from the there-are-still-some-of-us-left dept.
Over at ACM Yegor Bugayenko writes:
In the 1970s, when Microsoft and Apple were founded, programming was an art only a limited group of dedicated enthusiasts actually knew how to perform properly. CPUs were rather slow, personal computers had a very limited amount of memory, and monitors were lo-res. To create something decent, a programmer had to fight against actual hardware limitations.
In order to win in this war, programmers had to be both trained and talented in computer science, a science that was at that time mostly about algorithms and data structures.
[...] Most programmers were calling themselves "hackers," even though in the early 1980s this word, according to Steven Levy's book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, "had acquired a specific and negative connotation." Since the 1990s, this label has become "a shibboleth that identifies one as a member of the tribe," as linguist Geoff Nunberg pointed out.
[...] it would appear that the skills required of professional and successful programmers are drastically different from the ones needed back in the 1990s. The profession now requires less mathematics and algorithms and instead emphasizes more skills under the umbrella term "sociotech." Susan Long illustrates in her book Socioanalytic Methods: Discovering the Hidden in Organizations and Social Systems that the term "sociotechnical systems" was coined by Eric Trist et al. in the World War II era based on their work with English coal miners at the Tavistock Institute in London. The term now seems more suitable to the new skills and techniques modern programmers need.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday April 28 2018, @12:58PM (8 children)
Huh... What you call a programmer and what I call a programmer are very much not the same thing then.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Saturday April 28 2018, @01:35PM (6 children)
I read this as a kind of "get off the grass" thing. To paraphrase TFS, "Us old hackers are special, you young hackers don't know shit, and you won't know shit because you're not smart enough to learn programming."
The term "hacker" has been so badly abused, it isn't funny. Fekkin' Hollyweird was responsible for that. But, there are still "hackers" out there who fit the older, more realistic and dignified definitions. That kid of mine ranks among them. The boss tells him to build a gate that responds to commands from a cell phone. The kid builds the gate, and adds some embellishments that he wasn't even asked for. The gates get sold all over cattle country, and ranchers love them. Who'da thunk you could computerize a damned gate? That's what you have kids for - to jump out of the truck, open the gate, close it after you drive through, then jump back in the truck. Computerize a gate? Hell, nowadays, the gate counts the cattle for you, and closes after the 10th, or 24th, or 32nd cow - whatever you set it on. If you want cows and calves separated, you have to put a little effort into it, but the gate can count how many cows and how many calves.
Programmable gates. The kid just hacked all that crap together out of a few electronic parts, some scraps of code that appealed to him, and whole bunch of glue that he dreamed up on his own.
Screw the old timers. Kids are gonna walk on the grass no matter what they old farts say.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 28 2018, @02:33PM
You're missing the hack. From "War Propaganda Bureau" to "Tavistock Clinic" to "Tavistock Institute of Human Relations" - blatant social engineering. [goodreads.com]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 28 2018, @04:09PM
You can take the computers out of the gate, but you can't take the gates out of the computer.
(Score: 2) by KiloByte on Saturday April 28 2018, @05:09PM (3 children)
There's no real relation to age, I'd say. Back in the days, non-hackers wore business clothing while coding in Cobol. Today, they sip frappucinos while copy-pasting Javascript from StackOverflow. But someone still needs to code an OS to so they can run that node.js monstrosity in, and a container to limit damage when inevitably it gets breached.
I see people both twice my age and half my age cooperating on the same project, both with valuable contributions. Anyone can have the hacker mindset.
Ceterum censeo systemd esse delendam.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 29 2018, @05:18AM (2 children)
Head on over to https://hackaday.com/ [hackaday.com] or https://news.ycombinator.com [ycombinator.com]
You will find some hackers there. Round these parts we argue about stupid things like politics.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Sunday April 29 2018, @08:54AM (1 child)
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday April 29 2018, @12:11PM
There's more to argue about on politics. That doesn't mean we prefer doing so though.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Saturday April 28 2018, @03:11PM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 28 2018, @01:18PM (19 children)
We must replace the people who actually make shit, understand how things work, and will discourage bad ideas with rainbow-haired freaks who moo in unison.
