Future developer, where are we going?
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Member 4673202 wrote:
and what really worries me is that those new Developers will be the teachers of tomorrow, at some point, no one will remember and care about this....
Not sure what school you went to but "teachers" don't tend to be professionals where I have been. Which to your point might be a good thing as it means they will in fact know the fundamentals.
Member 4673202 wrote:
I was like OMG, and this is something that is really happens with new developers
Your experience must have been in some crazy places if developers always get to define the market place. In most of my experience we were told exactly what it had to run on.
Member 4673202 wrote:
Another point of interest, why are the new developers implementing everything is automatic with asking the users if they want it automatic?
Because other applications do it that way. And consumers either prefer it or don't care because they are not complaining.
Member 4673202 wrote:
What do you think?
As a guess you are working in a limited social environment and no one appears to be managing the developers that you do work with. Might help to read some technical articles about managing people and products. Those are often fantasy but some times some real world practices bleed through.
I'm a C Programmer. I used to write drivers for the UNIX v7 and I'm alive. I hope the new programmers understand that the materia is limited so we have always limits. Forgetting that is why we allways have to wait a lot ... having 64K, 64M or 2GB. Not all is the user interface. If you feel being ignored by the O.S. hit Return, something should happend (Unix Manual). Please "something should happend"!!!!
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First Hi to all, and sorry, my English is not as good as people would like, then probably I will fail a little... I want to discuss something that has been worrying me, with the modern PC and Devices, our new Developer are ignoring the old issues we use to have with performance and storage due the amount of Ram and CPU power... At this point of time I considere we the old developers (30 year +) still remembers our issues with pointers and not being free to load everything in memory, we use to implement crazy logic in our software just to be able to handle a couple of megabytes... now with the amount of "FREE" Memory new Developers are not giving to much importance to this topic, and what really worries me is that those new Developers will be the teachers of tomorrow, at some point, no one will remember and care about this.... To make thinks Easyer I want to use 3 categories here: 1st Generation (G1): that Old champions that build they code with just some KB of memory, they made everything possible. Just a few of them still alive... (people over 45 or 50 years, yes that oldies from 80s) 2nd Generation (G2): Me, we start using visual studio, windows and Obejct Oriented programing, we saw the bird of Java and C#, not to much of us remembe Assembly but we remember we saw it on a class... We worked not with KB but with MB, so we still remember the importance of performance. We are still the majority. I guess people 30+ years old, we are 90s people 3rd Generation (G3): The younger generation, they don't know about KB or MB they have GB and GHz, HD with Terabits, Clouds.. they probably don't know what is a pointer (but they are using it everywhere), lets call those the 2000s and Mobile generation. 4th Generation (G4): the new born, the developer from Tomorrow, they probably still in School or Kinder Garden... They teacher will by our current G3. Ok, now I categorize them, but not to say one is better or worst (if G3 and G4 fails, is because we G2 didn't do right teaching), I just want to emphasize they context, they environment... I will point a little to the Android market, from the OS to the App people are developing, I has been noticing something simple and estrange.. no Exit, no Logout... Why are those applications not implementing Exit or Logout? why they wants me to have always an APP running int he background eating 60MB of my 2GB Galaxy phone?... I was chatting about this in our lunch time at the company, then one of the juniors (totally G3) comes and told me: "man I don't want to wait for
Nice to see that there are interest in the topic!! I see good nice comments..... Something I want to add/point... when I said they will be the teachers of tomorrow I'm also considering co-workers, we learn and teach a lot when we are working, when we are in teams! About Garbage Collector, yes it's "good" (in quotes cause is not perfect and not always good for all scenarios) and we can rely on it to clean the unused memory, but unused doesn't means Exit/Logout, I just don't understand this approach... The first reply from jshell adds some good question: those approach are added by the developer, the project manager, the users or just is the current flavor? (monkey see monkey do?) It's not a secret that the nice UI introduced by iPhones was a success catching the buyers, but I guess now we should be more responsible and now that we have good nice UI in our phones is time to take care on the real code!!! with mobiles, sometimes I feel like the problem is that the approach business is following is like: is your device, is private, no one else will use it, this is not the Desktop at your house... but that is not true, because you can share your device at any moment to anybody, so whatever was not closed/exit is still there with all you private data or whatever you was doing a week ago... so we can also go over the memory and performance, we can also include privacy and security (just think why Google recently added the option to ask for password whenever you do a payment in your phone) Well again, thanks for the nice replies, I was happy to read them, my main topic can extend a lot, there is too much we can talk related to that simple idea! (There is a nice topic about this "privacy and security" related to smartphones and compare them to Credit Cards) (Why my chrome in my samsung doesn't have an exit option, I can't see 9gag without panic exit!!!!)
