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Why Programming Still Stinks
Posted by
timothy
on Sat Mar 20, 2004 10:15 PM
from the ad-viewing-is-good-for-you dept.
from the ad-viewing-is-good-for-you dept.
Andrew Leonard writes "Scott Rosenberg has a column on Salon today about a conference held in honor of the twentieth anniversary of the publishing of 'Programmers at Work.' Among the panelists saying interesting things about the state of programing today are Andy Hertzfeld, Charles Simonyi, Jaron Lanier, and Jef Raskin."
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panel link (Score:5, Informative)
Re:panel link (Score:5, Insightful)
Reviewing the list of contributors, it's interesting to note that some of them had already stopped programming back when they were interviewed. So why should we listen to them opine about software development techniques today?
My pet peeve on the list would have to be Jef Raskin [sourceforge.net], who's far better at self-promotion than actually coding. Had people actually listened to his ideas in the early days of the Macintosh project, they would have delivered a machine without a mouse or other features most people associate with the Mac. (As Andy Hertzfeld puts it, he's not the father of the Macintosh so much as the eccentric uncle.) [folklore.org]
However, if you want to hear him repeat the same things he's been saying for the last 20 years, he'll be keynoting the Desktop Linux Summit [desktoplinuxsummit.org]. No doubt he'll be beating the horse's skeleton that mice, icons, and the windowing interface are what's holding Linux back on the desktop. (MacOS X be damned!) Using those special "leap" keys that made the Canon Cat so successful, now that's the future!
Tyler
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Hungarian Notation (Score:5, Informative)
The linked page didn't mention that Charles Simonyi is the Hungarian for whom the term, Hungarian Notation is named.
Hungarian Notation is that Microsoft Windows programming naming strategy where the first few characters of a variable name should hint to the reader as to its data type. So hToolbox tips you to understand that it was a HANDLE type, even without scrolling your editor up a couple pages to find out; papszEnvironment would likewise tell a Win32 devotee that it was a Pointer to an Array of Pointers to Zero-terminated Strings.
It's not the first such instance of binding data type and name, and it won't be the last. For example, FORTRAN compilers have long had implicit variables; any variable not otherwise declared that started with I, J, K, L, M, or N would be assumed to be an integer, where most other variables would assume a real (floating-point) type. So FORCE(LAMBDA) directs the code to a real scalar from a real array, given an integer index. Many programmers start a routine with IMPLICIT NONE to disable this assumptive behavior, as mistakes are easy to make when you let the machine decide things for you.
BASIC would use sigils at the end of the variable names (NAME$, COUNT#, and scripting languages like Perl use sigils that precede the name %phones, @log, $count).
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Re:Hungarian Notation (Score:5, Insightful)
No it wouldn't. It would tell a win32 devotee that it started out that way.. it may not be that way now.
Look at how many "lp" variables are in the win32 headers.
Hungarian Notation is the most horrible concept ever because it always ends up lying. I bet that's why MS is so slow to fix buffer overflows.. in order to change a variable from an int to a long is an arduous process.
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Re:Hungarian Notation (Score:5, Funny)
my first thought was :
why should I listen to what m_plzstrSimonyi has to say about programming?
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Re:Hungarian Notation (Score:5, Informative)
Hungarian notation declined after Stroustrup added strong typing to C++. It is worth noting that Stroustrup never even considered NOT doing strong typing in C++. (Read his book on the design and evolution of C++.) Distaste on the part of hard-line C programmers for strong typing also declined, after C++ forced them to eat their broccoli, and they discovered it actually tasted pretty good (by catching errors that would otherwise not have been found nearly as easily).
It is also worth noting that Hungarian notation never caught on in any language other than C. In particular, Ada programmers never bothered with it: the Ada type system was rich enough that it could do everything that Hungarian notation pretended to do, and enforce it, by requiring compilers to refuse to compile type-incorrect programs.
(Somewhere, recently, I saw something about a commercial satellite project that was forced to use Ada, because there was no C/C++ compiler available for a recently-declassified microprocessor. Their programmers screamed bloody murder at the idea. The screams stopped when they noticed that the Ada compiler was catching errors for them.)
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Re:Hungarian Notation (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Hungarian Notation (Score:5, Insightful)
o When properly used, it created many ambigious meanings, which defeated the whole purpose of using it. Most of these ambiguities centered around various pointer constructs, which is supposedly one of the major areas which it attempts to address. Basically, HN is broken right out of the gate.
o It often required more typing, which slowed development and increased typo error rates. Which, in turn, required another round of typo fixing and compile attempts.
o While HN provides "instant" type information, it's often harder to read, especially for complex types, requiring much longer than an "instant" duration to comprehend or extract the information that it's attempting to provide.
o Maintaining code is very problematic. Changing the type of a variable may result in changes in countless files. This increases development time. It also causes a lot of garbage to be created in RC logs, which may of otherwise required changes in as little as one file.
