> -----Original Message-----
> From: hampshire-bounces@??? [mailto:hampshire-
> bounces@???] On Behalf Of Stephen Davies
> Sent: 07 March 2010 08:25
> To: Hampshire LUG Discussion List
> Subject: [Hampshire] Whatever happened to programming?
>
> There is an interesting discussion on /. with the above topic.
>
> http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1573922
>
> as someone who started out using Punched Cards & Paper Tape (but I bow
> down in age to John Lewis) and who has programmed in Fortran, Algol, Coral
> 66, Basic, Ada, Cobol, Java, C, Pascal, HTML, CSS etc., plus a whole shed
> load of machine code & embedded software (e.g. ITV Teletext Service
> Oracle's Subtitling
> Keyboard) many of the comments about the dumbing down, the use of
> frameworks and the like really ring a lot of bells.
>
> Let me give you an example.
>
> There was this project that wanted to put a real time battlefield
> intelligence data system. It was to be all written in Coral-66. The
> underlying machine code generated by the compiler was really crap. If you
> think that moden software is bloated then please thing again.
> Not only was the code crap but there was so much of it that all sorts of
> tricks had to be employed to even get it to link.
> Then we had to produce a version of the code that had to run on a diskless
> system. Boy did that give me a headache.
> In the end, I re-wrote all the low level functions directly in assembler.
> This made the code faster (20X) and smaller (10% of the original).
>
> This was all in 1977/78. Rewind to today and frankly there is so much
> obfuscation and framework usage that the size of apps has just gone out of
> the window. I see production code that is 'just cobbled' together. If it
> works then use it and god help the poor guys who have to come along and
> maintain it.
>
> When I was contracting I was offered a very lucrative support contract.
> It ticked all the boxes. Work from home, maintain the system, good money
> etc. When I did my due diligence on the actual code, my already grey hair
> went white. A 10yr old could have done better. It was just a complete mis-
> mash of cobbled together 'stuff'.
> When I asked about their regression testing, I was met with blank stares.
> This System was at the literal heart of their business. IF it fell in a
> heap for more than a day they would be liable to some serious fines.
> Needless to say, I politely declined the contract. When the asked me why,
> I replied, "Because your core system is frankly unmaintainable".
> It had also been written by a team of wrote programmers in Bangalore.
> But hey, who am I to complain. I'm just a unemployed 'grumpy old man'.
> Modern systems are fast enough to handle all this
> crap/bloat/obfuscation/framworks aren't they? Well, Intel is certainly not
> complaining are they?
>
> As one /. post states, Programmers are a dime a dozen but good programmers
> are worth their weight in gold.
>
> Stephen D
>
I tend to agree with most if not all of this. I won't say programming's no
fun any more but it's now a test of memory (the programmer's as much as the
machine's!) and who's got the best reference.
I have undertaken 2 Computer Science degrees in my life. In 1992, the
language of choice was Modula-2 and I find it a bit of a shame this died out
(due to OO) because it was a lovely language to learn and was well suited to
UNIX I thought at the time (Solaris & OpenWindows).
The course I'm currently doing is teaching me Java for no reason other than
(I suspect) the OU is impoverished and wants to teach something free.
Designing user interfaces in Java (without designing the forms themselves)
is a real pain and uses more libraries than I care to remember. The advice
is that nobody should sit down and attempt a Java program without the API
documentation. Now I certainly appreciate that part of the fun of
programming is (or can be I should say) writing some skeleton code, seeing
if it works, then fixing bugs etc - in short - I've often found that a bit
of bad programming teaches you a lot about the problem. Trouble is - over
the years - the R&D gained by allowing programmers to write a "first draft"
badly has gone out of the window and now lots of systems are so prescribed
that they do what they do and to modify them slightly takes a complete
rewrite - whether or not that's a good thing or a bad thing I dunno.
One of the most stimulating programming projects I've had in recent years
was an OU course which taught data structures and most importantly
algorithms. I enjoyed it thoroughly because I considered it more "proper
programming" and the techniques I learned there would be useful no matter
what language I was writing in. Most importantly though - the OU gave a
piffling little "programmer's workbench" environment for the teaching of
just these algorithms and objects like stacks, trees etc. A shame, I
thought, that they didn't consider looking around for an open source
Modula-2 compiler. I believe there was one once but the project died -
sadly as did the language.
OK - so I guess I'm a grumpy old man too!
Cheers
Rob
