6 ms·

Reading this made me so so sad, I do agree with the reasoning. I learned to program on a course that follows SICP, I spent all my college years learning how to

Reading this made me so so sad, I do agree with the reasoning. I learned to program on a course that follows SICP, I spent all my college years learning how to program from first principles, building all the pieces from scratch. Building compilers, soft threads implementations, graph parsing algorithms... and I was happy with that way of programming! Today I'm an iOS developer, I spend most of my day 'poking' at the Cocoa Touch framework whose source I can't even read because it's closed source. The startup I work for moves so fast that I'm forced to use other peoples open source projects without even having the time to read the source. I feel miserable doing the kind of programming I do nowadays! I wish I could go back to simpler times, where I actually had to reason about algorithms, data structures, hardware, etc...

eric-hu 10y ago
Please take advantage of your job mobility. Changing jobs in our line of work isn't as simple as flipping a switch, but you still are in so much demand. There's no need for you do engineering work you're dissatisfied with.
kajecounterhack 10y ago
I feel miserable doing the kind of programming I do nowadays! I wish I could go back to simpler times, where I actually had to reason about algorithms, data structures, hardware, etc... I don't subscribe to the school of thought that values engineers lower on the stack more than those higher up, especially since there seem to be a lot more new jobs of the latter sort and we all need to make a living, and there are plenty of cool problems in those spaces (algorithms, data structures, performance... it's all there). But I think the lucky ones are people who get to work low enough relative to their knowledge where it doesn't feel they are dealing with endless abstractions and layer upon layer of magic. The startup I work for moves so fast that I'm forced to use other peoples open source projects without even having the time to read the source. :( sounds to me that this might be more the problem. And worse is I suspect it's common.
- nextos 10y ago
  I think he doesn't necessarily imply anything about being high or low in the chain. But about beauty and understanding. SICP is one example, but I bet it's even possible to be happy coding GUIs or any other rather mundane things if one does it with an elegant toolset. For example, Oz comes to mind. Some modern tools are not pleasing to use, often because architectures are a mess. Things move forward too quickly.
  - monknomo 10y ago
    What's Oz?
    - carapace 10y ago
      http://mozart.github.io/ http://mozart.github.io/
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 10y ago
  A worse problem would be simulating linux in your head as you methodically review the source.
- SomeCallMeTim 10y ago
  I don't subscribe to the school of thought that values engineers lower on the stack more than those higher up Meaning developers who understand low-level details vs. developers who just wire up high level libraries? I've done the full range, from entire games written in assembly language and embedded C code, through high level full stack development with NodeJS, Python, and other languages. The low-level coding is far more skilled work than the high level coding. Instead of most of the work being "how do these plug in to each other?", it's how exactly does my code function with respect to all of the potential events additional threads, and how all of the edge cases interact, and what is causing this obscure bug? While that may not seem intrinsically harder, none of these are typically something you can Google or search StackOverflow for the answers on. So you're really just on your own. And developers who have grown up on "Google all the answers!" often hit a wall when they need to apply real problem solving skills. Luckily I can find enjoyment in many levels, since a lot of the jobs I've found recently have been more of the "full stack" or "mobile development' category. It's easy and fun work. I also have little problem piercing the magic and understanding how things fit together, but that means that I end up with opinions on many topics divergent with the crowd. For instance, I avoid writing Android/Java or iOS/Swift, and instead use cross-platform development stacks exclusively. Yes it means an entire extra layer of complexity, but it also means I write the app once for all target platforms. Far too big of a win to ignore.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
abc_lisper 10y ago
I might be canned for this here, but, I see that enterprises have a lot more work of the fundamentals, simpler sort than startups. At startups, I worked with 100s of libraries not understanding, or not having the time to even look back at things we did. At enterprises, there are a lot of low hanging fruit, which when applied magic CS pixie dust, becomes more performant (to a lot of people). This is one of the reasons why I moved away from product side programming to IT. My brain screams in pain, when I do lot of context switches, and I figured this is not going to make me a better programmer. The fun stuff is in handling data, not learning layers of apis(for me). Now working in enterprise is not for everyone - the politics etc, but for me, it still beats the pain of working in a smelly, loud, fast context-switching, agile-kanban startup.
sklogic 10y ago
And why exactly you're wasting your skills on something as pitiful as this? There is a lot of work out there for people who can build complex solutions from the first principles.
- heurist 10y ago
  Even piecing together systems out of existing components significantly benefits from knowledge of first principles.
  - sklogic 10y ago
    Maybe. But he obviously feels miserable doing this. What's the point of being miserable while there is a lot of much more fun things to do?
lifeisstillgood 10y ago
>> moves so fast that I'm forced to use other peoples open source projects without even having the time to read the source This. Moving fast, sprinting, only looks like you are making progress. At some point the debt comes too much