Let's smear all hackers as writers of unmaintainable code to discourage managers from hiring anyone who describes themselves as a hacker in the MIT tradition.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 28 2018, @01:30PM
Yup..
(Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 28 2018, @04:30PM (1 child)
rainbow-haired freaks who moo in unison
In the 60's. all programmers were rainbow-haired freaks, generally wearing sandals, and we often mooed in unison - synchronised by an old bearded guy with a Captain Crunch whistle.
We also wrote code for 4-bit micros in assembler in the middle of the night, while the old guy wrote Cobol.
Now get off my lawn.
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 28 2018, @05:41PM
The punch card wranglers at your bank and insurance company were no such thing. Hacking was and remains a niche interest with a large percentage of non-conformist libertarians. That's exactly why many here reject the superficial ideological conformity demanded by acolytes of the Social Justice movement.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 28 2018, @04:40PM (3 children)
The freaky hairs, "female game programmers" and social justice warriors are setting themselves up to be the managers of the highly skilled, but socially awkward men, that make up most of the programming profession.
And if they can't get to be managers, a slice of the sweet salaries programmers make isn't bad either.
(Score: 2) by lgsoynews on Saturday April 28 2018, @05:19PM (2 children)
I'd really like those kind of RIDICULOUS stereotypes to disappear. Especially in the mouth of people in the profession!
I can count on the fingers of ONE hand the number of programmers I've met (out of hundreds) that fit the stereotypes (4 men, one woman), and these people had some SERIOUS mental issues, they were in no way representative of programmers or your average worker.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 28 2018, @07:22PM
Yes, we have to stop calling average programmers "highly skilled". /trollface
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 28 2018, @09:19PM
Speak for yourself. The stereotype is kind of real. Computer people I've worked with are at best somewhat "off", have "interesting" (not so) novel ideas about engineering a new society and marry rather late (if at all). That applied both to males, and the few females in the field.
Those blessed with more social savoir-faire quickly try to jump into management.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by lgsoynews on Saturday April 28 2018, @05:32PM (11 children)
You are wrong on so many levels...
Ok, let's summarize the fundamental issue: computers projects -in the broadest sense- have become a LOT more complex than "back in the day". The number of tools, languages, has grown by several orders of magnitude (compare an Atari 2600 to the latest PS4 or Xbox). Expectations have ALSO grown orders of magnitude, just look at the GUIs compared to what we had in the 80s...
Nowadays, projects are MUCH more complex, involve much more layers of abstraction and the customers/users ask A LOT MORE.
Which leads me to an fundamental issue: programming is NOT about technical knowledge, it's about SOLVING PROBLEMS. Using your technical knowledge is meaningless if you cannot understand what the users want, that is communication is MUCH more important than the tech skills (of course, I don't mean those are not vital as well), because no matter how good you are, if you program a chess game while I wanted a GO game, what you have done is USELESS! And that's a problem that I've REALLY seen with my customers, you almost have to put them "to the question" to have them say what they really want, it's a HUGE fight because they change their minds every 5 minutes, I have plenty of horror stories because of that.
So your jab at some mythical "rainbow-haired freaks" falls flat on its head. Just because some people (including managers & PM) are STUPID does not change the point that soft skills are VITAL including for the programmers.
A really GOOD programmer is someone who is good both in programming (in the broadest sense) & in communication.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 28 2018, @05:53PM (7 children)
If the customer can't provide a final spec then you should refuse to start work. You wouldn't start constructing a house without a final, approved set of plans.
