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Here's the thing: everything sucks. Every industry, profession, even hobby is full of seemingly arbitrary limitations, poor tooling, quirky hacks you have to wo

Here's the thing: everything sucks. Every industry, profession, even hobby is full of seemingly arbitrary limitations, poor tooling, quirky hacks you have to work around, little bits of required know-how that seem ancillary to the central goals. Ask your friends in other engineering disciplines, politics and public policy of all kinds, finance, medicine, and energy. Everything sucks because the world is complicated and path dependency calls the shots. The question to ask is whether things are getting better or worse. And things in programming are getting emphatically better! For all the incidental complexity and pointless thrashing about [1], almost everything about writing software is better than it was just 10 years ago, which is not a very long time. The people who say things like "nothing ever changes" or "we're just reinventing old technology" have some seriously rose-tinted glasses. It's so much easier to do just about everything. The tools are better, the hardware is better, the quantity and quality of information is better. And we have better, bigger software doing more important things, which is why the industry is doing so well. The sky is doing the opposite of falling. That isn't to say there isn't room for improvement, or that complaining about broken things is wrong. That lets us keeping fixing things. It's more that "everything is broken and stupid" isn't a very useful lens, and leads to fool's errands like this: > It’s time to kill the aimless, bottom-up, ad-hoc incrementalism in programming in favor of purposeful, top-bottom and planned innovation. I'll stick to my massive pile of working software that solves real problems, warts and all. And I'll continue to help improve it wherever I can so that it works better. [1] I joked recently that Javascript library developers would be more efficient if they had their CI servers deprecate their APIs automatically before releasing them

acqq 11y ago
> leads to fool's errands like this: >> It’s time to kill the aimless, bottom-up, ad-hoc incrementalism in programming in favor of purposeful, top-bottom and planned innovation. Agree. Let the author put his money where his mouth is first, then we can discuss where he's right. He wants programming to be "easier." Well everybody wants everything easier. It's easy to have just one thing easy scarifying other dependencies. But the limitations exist everywhere. And it was damn hard to even come this far and maintain the state we are here now: Louis C.K's take: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEY58fiSK8E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEY58fiSK8E
- q-base 11y ago
  Loved the Louis C.K video! Are any of his shows based somewhat around this topic or is it only on this talk show that he talks about this?
  - acqq 11y ago
    > Are any of his shows based somewhat around this topic Not that I know. It wouldn't be appropriate for a general audience he targets. Anyway, there's a pattern, as soon as almost every stand up comedian becomes reasonably successful he starts to travel a lot by plane and the gags start to revolve about that. We just got lucky with his take to make it meta enough, recognizable and hilarious at the same time.
- luisobo 11y ago
  > Agree. Let the author put his money where his mouth is first, then we can discuss where he's right. I am.
  - acqq 11y ago
    > I am. Jesus! (1) What are you going to make or you're making already to change the "suckiness" of programming? Or was your article (and the question to others) your contribution? You've got at least a lot of comments here (and a lot of disagreement too) now you have something to proceed. 1) John 8: 58 and http://hightechministries.org/Eight%20I%20Am%20of%20Jesus.pdf http://hightechministries.org/Eight%20I%20Am%20of%20Jesus.pd...
LoSboccacc 11y ago
as a tinkerer, I love programming. I enjoy optimizing routines, fighting complexity, exploring the solution space for hard problems. the problem is, that doesn't pay for a roof and a meal. so I spend my day fighting users that requires twenty seven pop-ups not to delete their own data accidentally, browsers that have each their own idea of css3, enterprise services that are a landmine of old documentation, bugs, workarounds, workarounds for bugged workarounds and bugs on top of these. as my mentor once said, if work were fun they wouldn't have to pay you to do it.
- luisobo 11y ago
  author here. Thanks for you comment! A usual misconception, my fault, is to think I'm complaining about our profession. I'm not, I'm talking about programming, the tool. Re: I love programming. Me too! but I think tools should be measured by their outcomes, not by how much we love them.

acqq 11y ago

> leads to fool's errands like this: >> It’s time to kill the aimless, bottom-up, ad-hoc incrementalism in programming in favor of purposeful, top-bottom and planned innovation. Agree. Let the author put his money where his mouth is first, then we can discuss where he's right. He wants programming to be "easier." Well everybody wants everything easier. It's easy to have just one thing easy scarifying other dependencies. But the limitations exist everywhere. And it was damn hard to even come this far and maintain the state we are here now: Louis C.K's take: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEY58fiSK8E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEY58fiSK8E

q-base 11y ago
Loved the Louis C.K video! Are any of his shows based somewhat around this topic or is it only on this talk show that he talks about this?
- acqq 11y ago
  > Are any of his shows based somewhat around this topic Not that I know. It wouldn't be appropriate for a general audience he targets. Anyway, there's a pattern, as soon as almost every stand up comedian becomes reasonably successful he starts to travel a lot by plane and the gags start to revolve about that. We just got lucky with his take to make it meta enough, recognizable and hilarious at the same time.
luisobo 11y ago
> Agree. Let the author put his money where his mouth is first, then we can discuss where he's right. I am.
- acqq 11y ago
  > I am. Jesus! (1) What are you going to make or you're making already to change the "suckiness" of programming? Or was your article (and the question to others) your contribution? You've got at least a lot of comments here (and a lot of disagreement too) now you have something to proceed. 1) John 8: 58 and http://hightechministries.org/Eight%20I%20Am%20of%20Jesus.pdf http://hightechministries.org/Eight%20I%20Am%20of%20Jesus.pd...

LoSboccacc 11y ago

as a tinkerer, I love programming. I enjoy optimizing routines, fighting complexity, exploring the solution space for hard problems. the problem is, that doesn't pay for a roof and a meal. so I spend my day fighting users that requires twenty seven pop-ups not to delete their own data accidentally, browsers that have each their own idea of css3, enterprise services that are a landmine of old documentation, bugs, workarounds, workarounds for bugged workarounds and bugs on top of these. as my mentor once said, if work were fun they wouldn't have to pay you to do it.

luisobo 11y ago
author here. Thanks for you comment! A usual misconception, my fault, is to think I'm complaining about our profession. I'm not, I'm talking about programming, the tool. Re: I love programming. Me too! but I think tools should be measured by their outcomes, not by how much we love them.