- rwallace 10y ago
  In a startup context, the trick is to make sure the technical debt comes due after the point at which you find out whether you've got a product people actually want in the first place.
bordercases 10y ago
Closed source? Decompile the fker.
- jjnoakes 10y ago
  Sure. That makes it easy to reason about the code, see the abstractions clearly (at least as clearly as the author intended), make minor changes and submit patches upstream, recompile it with different options, ... Oh, wait.
- Retra 10y ago
  If you don't have time to read the open stuff, you probably don't have time to pick apart the closed.
- adrianN 10y ago
  I'm sure the lawyers in your company will be really happy to hear that.
quicklyfrozen 10y ago
And to make this really annoying, you still need to know low-level algorithms and data structures to make it through most interview processes. What they should really do is give you a crappy API doc and have you make it do something useful.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- oriolid 10y ago
  You're just applying at wrong companies.
cognivore 10y ago
Well, to be honest, that's why there are no iOS apps worth a god-damn. We got a bunch of junk as apps (programs now). So much wasted effort and time.
genop 10y ago
Serious question: What is stopping you from going back? I'm naive but curious and I do not want to make guesses. I wonder how are we going to preserve knowledge about programming from first principles if, under pressure from corporations and lazy peers, no one does it anymore?
- youjiuzhifeng 10y ago
  I think nowadays the most important business in a company is to built things atop fundamental things. For example, we build apps atop Cocoa, web atop ror. That is the business stop us from going back.
- jdmoreira 10y ago
  It's mostly that I got 'stuck' with iOS. Once you specialise it's hard to get out. If I change jobs now for anything other then iOS, I have to take a pay cut and I need to find someone that will hire me without any previous experience in... embedded, for example. There are also a lot more of this 'poking' jobs when compared to first principle coding jobs. Specially for someone like me who never worked for huge corporations.
  - Const-me 10y ago
    Not _that_ hard. Gradual transition should work. If you like videogames, learn some OpenGL ES, apply to mobile game development position, if you’ll like the area, you’ll be able to continue career developing games for other platforms. If you’d like to move to MS stack, learn some .NET, then look for Xamarin iOS jobs, you’ll be able to continue career developing .NET for Windows. If you enjoy hacking, seek a job in a company that makes UI test automation tools for iOS, or iOS-related security software. You already have experience dealing with all those iOS weirdness, you might be able to minimize or even negate that pay cut.
kazinator 10y ago
> I feel miserable doing the kind of programming I do nowadays! I wish I could go back to simpler times, where I actually had to reason about algorithms, data structures, hardware, etc. Join the TXR project: http://www.nongnu.org/txr http://www.nongnu.org/txr http://www.kylheku.com/cgit/txr/tree/ http://www.kylheku.com/cgit/txr/tree/ I made some 3000 commits all by myself since 2009. The main reason why this exists is the above: a project where I can stuff ideas, algorithms, whatever, into a coherent whole that has regular releases and is well-documented externally. And this coherent whole is useful to me in many ways.
- wiz21 10y ago
  TL;DR but it reminds me of Awk...
  - kazinator 10y ago
    Awk also has an input scanning sublanguage which implicitly marches through data, and that language can evaluate expressions and functions in another sublanguage. That's where the analogies end.
wiz21 10y ago
I was trained on Scheme 20 years ago. Scheme was the moment when I felt I "got" programming right (before that I did lots of Pascal, basic, assembler,etc). Now I do Python. And with Python I "got" something too : writing tools, coding, etc. is not like mathematics (like Scheme) anymore. It became a social activity. I'm in the field of ERP right now (arguably not the most theory-oriented stuff). It's because I spend most of time using API's by other and making API's in the hope that they will be used by other (none of those API being worth much in terms of computer "science" (stuff like algorithm). I'm also building tools to augment productivity of other people; which is also quite social. So from the abstract Scheme programming, I've moved to Python social programming. That keeps me happy (I must confess that studying Voronoi diagrams, or 3D structures packing remain what made me really tick :-) )
Derpdiherp 10y ago
Have you considered getting into embedded development? You tend to be dealing with much lower level code and closer to the hardware. It's fun :)
- jdmoreira 10y ago
  Thanks for this comment. Actually I have considered embedded a lot. I love C, specially free standing C. I will probably move to embedded soon. Problem is I have lot of experience with iOS but not that much experience with embedded, I'm willing to get a pay cut just to get out of iOS but there's a limit of how low I can go. There's also a lot more iOS jobs than embedded jobs! edit: Other than C, I'm very curious about rust and nim-lang. I do not know C++ though. Hope that won't be a problem.
  - Derpdiherp 10y ago
    Yes making career moves from one technical field to another can be difficult - I hope you manage to find somewhere that'll take you on without putting you over a barrel. I've found that it entirely depends what level of embedded development you want to enter - for instance I mainly work with C++ and MSQL databases on our platform - because our main device runs linux this makes sense. But other related products that we sell run on bare metal and are written in pure C. Having a strong knowledge of C will most certainly get you far in this field, but perhaps learning the ins and outs of C++ wouldn't be such a bad idea if you have the spare time - the more niches you can fit in the easier it will be to pick up that job you really want.