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I concur. We are all doomed. When I am old and grey (that happens a little while ago actually) my welfare will depend on people who when I have my heart attack will respond with searching for the app on their phone to tell them what to do and it will be hidden away somewhere because they don't use it every day or it wasn't *free* or they have to sit through a 30 second video advertising something before they can get any information or the app will tell them where the nearest hospital is (but it will be in the wrong state because it is the Apple map program) so when they text the emergency service (who actually makes calls on a telephone these day?) using the Request Medical Assistance App, the automated respondents won't understand or will dispatch an ambulance (using the Ambulance Dispatcher App) which will reach me in less than 24 hours...rant, rant, rant...
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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First Hi to all, and sorry, my English is not as good as people would like, then probably I will fail a little... I want to discuss something that has been worrying me, with the modern PC and Devices, our new Developer are ignoring the old issues we use to have with performance and storage due the amount of Ram and CPU power... At this point of time I considere we the old developers (30 year +) still remembers our issues with pointers and not being free to load everything in memory, we use to implement crazy logic in our software just to be able to handle a couple of megabytes... now with the amount of "FREE" Memory new Developers are not giving to much importance to this topic, and what really worries me is that those new Developers will be the teachers of tomorrow, at some point, no one will remember and care about this.... To make thinks Easyer I want to use 3 categories here: 1st Generation (G1): that Old champions that build they code with just some KB of memory, they made everything possible. Just a few of them still alive... (people over 45 or 50 years, yes that oldies from 80s) 2nd Generation (G2): Me, we start using visual studio, windows and Obejct Oriented programing, we saw the bird of Java and C#, not to much of us remembe Assembly but we remember we saw it on a class... We worked not with KB but with MB, so we still remember the importance of performance. We are still the majority. I guess people 30+ years old, we are 90s people 3rd Generation (G3): The younger generation, they don't know about KB or MB they have GB and GHz, HD with Terabits, Clouds.. they probably don't know what is a pointer (but they are using it everywhere), lets call those the 2000s and Mobile generation. 4th Generation (G4): the new born, the developer from Tomorrow, they probably still in School or Kinder Garden... They teacher will by our current G3. Ok, now I categorize them, but not to say one is better or worst (if G3 and G4 fails, is because we G2 didn't do right teaching), I just want to emphasize they context, they environment... I will point a little to the Android market, from the OS to the App people are developing, I has been noticing something simple and estrange.. no Exit, no Logout... Why are those applications not implementing Exit or Logout? why they wants me to have always an APP running int he background eating 60MB of my 2GB Galaxy phone?... I was chatting about this in our lunch time at the company, then one of the juniors (totally G3) comes and told me: "man I don't want to wait for
My current computer is literally a million times the one I learned to program on (and I don't mean literal in the new figurative sense of the word :)). It has two million times the memory, about a billion times the amount of secondary storage (a.k.a. disk, although back then, cassettes were the nearest equivalent), and it may very well execute instructions a million times faster (ferrite core is sooooo slow). Why shouldn't we write code that trades computer power for developer productivity, convenience and increased capability? After all, the computer is a tool for humans to use, not the other way around.