Long story short, the disadvantages of HN do not justify what is basically a single reward, when it actually works. Basically, there are smart programmers that use good names which help convey the same types of "instant" type information and then there are bad programmers that insist on using HN.
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Re:Hungarian Notation (Score:5, Insightful)
Another problem is that if you change types, you have to change the names, too. Or if you don't, you end up with a completely misleading code.
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Re:And Here's the Google Cache to the Article (Score:5, Informative)
just remove all+the+search+terms
The same link here [google.co.th] with extra words highlighted.
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Want to read the whole article? (Score:4, Funny)
No thanks. The first two paragraphs didn't make me want to read anymore. I'll wait for the comments of the slashdoters to appear.
Re:Have you looked at the ads? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you think this post had alot of obscenities, you should have seen the email I sent to salon.
Salon writes good articles for the most part, and they have had rough financial times. If ignoring an "internet commercial" means they get money to keep writing articles such as this one, so be it. I do not like it, but I understand they are just playing the system. I understand economics well enough to know that this is a necessary evil.
Now, as to your comment, please try to be constructive. I communicate with companies and my Congressmen on a regular basis, both email and snail mail. Some of the issues are very dear to me, such as the letter I wrote to Dell berating them for laying off American call center employees to outsource to India. Not once in my letter did I swear or come across as uneducated, unintelligent, or uncaring. Swearing and other vulgar language does nothing to help your cause. Be constructive. Do not just say "ads suck," provide them with a solution to your perceived problem. I think you will be hard pressed to do this, however. Their solution is very good for their company and not too intrusive to their readers, although it is intrusive.
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Why registration sucks. (Score:4, Funny)
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This is why I hate slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
Could an AC please post the full text?
Re:This is why I hate slashdot (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:This is why I hate slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
They have free day passes, FYI.
To summarize, though:
- Charles Simonyi has a new company that he claims will change everything.
- Jaron Lanier is still happy to inform you that he's a genius and everyone else is stupid. Don't count on him to do anything, though.
- Andy Hertzfeld sounds like he's gearing up to lose more money on Linux desktop software.
- Salon continues to suck up to Linux users.
That's pretty much it. Don't count on anything more useful out of these guys, except maybe Simonyi.Parent
Re:This is why I hate slashdot (Score:5, Funny)
Or, to summarize your summary:
Same ol', same ol'.
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Re:This is why I hate slashdot (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:This is why I hate slashdot (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:This is why I hate slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
Fucking stop it. It's a copyrighted piece of work, it belongs to someone else, it is their right to control it.
Dave
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Hmmm, there's an interesting duo... (Score:5, Funny)
why does programming stinks today, an opinion (Score:4, Interesting)
Honestly, from where I sit (you may agree or not), programming and computer stuff in general has become a lot less like a science or craft, and more like a factory job. In the early days programmers who physicists, engineers, and mathamaticians. Today programmers are just programmers. More and more computer science departments are teaching using Java. Why? because it helps people to understand how the computer works? no. Simply, because it's what the industry is using.
I had 4 technicians from Cox over at my house yesturday because my parents couldn't figure out what was wrong with the cable modem. They were the most filthy, disgusting bunch I have ever seen and were dressed more like gas station attendants than professionals. Why? because that sort of work has become blue-collar and low-rent.
Programmers are no longer expected to be educated beyond their field. they are being educated to produce software, not to be COMPUTER SCIENTISTS. How many graduates of say, ITT Tech would actually understand Knuth, even if they have ever heard of him? Likely, not many. That is why software sucks. That is why the programming "trade" sucks. and that is why companies can send the jobs abroad to people who work for peanuts. Programming is just like stamping "Ford" on the grill in a Detroit assembly plant these days and nothing more.
Re:why does programming stinks today, an opinion (Score:5, Insightful)
So the question of course becomes--how do you dodge the bullet of crap positions? Doing well in academia is probably unfortunately the best solution. I'm going to CMU next year, annd had a nice talk with one of their CS profs about some openGL + C++ projects I'm working on, plus some AI research I started. I will get to work on these things, however I will also have to try not to swallow cyanide while dying through Java classes teaching me how to program in a way so dumbed down that even the greatest imbecile can't screw up.
This of course touches upon a great sadness of modern engineering training for me: you don't get taught to think--you get taught to use prescribed methods. Why? Ostensibly to never never reinvent the wheel, but also to get retards to do the job fine.
Let's not be stupidly depressed about everything, however. Trying to shoot to the very top has always required talent and hard work, and always been possible.
I think programming is truly great, truly beautiful. This afternoon I made some money writing some boring PHP code, but also worked on my personal projects, and I'll work to have the tides change in the future.
