Stack Overflow CEO Shares Plans for Certification Programs, Opinions on No-Code Programming (zdnet.com) 52
"We serve about 100 million monthly visitors worldwide," says the CEO of Stack Overflow, "making us one of the most popular websites in the world. I think we are in the top 50 of all websites in the world by traffic."
In a new interview, he says the site's been accessed about 50 billion times over the past 14 years — and then shares his thoughts on the notion that programmers could be replaced by no-code, low-code, or AI-driven pair programming: A: Over the years, there have many, many tools, trying to democratize software development. That's a very positive thing. I actually love the fact that programming is becoming easier to do with these onramps. I was speaking at Salesforce recently, and they've got people in sales organizations writing workflows, and that's low code. You've got all these folks who are not software engineers that are creating their own automations and applications.
However, there is this trade-off. If you're making software easier to build, you're sacrificing things like customizability and a deeper understanding of how this code actually works. Back in the day, you might remember Microsoft FrontPage [an early HTML web page editor] as an example of that. You were limited to certain basic things, but you could get web work done. So similarly, these tools will work for general use cases. But, if they do that, without learning the fundamental principles of code, they will inevitably have some sort of a limit. For example, having to fix something that broke, I think they're going to be really dumbfounded.
Still, I think it's important, and I'm a believer. It's a great way to get people engaged, excited, and started. But you got to know what you're building. Access to sites like Stack Overflow help, but with more people learning as they're building, it's essential to make learning resources accessible at every stage of their journey....
Q: Is Stack Overflow considering any kind of certification? Particularly, as you just mentioned, since it's so easy now for people to step in and start programming. But then there's that big step from "Yes, I got it to work," but now "I have to maintain it for users using it in ways I never dreamed of."
A: "It's very much part of our vision for our company. We see Stack Overflow going from collective knowledge to collective learning. Having all the information is fine and dandy, but are you learning? Now, that we're part of Prosus's edtech division, we're very much looking forward to offering educational opportunities. Just as today, we can get knowledge to developers at the right place and time, we think we can deliver learning at just the right place and time. We believe we can make a huge impact with education and by potentially getting into the certification game.
Q: Some of the open-source nonprofits are moving into education as well. The Linux Foundation, in particular, has been moving here with the LF Training and Certification programs. Are you exploring that?
A: This is very much part of our vision....
Stack Overflow's CEO adds that the site's hot topics now include blockchain, machine learning, but especially technical cloud questions, "rising probably about 50% year over year over the past 10 years.... Related to this is an increase in interest in containerization and cloud-native services."
In a new interview, he says the site's been accessed about 50 billion times over the past 14 years — and then shares his thoughts on the notion that programmers could be replaced by no-code, low-code, or AI-driven pair programming: A: Over the years, there have many, many tools, trying to democratize software development. That's a very positive thing. I actually love the fact that programming is becoming easier to do with these onramps. I was speaking at Salesforce recently, and they've got people in sales organizations writing workflows, and that's low code. You've got all these folks who are not software engineers that are creating their own automations and applications.
However, there is this trade-off. If you're making software easier to build, you're sacrificing things like customizability and a deeper understanding of how this code actually works. Back in the day, you might remember Microsoft FrontPage [an early HTML web page editor] as an example of that. You were limited to certain basic things, but you could get web work done. So similarly, these tools will work for general use cases. But, if they do that, without learning the fundamental principles of code, they will inevitably have some sort of a limit. For example, having to fix something that broke, I think they're going to be really dumbfounded.
Still, I think it's important, and I'm a believer. It's a great way to get people engaged, excited, and started. But you got to know what you're building. Access to sites like Stack Overflow help, but with more people learning as they're building, it's essential to make learning resources accessible at every stage of their journey....
Q: Is Stack Overflow considering any kind of certification? Particularly, as you just mentioned, since it's so easy now for people to step in and start programming. But then there's that big step from "Yes, I got it to work," but now "I have to maintain it for users using it in ways I never dreamed of."
