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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 01 2014, @03:22PM
I picture an insane clown hitting himself in the head with a metal pipe. After that, he creates Java frameworks. Then he hits himself again. Then he works on a framework. That's the only explanation for Java frameworks that I've ever been able to come up with. How else could they be so over-engineered, crazy, unstable, and in a constant state of change?
I think this metaphor could be generalized to a lot of other things related to programming as well.
Exercise: Pick a dozen or so popular programming languages and determine how to find the length of a string. Then compare and contrast this insanity with the clown metaphor. If we as an industry can't consistently pick one way to get the length of a string, how can anything else not be crazy?
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Thursday May 01 2014, @05:51PM
It's the same anywhere. Consider web programming: I can't even begin to guess how many frameworks are out there, being developed by how many different organizations. I've been in and around the field for a long time, and just today I saw an ad for an "entry level" development position naming stuff I've never heard of.
The Microsoft world is only marginally better, in terms of overall complexity, and comes with the price of being tied to a specific vendor.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Thursday May 01 2014, @06:47PM
It is only a matter of discovering the real motives behind a result.
Implement an app on a light, concise, high performance, secure, scalable framework, sell it to your client, see your client perfectly content and not needing you for A long time. Or ever at all if the son of the client is a bright guy and starts hacking some added functionality.
Implement an app on a bureaucratic java framework and you will have the client depending on you forever.
Also, the COBOL way of creating programs is insane for the single man's project, but could actually help in an organization where its bureaucracy maps well against the structure already there.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday May 01 2014, @08:15PM
obligatory xkcd [xkcd.com]
"But my way is the RIGHT way!"
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"