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Re:why does programming stinks today, an opinion (Score:5, Insightful)
This afternoon I made some money writing some boring PHP code, but also worked on my personal projects,
While I whole-heartedly agree with points you are making, it's worth mentioning that there's nothing fundamentally wrong with either Java or PHP, that leads to boring lowest common demoninator programming: it's possible to do interesting advanced and sophisticated things using both, as well as with their countless alternatives. Except for some elitits who claim one has to use, say, functional programming languages to do anything interesting, or "no pain no gain" hard-core low-level language fanatics, most truly good programmers understand it's not tools that make exceptional advances; it's the craftsmen that use them.
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Programming as a ends in itself is factory work (Score:5, Insightful)
That's because business has a need to get their problems solved, and finds the most effective tool to do it - in this case, generic problem solvers or programmers. This is work that is easily outsourced.
Back in the day, the guy programming was solving problems to make -his- life easier. It's not a stark distinction, but one that needs to be made. My formal training is as an EE, I I took MANY more advanced mathematics courses than the CS people at least at the undergraduate level. We did a grand total of three programming courses, all of them offered by the CS faculty, and when I was there, we were taught Modula-2. It's since moved to Java. They don't start out teaching the virtual machine or bytecode, either. Pointer? Eh?
Anyway, back to my point - I used Matlab, C, Assembly, you name it in my digital systems courses. We were not taught those things; we were expected to know them or learn them on our own to solve the problem at hand.
Using a calculator to solve a problem and making the calculator are different things.
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Shoveling Data (Score:5, Interesting)
It's mindless. The problem with programming today is that yes, it has become a commodity. Something that people expect you to be able to sit for 8 hours a day and do continuously, without thinking or having any input of your own whether WHAT your doing is really worth it.
There is no creativity in the corporate world, I think thats why so many people choose to work on open source software.
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Re:why does programming stinks today, an opinion (Score:5, Insightful)
You refer to the cable guys as iif they are the epitome of computer science. They aren't computer scientists. They almost certainly aren't even programmers. Perhaps to the completely ignorant, all computer-related jobs are the same, but they aren't. Most jobs as a technician are crap. Slightly above that would be the post of admin. Keeping something up to date. Installing new software. Above that, some network and system admins have interesting jobs designing new systems, implementing creative solutions to problems, and so forth. Programmers have a similar opportunity, to do creative coding, but often it's just another solution to another problem. Not something that sounds like a lotta fun. And above that would be computer science. Research. Whole different ball game.
I think this is the root of your confusion. You see more blue-collar technical jobs. This doesn't mean less research is going on, though. Back in the day, the only people who interacted with computers were academics and researchers. There was no ITT tech. Now, in addition to the academics and researchers (of whom there are actually almost certainly many many more), there are hordes of unwashed masses actually (heaven forbid) using computers as tools, rather than just for the academic prospects themselves. Point is, the research is still there; in fact, there's far more of it. But there are also more and more other uses. This isn't a bad thing; it's a good thing.
In case you don't see what I mean, look at it this way. Your complaint could be summarized with an analogous complaint about the watch industry. Back in the 1800's, the only watches available were really classy, expensive, work-of-art kinda things. A gentleman's accessory. Now, any old Joe on the street has one; they come in all sorts of cheap, disposable, low-quality shitty versions. But that doesn't mean there are less high-quality versions; in fact, there are more. Tag Huer, Rolex, Citizen, Suunto...the competition to make the greatest precision timepiece is quite tough, I suspect. Point is, there's a lotta shit out there now that wasn't there in 1800, but plenty more nice watches as well.
Hmm. I guess I didn't really keep that brief. Sorry.
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Re:why does programming stinks today, an opinion (Score:5, Insightful)
Why? Because I've seen through experience that (1) most people can't learn the hard CS stuff, and (2) 95% of projects don't require it. The sad fact is that "Computer Science" is only really applicable to solving "hard problems", writing compilers, designing languages, or to AI and its kin. It is in general, not applicable to business applications.
It used to be, but what happened? Computers got faster. Here's the progression in my career...
- Kudos for optimizing memory management and speed in C/C++, or even assembler.
- Questioning the need for such optimizations and pushing profiling before such work if it would take a significant amount of time
- Questioning the need for ever doing optimization, questioning the value of low-level languages.
- Pushing high-level languages (web-based solutions / VB) for everything unless a clear need exists.
- Sending everything to India.
This just wouldn't work unless most apps simply didn't need the work that we as computer scientists want to put into them. Knuth is a perfect example -- he spent years and years getting TeX perfect just so he could see his books typeset perfectly. We have that sort of perfectionist bent.But it's all driven by money in the end, unless you're in academia, or research... A very few people are in positions doing both technically hard stuff and making money for it. These would be like Wolfram Research, google, some game companies (although I hear they're sweatshops, but what isn't nowadays?)...