We can program with only 1's, but if all you've got are zeros, you've got nothing.
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First Hi to all, and sorry, my English is not as good as people would like, then probably I will fail a little... I want to discuss something that has been worrying me, with the modern PC and Devices, our new Developer are ignoring the old issues we use to have with performance and storage due the amount of Ram and CPU power... At this point of time I considere we the old developers (30 year +) still remembers our issues with pointers and not being free to load everything in memory, we use to implement crazy logic in our software just to be able to handle a couple of megabytes... now with the amount of "FREE" Memory new Developers are not giving to much importance to this topic, and what really worries me is that those new Developers will be the teachers of tomorrow, at some point, no one will remember and care about this.... To make thinks Easyer I want to use 3 categories here: 1st Generation (G1): that Old champions that build they code with just some KB of memory, they made everything possible. Just a few of them still alive... (people over 45 or 50 years, yes that oldies from 80s) 2nd Generation (G2): Me, we start using visual studio, windows and Obejct Oriented programing, we saw the bird of Java and C#, not to much of us remembe Assembly but we remember we saw it on a class... We worked not with KB but with MB, so we still remember the importance of performance. We are still the majority. I guess people 30+ years old, we are 90s people 3rd Generation (G3): The younger generation, they don't know about KB or MB they have GB and GHz, HD with Terabits, Clouds.. they probably don't know what is a pointer (but they are using it everywhere), lets call those the 2000s and Mobile generation. 4th Generation (G4): the new born, the developer from Tomorrow, they probably still in School or Kinder Garden... They teacher will by our current G3. Ok, now I categorize them, but not to say one is better or worst (if G3 and G4 fails, is because we G2 didn't do right teaching), I just want to emphasize they context, they environment... I will point a little to the Android market, from the OS to the App people are developing, I has been noticing something simple and estrange.. no Exit, no Logout... Why are those applications not implementing Exit or Logout? why they wants me to have always an APP running int he background eating 60MB of my 2GB Galaxy phone?... I was chatting about this in our lunch time at the company, then one of the juniors (totally G3) comes and told me: "man I don't want to wait for
Member 4673202 wrote:
Just a few of them still alive... (people over 45 or 50 years, yes that oldies from 80s)
I might want to remind you that the current life expectancy is 75. That means that half the people who would have been 75 right now are still alive. My wife's parents just reached their 90's. Once you've reached 75, your life expectancy is no longer 75, it's more like 85. (Half the people who are 75 now should live to 85. Each year you live, your life expectancy changes.) We have a pop. explosion prob., but still, the birth rates haven't tremendously increased, 50-75 accounts for about a third of the pop. if everyone lived to 75. I'd bet more than 25% are over 50. That's not just a few. "80s"!!! OK, I admit to having almost complete contempt for the pc when it was introduced. (For that PC, I still do.) I'd been working with "real" computers for over 15 years by then. (8 bit! 5Kb RAM! ARE YOU NUTS!!!) Things change, what's the greatest now, will probably be ancient old news in 5 years.
