An outrageous, insightful, and sadly accurate commentary on programming. I found this an extremely entertaining read and agree with most of it. It doesn't offer solutions, but certainly highlights a lot of the problems.
"Double you tee eff?" you say, and start hunting for the problem. You discover that one day, some idiot decided that since another idiot decided that 1/0 should equal infinity, they could just use that as a shorthand for "Infinity" when simplifying their code. Then a non-idiot rightly decided that this was idiotic, which is what the original idiot should have decided, but since he didn't, the non-idiot decided to be a dick and make this a failing error in his new compiler. Then he decided he wasn't going to tell anyone that this was an error, because he's a dick, and now all your snowflakes are urine and you can't even find the cat.
Personally, I think things will only get better (including salaries) when software development is treated like other engineering disciplines.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Thursday May 01 2014, @02:41PM
I disagree with the claim that those intentionally obfuscated languages/programs are a sign of "destructive impact on the brain". It would if people used such code in production, but (I hope) nobody does that.
If an architect likes to build card houses in his free time, I don't consider him a bad architect for that, as long as he knows that his card houses are card houses and not real buildings. When he delivers a card house as my new home, then I'm going to question his sanity.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Thursday May 01 2014, @04:00PM
Oh, but in the software business, this happens all the time. I've picked up well-paying contracts because of it.
There are 3 causes of this phenomenon, in a nutshell:
1. Because software is largely invisible, a card house looks, to a layman, completely identical to a real building (or even better, because they could focus on really cool painting on the outside rather than silly stuff like foundations or load-bearing walls).
2. The Dunning-Kreuger effect means that the programmer building the card house often truly believes he's doing the same job as a programmer building a real building.
3. All else appearing to be equal (see 1), a layman purchaser will choose the lowest bidder. Since it's a lot cheaper to build a card house than a real building, the card house will nearly always triumph - until the day when a good gust of wind comes along.
And after that is when folks like me can come in and fix it for a price that is much higher than it would have cost to build it right in the first place.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin