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 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.