No, that's a good employee for you. It says nothing about the talent of an individual that can lock themselves away for 6 months and churn out a codebase that an organisation would be incapable of producing in years.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by lgsoynews on Saturday April 28 2018, @07:57PM (5 children)
Excuse me, but I work in the REAL world, where things are not that easy and B&W. Even when there is a spec (most of the time), the customer wants SOME flexibility, and it's difficult to say NO to everything, you HAVE to show some degree of flexibility.
In addition to that, when you are only a contractor working inside a team at some company, they can change things and you don't have much to say, even when YOU KNOW it's B.S. and a bad organization, you have no choice.
And the same code base will be unmaintainable because NOBODY ELSE will know what the "genius" has done. And you don't answer the REAL problem: YOU CANNOT STAY 6 MONTHS alone doing work on a project, that's NOT how it works in the real world, or on big projects (I've worked on telecom projects with hundreds of millions euros of budget).
Seriously, I'm sick of that "talent" B.S. that Silicon Valley's types spout all of the time. Really good workers are open to communication and work as a TEAM. Technical expertise is important -of course- but comes second. I HAVE met some "geniuses" that would churn out mounts of buffalo excrement with no consideration for documentation, maintenance, evolution, code readability, etc. You know what happened? We threw away their "contribution" because it was USELESS. Maybe I'm not as fast, but what I do (and many of my coworkers) is a solid job, reasonably well designed, with an adequate documentation (low & high level), code comments, test suites and knowledge spread to several people (because I like my holidays and I won't be here forever). And in the end, what my team and myself have done works fairly well. It's not as good as I'd like, but it's reliable and works fine. And our customers are happy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 28 2018, @09:30PM (3 children)
You're excused. If you've done this for any length of time, you've seen projects collapse because the customer decides to make wide ranging, fundamental changes. As an independent contractor you could not allow this because blame would be levelled at you.
Never happened. [wikipedia.org] Nothing good ever came of it. [folklore.org]
Really? [businessinsider.com]
(Score: 2) by lgsoynews on Sunday April 29 2018, @09:21AM (2 children)
Ok, I see that you're an expert at twisting words and changing their obvious meaning by taking them out of context.
Given that you are just trolling, I'll stop arguing, it's not worth my time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 29 2018, @11:37AM (1 child)
I wasn't trolling. If you want an example from the telecoms world, review the story of the failure of multics and subsequent creation of unix. Review also Brooks Law [wikipedia.org] and Price's Law [amarketplaceofideas.com]
(Score: 1) by suburbanitemediocrity on Monday April 30 2018, @10:18PM
I had an old friend at NASA who said that they had done an internal study that put a ratio of 30:1 of geniuses who did the heavy creative work to their support. Not to say that the support was unnecessary.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by fyngyrz on Saturday April 28 2018, @10:38PM
That's just straight-up nonsense.
Maintainability may, or may not, be present. That's down to how said programmer went about their work. But being a loner / genius doing this kind of work doesn't mean they went one way or another at all. It's completely a separate issue.
Knowing how to write clear, maintainable, well-documented code (and user instructions) are unique skills in and of themselves. Some who can code have one or both, some don't. Period.
The moment you try to gather everyone into the same basket, you're almost certain to have made a huge error. People are different. Programmers are different. Skillsets are different.
</rant>
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 28 2018, @08:44PM
I think you've been popping a few too many reds bud, best dial it back before you slip over the edge.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by loonycyborg on Saturday April 28 2018, @10:20PM (2 children)
Communication skills always were always important and their importance didn't change. In my experience people who complain about poor communication skills among hackers are drama queens and concern trolls. This article basically merely implies that those non-contributors should be treated equally to people who do the real job. This goes against principles of meritocracy, something that always captivated me most about old hacker culture. Any complex project always requires a lot of coordination, regardless of which technology it uses. And you absolutely failed to prove that things are MUCH more complex now. It's basically appeal to ignorance, hoping that people will just buy it without much thought.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 29 2018, @12:03AM (1 child)
Not to mention, the logic is completely absurd. "Programs are MUCH more complex, we need less skilled people to program them!" I mean really, WTF?