eric-hu 10y ago

Please take advantage of your job mobility. Changing jobs in our line of work isn't as simple as flipping a switch, but you still are in so much demand. There's no need for you do engineering work you're dissatisfied with.

kajecounterhack 10y ago

I feel miserable doing the kind of programming I do nowadays! I wish I could go back to simpler times, where I actually had to reason about algorithms, data structures, hardware, etc... I don't subscribe to the school of thought that values engineers lower on the stack more than those higher up, especially since there seem to be a lot more new jobs of the latter sort and we all need to make a living, and there are plenty of cool problems in those spaces (algorithms, data structures, performance... it's all there). But I think the lucky ones are people who get to work low enough relative to their knowledge where it doesn't feel they are dealing with endless abstractions and layer upon layer of magic. The startup I work for moves so fast that I'm forced to use other peoples open source projects without even having the time to read the source. :( sounds to me that this might be more the problem. And worse is I suspect it's common.

nextos 10y ago
I think he doesn't necessarily imply anything about being high or low in the chain. But about beauty and understanding. SICP is one example, but I bet it's even possible to be happy coding GUIs or any other rather mundane things if one does it with an elegant toolset. For example, Oz comes to mind. Some modern tools are not pleasing to use, often because architectures are a mess. Things move forward too quickly.
- monknomo 10y ago
  What's Oz?
  - carapace 10y ago
    http://mozart.github.io/ http://mozart.github.io/
0xdeadbeefbabe 10y ago
A worse problem would be simulating linux in your head as you methodically review the source.
SomeCallMeTim 10y ago
I don't subscribe to the school of thought that values engineers lower on the stack more than those higher up Meaning developers who understand low-level details vs. developers who just wire up high level libraries? I've done the full range, from entire games written in assembly language and embedded C code, through high level full stack development with NodeJS, Python, and other languages. The low-level coding is far more skilled work than the high level coding. Instead of most of the work being "how do these plug in to each other?", it's how exactly does my code function with respect to all of the potential events additional threads, and how all of the edge cases interact, and what is causing this obscure bug? While that may not seem intrinsically harder, none of these are typically something you can Google or search StackOverflow for the answers on. So you're really just on your own. And developers who have grown up on "Google all the answers!" often hit a wall when they need to apply real problem solving skills. Luckily I can find enjoyment in many levels, since a lot of the jobs I've found recently have been more of the "full stack" or "mobile development' category. It's easy and fun work. I also have little problem piercing the magic and understanding how things fit together, but that means that I end up with opinions on many topics divergent with the crowd. For instance, I avoid writing Android/Java or iOS/Swift, and instead use cross-platform development stacks exclusively. Yes it means an entire extra layer of complexity, but it also means I write the app once for all target platforms. Far too big of a win to ignore.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

abc_lisper 10y ago

I might be canned for this here, but, I see that enterprises have a lot more work of the fundamentals, simpler sort than startups. At startups, I worked with 100s of libraries not understanding, or not having the time to even look back at things we did. At enterprises, there are a lot of low hanging fruit, which when applied magic CS pixie dust, becomes more performant (to a lot of people). This is one of the reasons why I moved away from product side programming to IT. My brain screams in pain, when I do lot of context switches, and I figured this is not going to make me a better programmer. The fun stuff is in handling data, not learning layers of apis(for me). Now working in enterprise is not for everyone - the politics etc, but for me, it still beats the pain of working in a smelly, loud, fast context-switching, agile-kanban startup.

