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: 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.