A: "It's very much part of our vision for our company. We see Stack Overflow going from collective knowledge to collective learning. Having all the information is fine and dandy, but are you learning? Now, that we're part of Prosus's edtech division, we're very much looking forward to offering educational opportunities. Just as today, we can get knowledge to developers at the right place and time, we think we can deliver learning at just the right place and time. We believe we can make a huge impact with education and by potentially getting into the certification game.
Q: Some of the open-source nonprofits are moving into education as well. The Linux Foundation, in particular, has been moving here with the LF Training and Certification programs. Are you exploring that?
A: This is very much part of our vision....
Stack Overflow's CEO adds that the site's hot topics now include blockchain, machine learning, but especially technical cloud questions, "rising probably about 50% year over year over the past 10 years.... Related to this is an increase in interest in containerization and cloud-native services."
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I was planning to write this.
Stack Exchange is the poster child for no-code programming, everyone just copies/pastes the crap that is posted there without even having an inkling of an idea what the fuck they are doing, and I get to pentest this garbage.
I swear, at least 7 times out of 10, if I see god-awful, insecure, buggy code in a code review, googling the code will yield a Stackexchange page. And yes, I do put it into the report that the programmer is a lazy bastard who doesn't know jack shit what he's
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And the times it ain't wrong, it's just a security problem waiting to happen because it's a POC meant to give a newbie an idea how to do something rather than something you should put into production.
Re: "Certified no-code programmer" (Score:2)
Honestly I think there are a lot of good security practices to be learned from SO, but in order to learn them you can't just read the code, you have to read the comments too. As in my post below, the reason I searched SO to begin with was because I was trying to practice at least *somewhat* good security because I had to use a password to authenticate with an application I was working on (which is never a good situation to be in to begin with, but it's typically because the developer of a cloud API you have
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That's why, as a software developer, you're supposed to use your judgement, and what separates the good from the bad is all about judgement, as really just any idiot can code something that compiles and works, or at least appears to for some very limited cases. Likewise, tools like SO are quite useful and definitely shouldn't be ignored, especially when you're still learning. And indeed, if the answers provided don't work or are bad for whatever reason, then provide your own, as I did here:
https://stackover [stackoverflow.com]
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That's why, as a software developer, you're supposed to use your judgement, and what separates the good from the bad is all about judgement, as really just any idiot can code something that compiles and works, or at least appears to for some very limited cases.
And that is just the point. In established engineering disciplines, this has been stamped out by product liability and certification requirements. This is the reason that, say, electrical fires that burn down your house are rare. It is high time to stop this crap-show were anybody is allowed to write production code.
Re: "Certified no-code programmer" (Score:2)
One problem with that though is no programmer anywhere is in control of anywhere close to the entire stack; basically just a small fragment of it. Even what's referred to as "full stack" doesn't actually mean that. Very few application developers for example know anything about how the kernel works, and very few kernel developers know anything about building a physical CPU. And we still haven't seen gotten into firmware, networking, databases, storage, high availability, load balancing, etc, etc.
I think too
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First, no electrician produces their own wire, wire clamps, switches, outlets, etc. and they are not in control of what the utility delivers. It still works.
Second, no, Rust will not do anything for the overconfident (a form of incompetence) and the incompetent ones. There are tons of ways to screw code security and code reliability and code maintainability up that are not one bit dependent in the absence of memory safety. The incompetent ones will just find other ways to mess things up and no tool will hel
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First, no electrician produces their own wire, wire clamps, switches, outlets, etc. and they are not in control of what the utility delivers. It still works.
If you don't understand the difference in complexity between that, and a computer (and just how big of a difference it really is,) then you're one of the overconfident people I'm talking about.
Re: "Certified no-code programmer" (Score:2)
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Their hostility to new users will eventually be the reason they become useless, as people won't contribute knowledge.
I don't think you understand how StackOverflow actually works. The majority of new users aren't contributing knowledge, they're leaching it to solve their immediate problem.
They're coming to SO and posting just an error message (with no related code), or just a problem statement (without showing any code they've used to attempt to solve the problem), or just an isolated piece of code (with no input data and expected results) and expecting people to hand them a solution with a silver spoon. The number of peo
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No surprise at all. The problem with insecure code is incompetent coders. I would not even accuse them of laziness, I am convinced most of these people simply cannot do any better and should never have gotten a coding job in the first place. It is high time to stop this crap-show and realize producing good code is expensive, but that the money invested pays off nicely.