You still need at least 1-2 people that actually are capable of understanding what you are doing or it'll all go to shit.
Yes, ideally they are also good teamplayers because you need a team, but if not the rest of the team can probably do the extra effort to work with them anyway.
(Score: 2) by lgsoynews on Sunday April 29 2018, @09:18AM
That's NOT AT ALL what I wrote, please don't put invented words in my mouth. You took the beginning of a sentence and invented the 2d part!
I clearly wrote that we need communication FIRST but ALSO tech skills.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 28 2018, @02:21PM (1 child)
Gee, that makes perfect sense considering the technology is completely different. System boards are ridiculously complete and affordable. Then there's Arduino and RaspberryPi. And if you want a full blown SoC you can get one.
The programming languages are different, the libraries available now were unimaginable back then, and the tools ... oh the tools we have now.
Last, but not least, is the choice in CPUs. Not only are there so many new and advanced choices, but we have more that 20 years of legacy chips to choose from.
So yes, the skills needed today are different.
(Score: 5, Informative) by janrinok on Saturday April 28 2018, @03:09PM
You are absolutely right - but you also miss part of what being a 'hacker' means, at least to me. The MIT hackers were also the people who computerised a model train track, making (or 'acquiring') all the necessary mechanical parts as well as writing the programs that controlled them. They would find an existing piece of hardware and then re-purpose it, either in part or completely, to enable it to be used in an entirely different way. Those who make things using the RasPi, Arduino, or any other SoC as the base controller are very much following in the footsteps of those who first called themselves 'hackers'.
I don't consider myself in their league, but I do the same today as a hobby. I'm currently working (my wife calls it 'playing') with RasPis, Arduinos and micropython (on lopy4's). I've made a Arduino controller which allows a disabled person to control a telephone, television and music streamer by simple push buttons - many disabled people cannot use a smart phone, they simply have insufficient motor control to carry out many of the functions that a 'smart' screen expects. I receive ADSB data from aircraft using a SDR and RasPi, and display it locally on my computer and stream it to 2 other websites. I'm developing a remote ADSB system which will do the same but which can be controlled by me from the comfort of my armchair using LoRa transmissions to a site several kilometers from where I am. I regularly strip down unwanted computers, printers and other hardware to scavenge parts that I can use in future projects. Writing the code is only part of what I consider to be a 'hacker'.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Saturday April 28 2018, @03:39PM
John McAffee is still hacking the media to this day. Watched this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gringo:_The_Dangerous_Life_of_John_McAfee [wikipedia.org] last night, 'twas entertaining.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 5, Informative) by crafoo on Saturday April 28 2018, @03:59PM (3 children)
No. The field of "programming" has greatly expanded since the 90s such that people who have both good critical reasoning and system integration skills are also now in demand. Using a much more abstracted programming language or set of languages and writing software for integrated systems with a variety of sensors, displays, and input devices. Doing all of this at the hardware level would be insanely complex and time consuming.
However! There are still people doing the low-level, hardware programming! In fact, the new class of programmer relies greatly on their work.
This article is shit, in that it maligns the people, still in the trenches doing the hardware and firmware work, and even goes so far as to say their skills are not required. Furthermore, it is shit in that it mistakes system integration and abstracted critical reasoning for "sociotech". The author is a raging idiot.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by vux984 on Saturday April 28 2018, @05:37PM (2 children)
"and even goes so far as to say their skills are not required."
It's not that they aren't required, but their skills are in limited demand. The folks who figure out cpu microcode and firmware are outnumbered 1000 to 1 by the folks who create wordpress web sites with online ordering tied into to salesforce. Or the people working create cloud versions of desktop applications and write rest apis to power them...
And the latter really is a substantially different skill set.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 28 2018, @06:01PM
Web monkeys and DBAs were never considered hackers or programmers. Web developers and software developers are, as you say, substantially different. Having arrived at this conclusion, how do you disagree with the contention that the author of TFA is wrong?
