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Why does programming suck?

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Re: Why does programming suck?

#81

Post by pjc50 »

lausobo wrote: post #63
ghodss wrote: post #21

One of the premises of this article - that "competing standards" exist primarily because of political reasons or shallow decision making - demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of software engineering. Sure, some engineers (especially junior ones) enjoy reinventing the wheel more than using something that already exists to solve users' problems. We all like to trick ourselves into thinking we're unique snowflak…

author here. Thanks for your comment. I clarified that "Sometimes" the causes are political, it used to say "Usually". But if after a 30 minute read you picked up on a stupid example and you started a discussion on XML vs JSON you are just proving my point. The expectation in the 60s was that machines will figure out protocol, even make protocol, on the fly, by asking about each other. Yet, you want to have another d…

That was the great time of belief in "4GL". I think what we've learned from that is that the hard part is not so much implementing what we want, but making all the decisions. Coping with all the interacting possibilities and working out what we want in each case.

Re: Why does programming suck?

#83

Post by arethuza »

acqq wrote: post #77
lausobo wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here. Thanks for the discussion. UML didn't pick up for whatever reason and visual programming fell into the valley of deception. I expect that with more UI/UX research we can get to the plateau of productivity in the next decade. Btw, there is a variant of UML that is executable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executable_UML

> there is a variant of UML that is executable. If you believe it's a good way, you should certainly go that way. Please write about your experiences afterwards. Rose 2.0, I've mentioned and quoted explicitly, produced the code from the diagrams (that's the "code generation" from the quote). And it was tragedy. Maybe you find somebody's experiences on the web.

"And it was tragedy."

That sounds quite positive compared to my experiences with code generated from UML.

Re: Why does programming suck?

#84

Post by ThatMightBePaul »

"Back in the day math was slow and error-prone and we created the computer. Now, it’s software development that is slow and error-prone."

I'd argue Math is still slow and error-prone. Ask any math PHD candidate. Computation is fast, but Math itself has more layers, and more branches than ever. Sound familiar?

That said, some smarties are trying to remove unnecessary layers in programming. I feel like rump/Uni-kernels are looking to simplify the stack. [1] The clear linux project is removing some pieces from the stack. [2]

TL;DR Math is about as noisy as programming :/ I don't buy the premise. But, I enjoyed the read!

[1] http://rumpkernel.org/ [2] http://clearlinux.org/

Re: Why does programming suck?

#85

Post by rjknight »

wereHamster wrote: post #17
TurboHaskal wrote: post #9

Taking the creativity out of an inherently creative process. Imagine you're a painter and then comes some moron (who is probably not a painter) yelling at you: - Why are you holding the brush that way? Also, I don't know that brand. - You should make thinner strokes, and always start coloring the surroundings so you don't go over by mistake. - Do not bother with the first brushes until you have a clear pencil sketch.…

In pure software engineering there is much less creativity needed than most people want to admit. While the UI/UX people gather requirements and work with the client to work out how the app should look and behave, sure, they can use their imagination. But once the requirements are set then in many cases a software engineer can sit down and build the software. There is no creativity needed to decide whether to use a v…

This isn't really true.

If a requirement is 'creative' - that is, it involves doing something that has never been done before, as opposed to a standard design pattern - then it will also require a creative implementation. Sometimes very simple requirements require great creativity in the implementation.

Most software requirements leave the question of how the thing will be achieved entirely unstated. It's very easy to write a single page of requirements that could require hundreds of pages of code to implement.

Re: Why does programming suck?

#86

Post by cuillevel3 »

wereHamster wrote: post #58
cuillevel3 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you confuse creativity (to create something new) with self-actualization and visual art. Programming is a craft, often used to create things which are really boring. Coders often like their craft, they like creating things, even if the final product is not important to them on a personal level.

The result of the work is not boring (hopefully, for the sake of its users). But the process of getting there is rarely creative (in the sense of inventing something new). Most software engineers rarely need to come up with new data structures or fancy algorithms. Most of these things are already there, we just need to know which ones to pick in a particular situation and how to glue them together.

It's perfectly fine to produce boring products. Data entry has never been fun, but it's needed.

Creating new algorithms or data structures may be scientifically creative. I don't know, maybe it's boring for the scientists and they think reasoning and writing about these is much more fun and creative than implementing them. Anyways it just one kind of creativity.

But there is creativity in 'just gluing' stuff together. It's not that simple and there is more choice involved than you suggest.

Re: Why does programming suck?

#87

Post by dikeert »

lausobo wrote: post #66
acqq wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've tried this, some two decades ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_Software "The development of Rose 2.0 combined a Windows-based Booch notation editor called Object System Designer (acquired from Wisconsin-based Palladio) with a new intermediate representation, and with new semantic analysis, code generation, and reverse engineering capabilities. The latter, which allowed prospective customers to analyze…

Author here. Thanks for the discussion. UML didn't pick up for whatever reason and visual programming fell into the valley of deception. I expect that with more UI/UX research we can get to the plateau of productivity in the next decade. Btw, there is a variant of UML that is executable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executable_UML

Wrong. Here is a thing, soviet spaceship Buran, which was performing fully automated landing in 1991, was programmed with this stuff - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAKON. Teams of software engineers created this language so rocker scientists would be able to programm spaceship without software developers.

Re: Why does programming suck?

#88

Post by dikeert »

rl3 wrote: post #23
arethuza wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By "more visual" do you mean diagrams?

Pretty much. One ideal might be for a flow chart to come alive and actually be the structure of your application itself, rather than just a reference or an aid. I suppose that while visual programming excels at conveying topology and structure, it can be weak at a low level due to the tedium involved. Traditional code is arguably better suited for low-level grunt work, at least for most people. A hybrid solution migh…

You might want to look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAKON. Teams of soviet software engineers created this language in 1980-s so rocket scientists would be able to program spaceship without software developers. Buran was programmed to perform automatic landing using this.

Re: Why does programming suck?

#89

Post by veddox »

mobiuscog wrote: post #3

Programming sucks if you're not interested in programming.

Read the article first. (The author is in fact himself a programmer who loves what he does.) The reason he says it sucks is not because it isn't interesting, but because modern programming is using a machine (the computer) to solve problems that that machine was never meant to solve and is actually rather ill-fitted to solve. He says that all the pay-offs and work-arounds we have had to use to get computers (originally a purely mathematical machine) to do what we want is the cause of many, if not most, problems in programming.

Re: Why does programming suck?

#90

Post by 72deluxe »

mobiuscog wrote: post #43
72deluxe wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, I am not in a startup but a well-established company, yet your list of issues is exactly the issues I am currently facing! Sad really.

Unfortunately, well-established companies have to (or certainly feel they have to) compete with startups. Many reports show how time-to-market is more and more important, and 'agile' is the only way. Even companies well-versed in proper engineering practices move towards the modern 'best practices' and acquire all of the best problems at the same time.

There's no agility here. There is lack of communication and no specifications, however.

No agile development, just a horrible, horrible mess.

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