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Hush! The money they don't invest in coders they have to invest at least doubled or tripled into pentesters.
I.e. me.
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Hush! The money they don't invest in coders they have to invest at least doubled or tripled into pentesters.
I.e. me.
Heheheh, sorry about that.
It's pretty well no-code (Score:2)
Between their flowchart-based tools and the base functionality you can crank out a lot of behavior without actually writing any code. These days you can accomplish the same thing with Drupal using either a module called Maestro, or ECA module with BPMN (there are a couple of different modelers available for that.) You can trigger various actions provided by modules and often get away
In America no degree, no job (Score:2)
Once in a blue moon a contractor can get you in somewhere, but it won't last. And you'll always be the 1st in line for layoffs.
And when you hit 40 it's over. The contractors stop calling you.
Companies much prefer H1-Bs, and they use degrees as a mean
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you might get something for a short time after "graduation" because the program has a job placement deal with some companies, but when you inevitably lose that job you'll hit a wall where every company wants a degree or they won't even let you apply.
If you're really good at what you do, this isn't a problem. Even your favorite billionaire says so:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
And guess what? I got hired at one of his companies without having a degree relevant to my field of work. And the degrees I have are from community colleges and an in-state university you've never heard of.
But this isn't unique, it's actually an ongoing trend:
https://www.computerworld.com/... [computerworld.com]
Once in a blue moon a contractor can get you in somewhere, but it won't last. And you'll always be the 1st in line for layoffs.
And when you hit 40 it's over. The contractors stop calling you.
The contractors are generally only good for getting you entry level jobs in my experie
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Would that were true. I was badgered for easily five years after I quit. I quit at fifty-five. I never had a degree.
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A New Alternative to Stack.* is Needed (Score:5, Interesting)
Stack is now owned by Prosus, and Prosus is owned by Naspers, a South African mega corporation. Just like South Africa as a country, Naspers is supporting Russia and its invasion of Ukraine. South Africa is one of a very few countries that have not condemned the Russian invasion and has abstained from any vote condemning Russia's invasion. It has also supported the sham referendums in Ukraine that Russia is using to claim justification for the invasion. And like South Africa, Naspers is one of the few megacorps who have refused to distance themselves from Russia. Supporting Stack now is in fact supporting a company that supports Russia. A new alternative to Stack is required.
Re:A New Alternative to Stack.* is Needed (Score:4, Informative)
So what? (Score:1)
Naspers is one of the few megacorps who have refused to distance themselves from Russia.
I am so sick of everyone on Earth having to support the latest war.
I would rather work with a company or country that maintains neutrality, than one that pushes others to get involved in regional conflicts we should never belong.
YOUR support of the war has killed thousands if not tens of thousands more Ukranians (and Russians, but it's clear you are cool with that) tan if the world had just let Russia and Ukraine work t
Re:So what? (Score:4, Informative)
You DO know that Russia invaded Ukraine, not the other way around, yes? The war would instantly be over if Russia wants that...
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maybe he isn't as vulnerable to us/western propaganda like you ...
(get on with the times, even biden is privately asking zelensky now to consider peace talks (which means there will be peace talks soon), it seems the show has been too good of a hit so far. go figure. i for one wouldn't complain)
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So it's Western propaganda that Russia is standing deep in Ukrainian soil? And in truth poor little Russia is getting invaded?
Hey, this is your chance to set the record straight, so how did it really transpire? Did Ukraine assault Russian border guards and since 5:45 Russia is now shooting back and every bomb will be answered with their own bomb?
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no, that's sadly a fact. western propaganda has been steadily an instrument to escalate the conflict. as opposed to neutrality contributing to de-escalation and peaceful solutions. which was what the post you replied to was about.
and it's because of western propaganda that you will probably find this outrageous and unacceptable, as per the narrative of bad putin being the root of all evil. rather simplistic, but it apparently works! but worry not, if as it appears there is some intention to now dial it a bi
Re:So what? (Score:4, Interesting)
There's a simple, peaceful solution. Russia withdraws from Ukraine.
