SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 01 2014, @03:35PM
Even the oldest, most wise and experienced rockstar of a programmer can never be exactly sure what his code will do, simply due to the fact that it will be compiled by software written by other people, run on operating systems written by other people on hardware designed, built and maintained by other people. Implementing functional requirements (often contradictory, or impossible) specified by other people. He can try to avoid catastrophic failure by building various types of safeguards into the software, maybe turn it into graceful failure, but he will never be able to prevent failure altogether.
So please be a bit more nuanced. Designing and building a bridge, or doing a brain surgery, is child's play, compared to what many programmers in the world today have to deal with. THAT..and the lawyer culture, is why we have disclaimers.
Civilization runs on what we do. I'm sick of being treated like a digital brick layer, after all the effort and expense I went through to learn what I know, while MBAs and banker parasites reap the profits.
Yes I am an Anonymous Coward, and proud of it!