In the end, you're correct that a lot of hard problems can only be handled by people trained in CS. These would be the things mentioned, along with parallelism, threading, and optimization issues... But it's also true that most of the products out there don't need these. We're sifting these categories apart now, and unfortunately, it's just a fact that not much yummy stuff is left.
But when you have garbage collection, a raging fast machine, and graphical IDE's, even if someone puts crappy code together, as long as they make a decent API, it's going to work after they try to compile it half a million times.
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Re:why does programming stinks today, an opinion (Score:5, Insightful)
My school's core computer science curriculum is in Java. Language of instruction is a moot point to a rather great extent. You can learn as much from a data structures class taugh in Java as you can from one taught in $language_of_choice. The idea is to learn how things work fundamentally, and then apply those ideas practically. A linked list in Java works the same as a linked list in C. Its not about Java being the "industry standard" as you call it, its about Java being a perfectly modern and capable programming language. The idea
Your next analogy of the cable repairmen almost prompted me to moderate your post as +1 Funny, but when I found out you were not joking I decided to write this reply instead. To even equate a cable repair person with a computer scientist is pure madness. Even if they were programmers, how is getting the cable modem working a good metric of "computer stuff in general" being "a lot less like a science or craft and more like a factory job", or even relevant to the discussion of computer programmers vs. computer scientists at all?
None of your points even remotely explain what you consider the fundamental problem: "why software sucks...why the programming "trade" sucks...why companies can send the jobs abroad to work for peanuts" The fact is not all software sucks, many people love their jobs in the industry, and these people are getting paid well to do their jobs. Most of the computer scientists you speak of don't work in the private sector, you can find them at government [fnal.gov] research [llnl.gov] institutions [ornl.gov].
To say that these type of people don't currently exist, and that current CS curriculums can't produce scientists of this caliber is nothing short of ignorant.
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It helps to understand low-level stuff (Score:5, Informative)
The thing is, Java is somewhat high-level. There are things that go on under the hood that you won't learn about, but once in a while pop up anyway. For example, being taught Java, you won't learn about the difference between memory allocated on the heap, and memory allocated on the stack. And yet...
This does not work (it doesn't even compile):
There's nothing wrong with the code; the problem is that Java pretends to support closures but really doesn't. To use x in the anonymous inner class, you need to declare it final. But if you declare it final, you can't do the x = "b" assignment.
I'm familiar with C, so I understand the difference between the heap and the stack. I can infer that x (the reference to the string, not the string itself) is allocated on the stack. It is not uncommon for instances of anonymous inner classes to outlive the stack frame they were created in, so the compiler doesn't know whether or not x (on the stack) will still exist when the object's run() method is called. So it makes a _copy_ of x, but in order to pretend that it is still x, the compiler wants you to declare it final so that the original and the copy can never get out of sync.
Having experience with C, I know the heap is a safe place to put things that may need to outlive the current stack frame:
It's ugly, but it works. The reference called x needs to be declared final (because it's on the stack) but the reference contained in the array does not need to be final (because it's on the heap).
Because of my experience with lower-level stuff, I understand how Java is faking its support for closures, and how to work around the limitations. This is only one example; there are many other times when understanding things from a closer-to-the-metal perspective gives insights that would be lost if things were only understood from a high level. Joel Spolsky summed this up fairly well: Leaky Abstractions [joelonsoftware.com]
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Re:why does programming stinks today, an opinion (Score:5, Insightful)
The first thing you have to realize is that software is being written at a much higher rate now than it was back in the days when programmers were physicists and mathematicians. That's because it no longer takes a rocket scientist to write a program, and that is a Good Thing (TM). If the programming learning curve hadn't come down, we wouldn't be living in the wonderful information society that we are today, because there simply aren't enough rocket scientists to hammer out every PHP script and database app one might desire. The technical aptitude of the people working on the foundations of computing is certainly not degrading as programming becomes more democratized, because those people's talent and skills are not forged in some intro programming class. Every hacker knows he learned his art outside the classroom. So it's not exactly logical to assume that colleges could turn out a crop of brilliant innovators if only they used Haskell, read Knuth, and taught all their CS students physics and numerical analysis on the side. Clearly, what would actually happen if one simply cut the lowly Java-bred programmers out of the programming craft is that a lot less bad software would be written, a little less good software would be written, and all of it would cost more. That's not exactly an improvement.