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First Hi to all, and sorry, my English is not as good as people would like, then probably I will fail a little... I want to discuss something that has been worrying me, with the modern PC and Devices, our new Developer are ignoring the old issues we use to have with performance and storage due the amount of Ram and CPU power... At this point of time I considere we the old developers (30 year +) still remembers our issues with pointers and not being free to load everything in memory, we use to implement crazy logic in our software just to be able to handle a couple of megabytes... now with the amount of "FREE" Memory new Developers are not giving to much importance to this topic, and what really worries me is that those new Developers will be the teachers of tomorrow, at some point, no one will remember and care about this.... To make thinks Easyer I want to use 3 categories here: 1st Generation (G1): that Old champions that build they code with just some KB of memory, they made everything possible. Just a few of them still alive... (people over 45 or 50 years, yes that oldies from 80s) 2nd Generation (G2): Me, we start using visual studio, windows and Obejct Oriented programing, we saw the bird of Java and C#, not to much of us remembe Assembly but we remember we saw it on a class... We worked not with KB but with MB, so we still remember the importance of performance. We are still the majority. I guess people 30+ years old, we are 90s people 3rd Generation (G3): The younger generation, they don't know about KB or MB they have GB and GHz, HD with Terabits, Clouds.. they probably don't know what is a pointer (but they are using it everywhere), lets call those the 2000s and Mobile generation. 4th Generation (G4): the new born, the developer from Tomorrow, they probably still in School or Kinder Garden... They teacher will by our current G3. Ok, now I categorize them, but not to say one is better or worst (if G3 and G4 fails, is because we G2 didn't do right teaching), I just want to emphasize they context, they environment... I will point a little to the Android market, from the OS to the App people are developing, I has been noticing something simple and estrange.. no Exit, no Logout... Why are those applications not implementing Exit or Logout? why they wants me to have always an APP running int he background eating 60MB of my 2GB Galaxy phone?... I was chatting about this in our lunch time at the company, then one of the juniors (totally G3) comes and told me: "man I don't want to wait for
I'm halfway from a G1 and a G2 and yep, I did start programming on systems where you just had KBs of memory and very small resources overall. I think the answer to your question/rant is actually quite simple: it's absolutely ok to (at least partially) forget optimiziation and resource usage concerns when they are negligible, and this actually happens with some kind of projects and with today's pumped-up hardware. BUT what's important is that developers DO know and care about these concerns, just as you say. If they don't, then you'll just end up with youngsters building the latest flashy app for your darn smartphone and using a linear search to find the answer to your questions from a million-entries remote DB. ;P
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice, but not in practice. - Anonymous A computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things. They are, in short, a perfect match. - B. Bryson
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Wirth's Law[^] The attitude of "resources are infinite" is there, but I wouldn't put it all on the programmers. Most professional software has no performance to speak of - and it's the managers/boss's fault. Optimizing costs them time == money, not optimizing costs everyone else time ( == money?). Because what they're wasting isn't theirs, they have a perverse incentive to waste it as much as possible just to spare a little of their own time. CPU years are thrown away by the thousands (aggregated over all users) because it's Not Our Problem.
Lest we forget that hardware is there to serve the software which serves the human. Software has become more complex to serve the humans who expect it to do more. As such, the hardware moves forward to be faster and more responsive to make the software look good.
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First Hi to all, and sorry, my English is not as good as people would like, then probably I will fail a little... I want to discuss something that has been worrying me, with the modern PC and Devices, our new Developer are ignoring the old issues we use to have with performance and storage due the amount of Ram and CPU power... At this point of time I considere we the old developers (30 year +) still remembers our issues with pointers and not being free to load everything in memory, we use to implement crazy logic in our software just to be able to handle a couple of megabytes... now with the amount of "FREE" Memory new Developers are not giving to much importance to this topic, and what really worries me is that those new Developers will be the teachers of tomorrow, at some point, no one will remember and care about this.... To make thinks Easyer I want to use 3 categories here: 1st Generation (G1): that Old champions that build they code with just some KB of memory, they made everything possible. Just a few of them still alive... (people over 45 or 50 years, yes that oldies from 80s) 2nd Generation (G2): Me, we start using visual studio, windows and Obejct Oriented programing, we saw the bird of Java and C#, not to much of us remembe Assembly but we remember we saw it on a class... We worked not with KB but with MB, so we still remember the importance of performance. We are still the majority. I guess people 30+ years old, we are 90s people 3rd Generation (G3): The younger generation, they don't know about KB or MB they have GB and GHz, HD with Terabits, Clouds.. they probably don't know what is a pointer (but they are using it everywhere), lets call those the 2000s and Mobile generation. 