Future developer, where are we going?
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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.