None of this is to say that there are not pervasive (and addressable) problems in modern software engineering. Those problems are simply much more endemic to the state of the art of programming than they are to any particular group of people. As many have pointed out, software today is brittle. It is frequently opaque, offering users and programmers alike only the most rudimentary means of debugging. The bread and butter software used by everyone everyday is often monolithic, designed for one purpose and impossible to customize without intensive study. Think about it for a moment, and you'll realize that much of the functionality of a typical document-editing application is duplicated in any other. In principle, such functionality could be factored out. But I can't digress too far into that here - let me continue with the list of reasons why software sucks. Integrated development environments give programmers a view of a project that scares poorly with complexity, software is incredibly difficult to build from source (unless you use Java--heaven forbid that should find its way into the bubble of intellectual purity you inhabit), and perhaps worst of all, the design decisions and architecture of software are usually not expressed clearly anywhere except in source code, where they are obscured by all manner of syntactic complexities, compiler optimizations, and details that aren't significant to the overall intent of the code. These things--all the things that make software complex, which make it difficult for groups to work together on large software projects (as you would understand if you'd ever worked on one)-- are some of the real hurdles to be overcome in software engineering. ITT Tech and outsourcing to India are NOT the problem.
I haven't said much about how to solve any of these problems. But I've said a lot, so I'm going to stop now. I highly encourage you to get some more experience and perspective before you make sweeping and arrogant generalizations. College-aged know-it-alls with overblown rhetoric are a dime a dozen. Real problem solvers are rare.
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Re:why does programming stinks today, an opinion (Score:5, Insightful)
Any moron fresh out of ITT or CLN with a degree pasted to their face by their own drool can churn out a reaking pile of code that will work.
However, without the theoretical knowledge to back that basic syntax knowledge up, it won't work well.
The grandparent post mentions coding being a "factory job". The commoditization of coding IS a huge problem. Coding WELL is not easy. However, because these half-wits that barely dragged their sorry asses through High School can go to CLN and pick up the latest "Microsoft cert dujour" or whatever other worthless peice of paper they offer, the overall expectation of coding is dropping. I couldn't tell you how often I've been ordered to cut critical corners by clueless bosses who don't understand coding on any level deeper than how to throw syntax together to create a brittle shell of a program that will work just long enough to take the customer's money and run (a favorite quote: "... *I* was never taught that." - spoken in the manner of someone who can't imagine they don't know everything).
The problem isn't that we're elite. The problem is that good programming is no less complex or time-consuming a task now than it was 20 years ago. Why is it elite to try and explain that to someone when they tell you not to bother with such and such critical piece or this basic security test? It's not elite, it's just that we've been flooded by so many bozos that wouldn't know good programming practice if it bit them in the balls that we're constantly deluged by sub-par workers and everyone has come to accept that sub-par work as the norm.
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Re:why does programming stinks today, an opinion (Score:5, Insightful)
But good programming should be less complex now than it was before. That's the whole imperitus of language design. That's the reason that the last of the big languages to roll out is the same "simple" JAVA bashed in a few previous posts.
In a previous post, I couldn't fathom the divergence of thoughts that denounced JAVA as a language while espousing that he's really cool C++/OpenGL stuff out there. C++ has a syntax that's unwieldy and awkward, mastered by comparatively few, and full of "compatibility" weaknesses shared by it's older brother, C. It's almost like it was thrown in there subconsiously to say, "Look, I am an uber elite programmer. OpenGL and C++. Watch me whine as I use something that has a clean, clear syntax."
I'd hate to hear him gripe about PASCAL.
"Really cool work", can be done in any language, and the proliferation of languages shows that there's many solutions to the same problem.
His bashing the language for it's simplicity was as insightful as bashing good error checking, testing array boundaries, or enforcing garbage collection. Note that technological improvements can lessen the impact of these annoyances, but when the language design is flawed, only deep education of the masses (as in, don't do this, you'll regret it) can save the language.
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Why programming stinks in general: (Score:5, Insightful)
The forces that allow this phenomenon to self-perpetuate are:
=Lack of people who know how to manage engineers properly, know how to recognize good ones and bad ones and how to motivate the ones you have to be productive.
=Lack of good project management skills that inevitably leads to crunched schedules and poor quality code, also lack of perception on the part of management as to why software is having problems with performance, bugs or schedule to complete
=Lack of desire to retain good engineers or cultivate improvement in the junior ones
=Lack of communication between engineering and whomever is giving them work, especially regarding desired features and schedule
=Lack of quality control, lack of oversight, lack of checkpoints in project progress
It doesnt help that the concept of "good engineering" is so hard to measure- a few things are "obviously bad" but most things are not. Even if someone is being completely wrong headed about one particular concept, it is entirely possible that they are exceptionally strong in many other areas within that field. It eventually boils down to "the proof being in the pudding" with the pudding being exceptionally complex to make and subject to the whims of the royal pudding tasters when done.
Soon will be gone forever the glory days of old (Score:5, Insightful)
It'll have to be a managed engineering process with all the fun and excitement of a CPA convention.
Re:Soon will be gone forever the glory days of old (Score:5, Insightful)
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It's Gordon Moore's Fault (Score:5, Insightful)
With exponentially increasing resources, nothing ever stabilizes and everyone knows it. If people design software with the assumption that it will be totally obsolete and replaced in 18 months, they create software that is so badly designed that it must be replaced in 18 months.