Everything else only means that it's acceptable to raid a neighbor and steal part of its territory. We've had that kind of thinking already. It was the staple of diplomacy before WW2. You just raid a neighbor when you feel like you should have some of its territories and thought that the neighbor is too weak to defend against it. This also meant that there has never been a decade without war on the European continent before 1945.
I kinda doubt that it's really a good idea to return to that kind of time, especially with contemporary weapons that don't limit the war to the battlefield.
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There's a simple, peaceful solution. Russia withdraws from Ukraine.
ukraine needs to be what it already was before the usa started meddling with nato and promoting coups, a decade ago: a neutral buffer state between russia and the west. except it's too late for that. so the only alternative now is partition which is a less than ideal arrangement. if that isn't possible, though, russia will wreck the country before letting it fall into western influence, transforming it into a de facto buffer.
media systematically dismissed the idea of nato expansion as an existential threat
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the only alternative now is partition
The only alternative for Putin, you mean. Nobody gives half a fuck what that megalomaniac nutjob wants.
Has it ever occurred to you that Ukraine can actually choose what they want to do, without having to consult mother Russia whether they may? Ukraine ain't Russia's child, and it doesn't need to ask for permission when choosing its foreign policy for fuck's sake!
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This had less to do with someone calling someone (Biden called him back in 2019? Really? According to my information, someone else was in power back then. C'mon, at least try something that hold a drop of water, if you have a problem with a particular stooge in your political horrorshow, that's fine, but stop projecting your problems on other nations, please) but more with people not wanting a peaceful solution but rather wanted to break the country up to do their own thing.
You may notice that something lik
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zelensky took office may 2019. he did enter into talks with putin and with "separatists", deals were struck and ceasefires were agreed upon, none of that did hold very well. probably not his fault, it was a volatile situation and he had dubious friends to satisfy, but in retrospect it doesn't seem as a serious commitment for peace and very minimal concessions, if any, were made. he basically was telling russians to gtfo and let the donbas to its own devices.
biden took office january 2021. from there the pre
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The point is that no country in the history of countries easily accepted a part of it trying to break away. Twice so if there's good reason to assume that the idea isn't exactly their own.
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well, that's indeed a way more thoughtful, nuanced and useful perspective than "it's all that nutjob putin's fault, die putin die", so i'm very glad we had this conversation. and i can actually agree to some extent, but lets leave it here :-)
we live in a complicated world, but media only ever tells us simple slogans, giving us easy dummy targets, and repeats them ad nauseam. they act like we were idiots because collectively we so indeed behave like idiots, that's a fact. weeding out these lies makes room fo
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maybe he isn't as vulnerable to us/western propaganda like you ...
Maybe you can point out a single agreement between Ukraine and Russia that Russia hasn't broken in the last 30 years? Maybe you should ask Armenia exactly what aid the CSTO (and by extension, Russia) provided to them in the wake of the invasion by Azerbaijan a couple of months ago?
Or maybe you can just shut your Putin-taint-licking hole?
Postscript. COBOL. Farming. (Score:4, Informative)
How long ago was it that anyone coded in raw Postscript? Modelling languages like PS are not the same as coded programs, but maybe the idea is that "programs made of code" will become more like "program models". A lot of the GUI frameworks used in making nearly all modern web apps are little more than models now. Nobody cares about the underlying code, they just want the app to work end-to-end, and codemonkeys can turn out reasonably good (and reasonably secure) web apps in the same way a puppy mill cranks out pedigree dogs.
I wrote UI code, optimized JS, and full-stack web apps for 25 years. Seriously, from Day One (maybe Day Two) of the Interwebs. I used every platform you can remember, and created a few platform-ish things for my own uses. The work always paid well, was fascinating, and I eventually retired comfortably in the Bay Area. But I would never encourage anyone to take up web app development today. Because I expect those jobs -- and everything allied to them -- to become completely dominated by AI "any day now".
Oh, BTW, the last thing I did before I retired was evaluate and then turn down a startup that was going to fully automate DevOps using ML. I wasn't optimistic, but I'm certain it will happen eventually.
