Uncle Bob nails it again
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LOL, I suspect Uncle Bob is one of the people who came up with the Agile Manifesto. I know he's a huge fan of Agile and all things TDD. Resistant to change...? :rolleyes: Back in the 60s and 70s when programming became a thing, there was some scientific rigour behind it. It came about at Universities, business labs and places of learning. Nowadays anyone with a computer connection can become a "programmer". Hell, I did! :laugh: But the mantra nowadays seems to be "give me a way to do it faster and without so much hassle" (i.e. so I don't have to fix so many bugs). No one makes an effort to learn to program properly anymore, so they just keep sticking language and framework bandaids over the problems. So yes, churn.
The day is coming when we will write programs by attaching 2D blocks to each other, then viola, we have a program! (I think MS has already done this with scratch, MFC windows, and C# Forms/WPF. Some tools can translate a flow chart to code.)
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Jeremy Falcon wrote:
growing old
Hey! I just had my 17th birthday, a few days ago*! * Who the Hell wants to be an adult?
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
How many years have you been celebrating that 17th birthday (again)?
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Not only are we running in circles, but even talking about running in circles is an old story[^].
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein
"If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010
Maybe I am old fashioned, but I still like the King James version best....
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Mark_Wallace wrote:
OO? Sure, it works, but I was coding objects in COBOL more than 30 years ago, without having to change anything about the language.
This is the voice of experience speaking. I remember thinking something similar for my C projects. Took me a while to jump unto the OOP bandwagon being so awesome it cures cancer. Just like it's gonna take people a while these days to jump onto the next thing. Change is slow.
Mark_Wallace wrote:
An improved IDE is worth a hundred times more than any new language, as is any library/framework that reduces the level of detail that you have to delve into.
Agreed. Although, having gotten used to some newer languages (in web dev at least) it's rough to go back.
Jeremy Falcon
I remember the same thing in the early '90s when they were talking about CASE tools, and that they would make everything simple and programmers superfluous. I have no idea how many times I have been asked to develop a product using a "new technology", only to recognize that a lot of what I needed to learn was based on some early tech I was acquainted with. It brings to mind the saying, those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it....
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The day is coming when we will write programs by attaching 2D blocks to each other, then viola, we have a program! (I think MS has already done this with scratch, MFC windows, and C# Forms/WPF. Some tools can translate a flow chart to code.)
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I'm not a great fan of Uncle Bob's preaching but he is right here, but perhaps not quite for the reasons he puts. Roughly the software development field turns over new technology every 5-10 years. What I learned as an Informix developer, or C/C++ developer or VB developer is more or less useless as far as building an applications goes. Sure, I've got some general principles to apply across all languages and technology stacks but there is also a hell of a lot of specific stuff that just doesn't transfer. Especially the raw, tested and proven code that I would recycle into other applications. This means just as I'm getting really good at something (5+ years), say Linux/EsqlC/Informix I've got to dump that experience and re-tool. Hand on heart, can anyone really say we're 'experts' in anything? Even if I dusted down a language I used 10 years ago, there's a lot of stuff I've forgotten about it. This sort of pace of change doesn't happen in other professions (say legal, accounting or medical) and in this context it shouldn't really come as a surprise that we struggle as a profession. I'm fairly sure, but can't prove, that one reason why the success of a project is such a crap shoot is because of the relative inexperience of the developers using a specific technology stack.