Until hardware performance plateaus and people get off the upgrade-go-round, programming will be sloppy and ugly.
Building code from specification (Score:5, Insightful)
It's difficult to believe that Simonyi could be ignorant of the many many years of development of CASE tools and AI projects that have promised to build software systems from specifications.
In 1980, a Professor told a lecture hall of Sophomore Computer Science students, myself included, that almost none of them would have jobs in programming, because in just a few years we would have AI systems that would build software systems from specifications that subject specialists could input.
I don't think we are even a little bit closer to that dream today than we were 24 years ago.
Maybe I'm confusing things here, though. Specifications aren't exactly the same as design. I know that I've sat through some CASE tool presentations where they implied that the work was all done when the design was done, but they were doing some pretty fast hand waving. I believe that those tools did not live up to the promises of their marketing.
Am I off-base here? Has Simonyi cracked this problem with something entirely new?
Mechanics and programmers have similar problems. (Score:5, Interesting)
I admittedly haven't read the article (yet), but I'd like to include a few reasons of my own that programming stinks. As you might guess, I am a programmer.
My friends and I compare a lot of computer things to car things. Most likely, we do that because we are enthusiasts of both. Fast cars and fast software are very similar in many respects.
A little background information on cars is necessary to gain the full effect of my argument about programming. Although the next three paragraphs may seem unnecessary at first glance, I assure you that I am a careful writer and that you should read them.
Car enthusiasts fall into quite a few categories. For example, people who restore classic Mopar or Chevy cars enjoy making everything look like "mint" condition. Usually, every part of the car is so spotless and beautiful that you could eat off the engine. On the other end of the classic car spectrum, there are those who will tub out the entire car and concentrate only on performance features. These cars may not look like much, but they'll break your neck if you push the gas too hard. And of course, there is an entire spectrum of prefenences between these two ideals.
In most of these categories, the hard core enthusiasts like to do the ENTIRE job themselves. They won't let anyone else touch their cars. The wanna be's will usually contract out nearly everything, because they want the glamor of showing up at car shows and showing off their machine, but can't hold a screwdriver and don't know the difference between a 6-point wrench and an Allen wrench. And of course, there is an entire spectrum of car knowledge, experience, and do-it-yourself levels in between these two extremes.
Somewhere in the middle of the two extremes are people like my friends and I. We do a lot of work ourselves, but when it's a complex or high-risk job, or if we don't feel like doing it because it's boring and time consuming, we'll have a professional do it. There are auto mechanics who do pretty much any job. And there are mechanics who specialize in a specific area. For example, I have my radiator guy, my transmission guy, my engine rebuilding guy, my chrome plating guy, my carpet guy, my headliner guy, and the list goes on and on. I use each specific person for the job he excels at because I understand thoroughly what I am about to explain.
Programmers are a lot like the car enthusiasts that I am and whom I describe above. Some prefer to do EVERYTHING, like that guy who wrote 386BSD and wouldn't insert other peoples' code improvements. (The project got forked and now you've got the *BSDs, and that guy is no longer involved as far as I know.) Some prefer to concentrate only on a specific area of software, such as graphics, numerical algorithms, kernel schedulers, assembly optimizations, databases, text processing, and the list goes on and on forever. Even an area such as graphics can break down into a plethora of categories, such as charting software, user interfaces, etc.
The biggest reason that software sucks, in my opinion, is the very same reason that the automotive repair industry sucks. I wouldn't be surprised if programmers are just as hated as car mechanics. The programmer's boss is just like the old lady who takes her car to the mechanic. Neither knows anything about the job at hand. The only thing they know is that it costs them big and the results suck.
For the programmer's boss, the software contains bugs, is difficult and confusing for the customer to use, and takes much too long to develop, so the market window closes, the project goes over budget, and maybe higher management cancels the project altogether.
For the little old lady, the car broke down. The mechanic wants to fix it properly. But doing so will take weeks (believe me). The symptoms are caused by one or more problems, which require several new parts and quite a lot of labor to repair. The parts may be hard to find. The old ones may need to be rebuilt. And generally, people don't like renting a car for t
Why this article stinks... (Score:5, Insightful)
The article is crap. A typical snippet:
This is similar to many articles before disparaging the WIMP (Windows, Icons, Mouse, Pointer) model. A bunch of "visionaries" who see that we've used this same model for some time and therefore are convinced it is horribly limiting, and that we are using it solely because the people who actually make systems have less imagination than people who write these kinds of articles. [*] They never have any but the most vague suggestions of a better model. They certainly never take the time to explore its limitations longer to ensure it really is workable (much less actually an improvement).
In fact, this article is so vacuous that I'm not sure what they think stinks about software, much less why. And certainly not how to fix it.
[*] In fairness, this article mentions people who have done some impressive work in the past (and is thus atypical of the genre). But still, I do not see any suggestions for a fundamentally better model or even any concrete problems with the existing one.