(Score: 5, Informative) by crafoo on Saturday April 28 2018, @07:09PM
Verilog & VHDL, motor controllers, display controllers, DSP applications, the uncountable microcontrollers in vehicles including aircraft, drones, every appliance and consumer product. All low-level, hardware programming. A significant amount is still assembly language. Quite a lot of it is in C with systems like FreeRTOS.
I think you don't know much about the field and understandably do not understand the scope of the field. These skills are still very much in demand. Demand that exceeds the demand compared to the 80s and 90s. The whole of programming has just expanded so much that it is a far smaller percentage of the whole. But the demand is still very much there. People skilled in assembly and people who know how a computer works have very well paid careers.
This article calls the larger field of abstracted programming "sociotech" which is just ridiculous and ignorant.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday April 28 2018, @08:42PM (4 children)
It had to be updated in sync with the electron beam scan. Real work was done during the vertical blanking interval
Bob Polaroid is a friend of mine who was one of Atari's first coders
http://polaro.com [polaro.com]
Look under Articles & Interviews on the left
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VanessaE on Sunday April 29 2018, @02:16AM (2 children)
The Atari did not have a one-pixel buffer. That would be impossible, as each pixel is only a bit over 100 nanoseconds long, and the 6502 averages about 35 times that, per instruction.
No, Atari used a display list prepared by a user program. That list is itself a program which is executed entirely by the ANTIC display chip. ANTIC uses DMA to read the list in realtime, and to fetch the display data as dictated by it, and it keeps reusing the list, so the CPU need only prepare it once to create a static image. Of course, you do have to stay ahead of the raster or stay in the vertical blank interval when updating the list or changing the data it's about to fetch, if you want to avoid tearing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 29 2018, @11:33PM
Thanks Vanessa, super interesting.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 30 2018, @01:24AM
The 2600 drew anything more complex than original Pong by software altering the TIA registers during hblank for every line in software. The tricky bit is that there's no hblank interrupt. Beyond the small handful of registers, there's no framebuffer or tilemap or anything. It's not even like a one pixel buffer, you basically just move the sprites/change the background data/swap colors each line to get the image you want.
The 5200/Atari 8-bit computer series expands on this a bunch by using a display list to do that kind of tricky, timing-sensitive work automatically, like you described.
(Score: 1) by suburbanitemediocrity on Monday April 30 2018, @10:33PM
Wow. He was one of my heroes when I was a kid.
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Sunday April 29 2018, @04:38AM (1 child)
It ended when they took away Internet from Julian Assange. When Ecuador cut him off from Internet.
I'll tell you, I love WikiLeaks. It’s amazing how nothing is secret today when you talk about the Internet. But it had absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election. Intelligence stated very strongly there was absolutely no evidence that hacking affected the election results. Voting machines not touched!
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 29 2018, @05:45AM
What I'm trying to understand is if Comey handed you the election why is he now part of the build up to impeachment proceedings.
(Score: 1) by JustNiz on Sunday April 29 2018, @09:18PM
>> programming was an art only a limited group of dedicated enthusiasts actually knew how to perform properly.
Judging by nearly all the utterly crap code I've seen in over 35 years.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Monday April 30 2018, @07:35AM
Until the hardware guys come up with new architectures and you need actual programmers to build upon them. After they are done, the social crowd starts making money off it by scamming the general public.
Hacker means two things: 1. tinkerer, who wants to know what's under the hood. Personality trait, cannot be removed, only curbed.
2. guy who subscribes to the age old idea (but expressed in the context of IT by R. Stallman) that to learn to build a system it is better to start with small modifications to an existing system instead of designing a toy one from scratch.
The existing system has to be open and there comes the need for freedom.
Side note, the hacker = cracker definition denotes intent, not methodology.
Account abandoned.