It's over, guys. Get into AI or ML development -- until the AI takes that over too -- or get just completely out. Apply your logical chops to making farming a fully automated, hands-free, play. Feed the world. Or maybe get deep into FORTRAN or COBOL, maintaining critical legacy systems that need to last another 50 years. I doubt there will be any AI tools pointed those directions. Heh, I could be completely wrong about that.
But I'm serious about the farming thing. Think about it.
Re:Postscript. COBOL. Farming. (Score:4, Interesting)
1. First we had to to give direct commands in binary.
2. Then we had assembly language, that made reading the code much easier as binary numbers got human readable names, but still quite difficult
3. Then we got higher level languages like C, which improved this even more
4. Then we started getting libraries that do part of the work, e.g. graphic libraries, but now we needed to learn to use them and integrate them together. It was still better than writing everything yourself.
No-code, is not the next step in evolution. It is just a new branch. You need to write the actual application with "real" programming language so someone can make something with it without writing code. This falls into two categories:
A) Very specific applications, that limit heavily what you can do, but you can do what you want very easily. E.g. a robot which you can program to move forward or turn left or right. Very easy to program, but very limited about what you can do.
B) Very general, but really hard to make something big and shiny. E.g. Scratch. You can drag&drop loops and everything without writing any code, but you are pretty much still programming. And if you actually know how to program, doing it with Scratch is a real pain as writing the code is just much faster and gives you more freedom and makes it easier to control large code base.
Making B gives no benefit except for educational purposes and A is useful only for applications which you need to make several that all do almost the same thing. Best use case would be games. An application that lets to make a 2D game and another app that lets you make 3D game. Just add your skins, draw maps, setup some basic rules and game is ready.
Therefore no-code will not cause people to lose their jobs in programming, except perhaps in gaming if marked is flooded with cheap games. But it is possible that similar thing will happen which happened for example with browsers and databases. Some of them become so widely used that there won't be marked for anything else. This could happen e.g. with hospital software, cash register software etc. things that are doing pretty much the same thing, around the world.
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It's over, guys.
Not even close. I remember 4th Generation languages in the 90's that were going to make programming accessible to everyone. All the programming constructs were there in an easy drop-and-drop format. It was so simple that everyone was going to be doing it.
Except it wasn't. It turns out that writing code is drop-dead easy, but figuring out what has to be coded can get really, really hard. I strongly suspect that the low-code and no-code systems are going to raise the demand for competent programmers, not lowe
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I forgot to address AI. It is a great pattern matching system for very specific purposes, able to iterate through gigantic data sets to arrive at a very specific outcome, but is absolutely wretchedly terrible at creating anything even remotely original. That's why it will be great for finding potentially useful new drugs, sharpening images, and for generating reasonable looking prose (though the crap generated by GPT-3 is really, really bad in the first many dozens of iterations), but will absolutely suck a
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It's over, guys. Get into AI or ML development -- until the AI takes that over too -- or get just completely out. Apply your logical chops to making farming a fully automated, hands-free, play. Feed the world. Or maybe get deep into FORTRAN or COBOL, maintaining critical legacy systems that need to last another 50 years.
This is so ironic if one remembers how COBOL got created! Did "Common Business Oriented Language" sound something like what no-code was selling?
Anyone remembers 4GL? How about Visual Programming which was supposed to let you build programs using GUI? That was more than 20 years ago. "No code"? Everything old is new again. And it will fail again for the same reasons it failed every decade of so for the past 40 years.
Just imagine, do you think a tool that sells "No Writing" to script writers is going to
Stackoverflow is a dumpster fire (Score:1)
And I've been there for over eight years, and have 100k+ rep. The overwhelming majority of crap posted on Stackoverflow consists of:
1. Clueless wonders who are desperately searching for pleasedomyhomeworkforme.com or pleasewritemycodeforme.com.
2. Refugees from coding competition sites who were promised that simply by solving their dumb coding puzzles anyone can become the next coming of Kevin Mitnick. This becomes interpreted as "if you can find someone else on Stackoverflow who will solve this dumb coding
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Look for Stackoverflow to be bought/sold/taken over, within the next two years.
And the real reason they are riding the hype-train emerges.