Re:Why this article stinks... (Score:5, Interesting)
Ignoring your snide attack on the previous guy's knowledge - do you really think anybody on /. doesn't know who Raskin is? - I agree with the previous guy that it's unfair to blame open-source coders for producing "more of the same". Let's look at the comments:
They say that "Windows" (meaning WIMP) on top of "UNIX" is a bad idea. Why? It's exactly what Raskin's former employer is currently doing. And Windows is essentially WIMP on top of VMS. Where is the innovation coming out of the leading two desktop OSs? They too are just rehashed versions of decades old ideas.
I don't think it's the open-source community's responsibility to be free R&D for the entire computer industry. Isn't it enough that they are producing free software? Do they have to research it as well? What an onerous task! R&D should be in the domain of researchers and academics. It took 40 years for WIMP to progress this far. Does Raskin think open-source can turn that around over night? If so, then he has more unrealistic expectations about open-source than all the /. cheerleaders combined.
To put it bluntly, I don't think it's fair for Raskin and Lanier to demand such a high standard from the money-poor open-source community when the ultra-rich closed source companies aren't doing any better. Microsoft pumped how many billions into their R&D department and what they did get? A ripoff of J2EE and a ripoff of MacOS X. Apple pumped billions into their own R&D and they've produced Display Postscript... I mean Display PDF... only 20 years after Adobe did it. Colour me unimpressed.
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From the soapbox (Score:5, Insightful)
The worst programming problem is unrealistic expectations on the part of management. What it really will cost and how long it will take is always too much and too long so budgets and schedules get cut. At least aerospace/defense makes an attempt to figure this out and bid the contract accordingly. The commercial world looks at when the next trade show is or something else equally irrelevant and then says it has to be done by then with the staff that's available. They end up getting what they paid for and blaming the programmers when it crashes (See my sig. Yes, I do software QA). Established commercial companies aren't quite as bad but there is still a tendency for making the sale to somehow trump in the determination of what can be developed with the time and resources available. The resources may be there but there is a tendency to try to produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant and then wondering why there is no baby after the month is up in spite of publishing detailed schedules.
In contrast, I think one of the primary reasons free/open source software tends to be of significantly higher quality is that these factors don't come into play. A feature or program either is ready or it is not. If it is not, it stays as a development project until it either dies of apathy or enough people are attracted to it to make it into something real. For established projects, you have people like Linus who "own" the project and ensure that contributions only get incorporated if they pass muster.
I find it amusing that one of the criticisms of FOSS is that the schedules are unpredictable but the reality is that software development schedules ARE somewhat unpredictable* but at least the FOSS development process recognizes this and instead focuses on the quality of the program rather than pretending it doesn't exist and coughing up something that isn't really done based on someone else's absurd schedule.
* If someone develops the same sort of software over and over again (think IBM) they will eventually gain enough experience to have a reasonable shot at scheduling and resourcing a project correctly. The fewer data points you have, the less likely you are to get it right.
I already sent this letter in response.... (Score:5, Insightful)
As a programmer who recently stopped working for a very very very large computer firm that sells both hardware and software, let me say that Simonyi's point makes zero sense. Tools already exist to "shape software," and they are known as programming languages like Visual Basic, C, C++, C#, Java, Perl, PHP, Python, etc...
I'm frankly sick of architects (that's the term for people who say they design software but don't actually design software) who bemoan the gap between their glorious visions and the real products their teams end up producing. These people need to click "Close" on their UML models and go get their hands dirty by writing parts of the production code. Then they'll understand the real-world constraints that their codeless design didn't account for, like internationalization, performance bottlenecks, user authentication, heterogenous networked environments, and ACID transaction support (to name the first few).
Oh yeah, and the reason open-source developers wrote a Unix-like operating system (Linux) and put a Windows-like interface on top of it (X11 + GNOME/KDE) is because these are both very reasonable and mature solutions for a variety of computing needs. If any of you architects out there want something besides Linux that conveniently abstracts away 99.9% of the hardware interaction yet also provides an easy-to-learn interface for general users, you are more than welcome to write it yourself. Or you can model it in UML, click some buttons, and hope it compiles.
Why do I think software sucks? Because market droids and architects who forgot how to program get together and promise their customers AI in only six months.
Programming = Art (Score:5, Funny)
Sadly it's the type of art where they paint with feces.
Why an old C64 hack thinks programming sucks (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, in the nice old days, the C64 and IBM PC were fairly easy to code for, but they also gave you very little bang for the buck. The nice thing was a couple hours of programming could get something nice out.
Now, it can take me a couple hours to do even a simple notepad application from scratch. I'm forever spending lines of code to fill in structures or respond to all the events an API wants.