4th Generation (G4): the new born, the developer from Tomorrow, they probably still in School or Kinder Garden... They teacher will by our current G3. Ok, now I categorize them, but not to say one is better or worst (if G3 and G4 fails, is because we G2 didn't do right teaching), I just want to emphasize they context, they environment... I will point a little to the Android market, from the OS to the App people are developing, I has been noticing something simple and estrange.. no Exit, no Logout... Why are those applications not implementing Exit or Logout? why they wants me to have always an APP running int he background eating 60MB of my 2GB Galaxy phone?... I was chatting about this in our lunch time at the company, then one of the juniors (totally G3) comes and told me: "man I don't want to wait for
The G1 people also gave us the Y2K scare. Shortening those years to 2 digits. Who would have thought that software made in the 60s, 70s, or 80s would have survived until the year 2000? So, here we go again. We have (virtually) unlimited memory resources, so throw all size limits to the wind. Freely use as much as you need. By the way, I am between a G1 and G2. I remember submitting my first programs on punched cards in Fortran IV. And, COBOL was just too weird. I also remember writing 6802 assembly code where we only had 4K of EPROM memory. When we ran out of programming space, we had to make multi-purpose functions that would handle similar tasks (ugly). Then, the software was really limited by the hardware. It would take much longer to get the job done, but that's what happens when you have to live within certain (restrictive) limits. Its nice to have some freedom now. And, it helps from a business perspective. We can have a quicker time to market with the product, easier debugging cycle, and easier to understand code. But, I assume with the smart phones, we are back to restrictive memory limits again. How large can an app grow to?
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Lest we forget that hardware is there to serve the software which serves the human. Software has become more complex to serve the humans who expect it to do more. As such, the hardware moves forward to be faster and more responsive to make the software look good.
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First Hi to all, and sorry, my English is not as good as people would like, then probably I will fail a little... I want to discuss something that has been worrying me, with the modern PC and Devices, our new Developer are ignoring the old issues we use to have with performance and storage due the amount of Ram and CPU power... At this point of time I considere we the old developers (30 year +) still remembers our issues with pointers and not being free to load everything in memory, we use to implement crazy logic in our software just to be able to handle a couple of megabytes... now with the amount of "FREE" Memory new Developers are not giving to much importance to this topic, and what really worries me is that those new Developers will be the teachers of tomorrow, at some point, no one will remember and care about this.... To make thinks Easyer I want to use 3 categories here: 1st Generation (G1): that Old champions that build they code with just some KB of memory, they made everything possible. Just a few of them still alive... (people over 45 or 50 years, yes that oldies from 80s) 2nd Generation (G2): Me, we start using visual studio, windows and Obejct Oriented programing, we saw the bird of Java and C#, not to much of us remembe Assembly but we remember we saw it on a class... We worked not with KB but with MB, so we still remember the importance of performance. We are still the majority. I guess people 30+ years old, we are 90s people 3rd Generation (G3): The younger generation, they don't know about KB or MB they have GB and GHz, HD with Terabits, Clouds.. they probably don't know what is a pointer (but they are using it everywhere), lets call those the 2000s and Mobile generation. 4th Generation (G4): the new born, the developer from Tomorrow, they probably still in School or Kinder Garden... They teacher will by our current G3. Ok, now I categorize them, but not to say one is better or worst (if G3 and G4 fails, is because we G2 didn't do right teaching), I just want to emphasize they context, they environment... I will point a little to the Android market, from the OS to the App people are developing, I has been noticing something simple and estrange.. no Exit, no Logout... Why are those applications not implementing Exit or Logout? why they wants me to have always an APP running int he background eating 60MB of my 2GB Galaxy phone?... I was chatting about this in our lunch time at the company, then one of the juniors (totally G3) comes and told me: "man I don't want to wait for
As an older embedded developer I feel your pain. The technologies that drive the need for "big iron" when it is not needed have hardware and software costs that go right to the bottom line. Unfortunately many new engineers only know how to approach a problem with a sledgehammer. Today's students would be well served by a semester or two doing projects for PICs or 8 bit microcontrollers no matter what field they go into.