. Of course there is much room for reusing old plans as components of your new plan. But still every plan must be about what is needed at the moment, not about reusing existing plan-components. In human communi…
My feeling is that rewriting is used as blunt weapon when the developer lacks the inclination or skill to learn what was written before. I’m been guilty of this.
...or a tool for CV-drive development.
Re: Does the software industry learn?
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
You see, this sounds really cool. So what kinds of problems fit COBOL? And why did "we" conclude from this that general purpose languages were the solution, rather than building many different languages for specific problems? Did "we" even conclude that, or is that just my impression, 50 years later?
From what I remember of the times, it was the PC that killed COBOL. COBOL was considered a "serious" language, for "serious" business problems running on "serious" hardware that lived in a server room. PC's were not "serious", and lived on people's desks, running Lotus123 and other such trivial tools. Then VB/Delphi/etc came along, and a generation of developers writing "little" applications directly for the desktop…
A friends first job out of uni was working for IBM on bank maintenance contracts writing COBOL. He considered it a "useless yet valuable skill."
Re: Does the software industry learn?
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
> and no one seemingly likes funding open source code. I’m not sure how this meme got started but it’s toxic. Why does free software need funding? Free software needs contributions . Big corporations make contributions by paying engineers. Everyone benefits in this ecosystem.
> I’m not sure how this meme got started How? Look at multitude of projects and see that most people using the software is not contributing back, with either time, money or anything else. > Why does free software need funding? Free software needs contributions You're saying the same thing, "contributions" is one way of funding projects, "funding" doesn't just mean money, it also means contributing engineering hours,…
‘Free’ literally means that you don’t need to contribute back.
If a contribution is required, then it’s not free.
Re: Does the software industry learn?
#76I think there's a myth that rewriting software is bad, or at least a symptom of badness, and "reusing" software is ideal. But writing software is really like creating plans: plans for what the machine should do. Of course there is much room for reusing old plans as components of your new plan. But still every plan must be about what is needed at the moment, not about reusing existing plan-components. In human communi…
> I think there's a myth that rewriting software is bad, or at least a symptom of badness, and "reusing" software is ideal. There's also a weird opposite myth that old software is bad, and urgently needs to be rewritten with newer paradigms. I'm currently hired to replace a piece of extremely stable '90s software with hundreds of janky eventually consistent microservices because for some reason. That's how software m…
Haha, yes. My first front end job was to rewrite a totally reliable and working software written in an obscure javascript framework, but still, working pretty well, appreciated by the users, and making tons of money for the company.
Well, AngularJS was such a trending thing that we HAD to rewrite everything in it. For no reason. No new feature. Bonus time : i was the only dev on this project (because i was replacing the only front-end dev who was leaving) and i had not a single idea of how AngularJS worked at the time.
No supervision, no prior experience, no business goal. I'm not proud of the result. But at least i learnt a lot of things (including CoffeeScript, i'm sorry for who took the codebase after me).
Re: Does the software industry learn?
#77I think there's a myth that rewriting software is bad, or at least a symptom of badness, and "reusing" software is ideal. But writing software is really like creating plans: plans for what the machine should do. Of course there is much room for reusing old plans as components of your new plan. But still every plan must be about what is needed at the moment, not about reusing existing plan-components. In human communi…
My feeling is that rewriting is used as blunt weapon when the developer lacks the inclination or skill to learn what was written before. I’m been guilty of this.
> lacks the inclination or skill
Or the time. When you've been given a hard one-week deadline to produce something, you can commit to writing something that works with a lot more confidence than you can commit to figuring out somebody else's piece of garbage.
Re: Does the software industry learn?
#78Well, after 30 years of software development experience, I seem to be the only person I know who has learned that you have to be able to test everything outside of a production environment.
Re: Does the software industry learn?
#79Another story on the front page right now is "how I built a date picker". In 2022, people are still building date pickers. Imagine the progress our field could make were it not for the navel gazing, NIHing and pointless reworking.
..someone really ought to invent The Date Picker to Rule them All. Hm, maybe I'll give it a shot.
Actually, I think that's the reason people build new date pickers (or new anything else). The new (fill in the blank) to rule them all has to take every possible permutation of use cases into account, and as a result, is necessarily "bloated" for whatever purpose you intend to put it to. In most cases, it's not just bloated itself, it also depends on other (fill in the blank)s to rule them all that are themselves bloated, and inconsistently compatible. It's also necessarily way more complex than just annotating an HTML input form element - again because of the huge number of different cases it has to support, so take a while to learn how to use and to learn its own idiosyncrasies.
Re: Does the software industry learn?
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
And yet, those people do not get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, believe their work to be at the height of economic efficiency, or think themselves generally more intelligent than the average person. Software engineering is not a craft. It is a discipline. If society is paying people these exorbitant sums to be the equivalent of digital Etsy moms, we're getting a raw deal.
I don't know what software engineering is ans I strongly suspect you don't, either. I fact, I think that software engineering is just a term invented to give non-programmers (professors, managers, consultants) a somewhat technical career path. There is certainly no engineering happening when someone creates a new web service or a new device driver. I don't think there's engineering involved in Amazon's latest cloud s…
> I don't know what software engineering is ans I strongly suspect you don't, either.
I do actually. I am retired now, have 25 years of experience, and a physics degree from a prestigious college. I built control systems for microscopes, founded an industrial control systems company, wrote linux drivers for tuner cards, and built downhole fluid simulation software used on oil rigs. I also did every other "soft" type of software development you can imagine.
But there's tons of rules, if the industry would bother to learn. Comparing software developers 25 years ago when I started to today is embarrassing. The question of the OP is probably not "does the software industry learn?" but rather "is the software industry forgetting things it used to know?"