The computers got more powerful, and the APIs also got more powerful, but now I spend so much time filling out basic structures that I don't need. I'd rather a lot of that stuff was user configurable or stored in an XML file somewhere. I don't want to have to know about allocating & positioning fonts! I just want to dump it in a nice scrolling box.
It's like a bureacratic nightmare writing code now. Sure, there's MFC, etc., but that's like the "easy" tax form. The moment you want to do just one thing different, you're back to square one. And the learning curve, sheesh!
That's why I like projects like XUL. We've made the APIs so programmer centric, that I can't breathe anymore. I just want to code the important stuff then let someone else make the GUI pretty.
Re:Why an old C64 hack thinks programming sucks (Score:5, Interesting)
You're right. Those damn calls have so many goddamned parameters and complicated structures to fill out, it feels like you're going on a snipe hunt every time you want to make a system call.
Try Qt. Its not quite as efficient as win32, but for GUIs, it generally doesn't matter. For other things, the key is to make as few system calls as possible and instead rely on the C/C++ standard libraries.
I'm lucky. I get to write commercial software for MacOS X using Cocoa. Still, the bugs I have are mostly due to having to make system calls. When I'm writing code to hold and manipulate data using the STL, I have very few bugs. Where I run into trouble is when I want to use something like Quicktime or other system APIs where I don't really know what the calls are doing and there are a lot of undocumented gotchas.
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Why it really sucks (Score:5, Insightful)
Add to that the string of phbs, development team, testing team. Then you end up with people who don't really understand the problem, solving it with tools that we don't know if they work or not, or which they might not even fully understand. (Have you proved GCC is correct lately? How about
So until we can get a method that ties programming to what it really is (problem solving) we get to poke about blindly in the dark to find our 'solution' and hope it shuts up the customer long enough for them to write the check. We're slowly getting there, but because programming is still a new thing it hasn't been remotely fully explored yet.
There's lots of room to figure out how to make a computer solve a problem once it's defined. Finding the problem is a major portion of the battle. The rest comes in finding a repeatable, provable way to solve it.
Until that happens youll need your blindfold and poking stick handy.
People, not computers (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not going to be a Yancy and specify where these points aren't applicable. Take what you read here with a grain of salt, but I guarantee you can apply one of these to an experience you've had.
- Zealot Trolls.Answering someone's question with a code solution that contains even the pettiest OO fault, even if it has nothing to do with OOP, will get you nothing but a bunch of OOP zealots on your ass, saying 'WRONG! That shouldn't be public' or 'WRONG. The destructor should be virtual' or 'WRONG. Should pass by reference'. You get the point. There are more and more trolls on boards these days looking to stroke their ego by posting extremely minor corrections to mostly correct solutions.
- Wheel Engineers. Stop making 3D engines. Stop making WinSock networking wrappers. Stop making ray-tracers. Stop making things that have been done 1000x before unless a)It's for fun/educational purposes. b) You're going to do something someone else hasn't. Even if there's _one_ thing in your coding project that someone hasn't done before, it's definitly worth it to create. Red-Faction was the last game IMO that added anything new to the world of 3D engines, other than 'taking advantage of x graphics card feature'. Physics is another area to inovate with game engines. Please Stop Re-Inveting The Wheel and giving it some cheezy name.
- Meatless Code. Anyone who has worked with the 3DS Max SDK knows what I'm talking about. Important data is fragmented everywhere, and accessed in 10 different ways. You spend more time reading the API docs than you do programming. I was reading through some ASP.net code the other day, and it took 45 lines to update a table with an SQL command. I read through it, and it could be done with 5 narrow lines of perl code. With C++, you could probably spend a solid two weeks writting generic 'manager' code that does absolutely nothing. Programmers need to learn to draw the line between 'productive' code and 'silly' code. Having a DataObjectFactoryCreatorManager class for 'ping' program, is a bit silly.
If I could do the world a favour, it would be to send all coders a letter that simply said "You are not the best. Live with it.". If I read another reply to a simple question with some dork awkwardly throwing in that he's "A 20 year C programmer who wrote a compiler on a TSK-110ZaxonBeta when I was 11". No one cares about your background unless they ask, or it's relevant.
Other than that, programming is fine. Except for Java.
Re:Copyright (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Keep it simple, stupid. (Score:5, Informative)
In pure line count a minimal Java Hello World would only have one additional line.
It is crammed with keywords, and it contains the notion of Objects and Classes.
But I see that as a good thing - you can concentrate on the mainline code and introduce the student to control flow and so forth, but when you come to the concepts of classes you've got a nice immediate example to point to.
It's so much easier to teach a language when a common reaction to new information is "oh, I wondered what that was for" rather than "why would I ever need that ?"
Finally I have to completely disagree with you about type safety. A perfectly written and comprehended program does not need type safety. A real world program will never be either, and type safety will prevent some of the nastiest bugs from occurring and keep your data intact.
I have no problem with C in its place, but its place is not as a learning language or as a business language.
D.
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