sklogic 10y ago

And why exactly you're wasting your skills on something as pitiful as this? There is a lot of work out there for people who can build complex solutions from the first principles.

heurist 10y ago
Even piecing together systems out of existing components significantly benefits from knowledge of first principles.
- sklogic 10y ago
  Maybe. But he obviously feels miserable doing this. What's the point of being miserable while there is a lot of much more fun things to do?

lifeisstillgood 10y ago

>> moves so fast that I'm forced to use other peoples open source projects without even having the time to read the source This. Moving fast, sprinting, only looks like you are making progress. At some point the debt comes too much

rwallace 10y ago
In a startup context, the trick is to make sure the technical debt comes due after the point at which you find out whether you've got a product people actually want in the first place.

bordercases 10y ago

Closed source? Decompile the fker.

jjnoakes 10y ago
Sure. That makes it easy to reason about the code, see the abstractions clearly (at least as clearly as the author intended), make minor changes and submit patches upstream, recompile it with different options, ... Oh, wait.
Retra 10y ago
If you don't have time to read the open stuff, you probably don't have time to pick apart the closed.
adrianN 10y ago
I'm sure the lawyers in your company will be really happy to hear that.

quicklyfrozen 10y ago

And to make this really annoying, you still need to know low-level algorithms and data structures to make it through most interview processes. What they should really do is give you a crappy API doc and have you make it do something useful.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
oriolid 10y ago
You're just applying at wrong companies.

cognivore 10y ago

Well, to be honest, that's why there are no iOS apps worth a god-damn. We got a bunch of junk as apps (programs now). So much wasted effort and time.

genop 10y ago

Serious question: What is stopping you from going back? I'm naive but curious and I do not want to make guesses. I wonder how are we going to preserve knowledge about programming from first principles if, under pressure from corporations and lazy peers, no one does it anymore?

youjiuzhifeng 10y ago
I think nowadays the most important business in a company is to built things atop fundamental things. For example, we build apps atop Cocoa, web atop ror. That is the business stop us from going back.
jdmoreira 10y ago
It's mostly that I got 'stuck' with iOS. Once you specialise it's hard to get out. If I change jobs now for anything other then iOS, I have to take a pay cut and I need to find someone that will hire me without any previous experience in... embedded, for example. There are also a lot more of this 'poking' jobs when compared to first principle coding jobs. Specially for someone like me who never worked for huge corporations.
- Const-me 10y ago
  Not _that_ hard. Gradual transition should work. If you like videogames, learn some OpenGL ES, apply to mobile game development position, if you’ll like the area, you’ll be able to continue career developing games for other platforms. If you’d like to move to MS stack, learn some .NET, then look for Xamarin iOS jobs, you’ll be able to continue career developing .NET for Windows. If you enjoy hacking, seek a job in a company that makes UI test automation tools for iOS, or iOS-related security software. You already have experience dealing with all those iOS weirdness, you might be able to minimize or even negate that pay cut.

kazinator 10y ago

> I feel miserable doing the kind of programming I do nowadays! I wish I could go back to simpler times, where I actually had to reason about algorithms, data structures, hardware, etc. Join the TXR project: http://www.nongnu.org/txr http://www.nongnu.org/txr http://www.kylheku.com/cgit/txr/tree/ http://www.kylheku.com/cgit/txr/tree/ I made some 3000 commits all by myself since 2009. The main reason why this exists is the above: a project where I can stuff ideas, algorithms, whatever, into a coherent whole that has regular releases and is well-documented externally. And this coherent whole is useful to me in many ways.

wiz21 10y ago
TL;DR but it reminds me of Awk...
- kazinator 10y ago
  Awk also has an input scanning sublanguage which implicitly marches through data, and that language can evaluate expressions and functions in another sublanguage. That's where the analogies end.

wiz21 10y ago

I was trained on Scheme 20 years ago. Scheme was the moment when I felt I "got" programming right (before that I did lots of Pascal, basic, assembler,etc). Now I do Python. And with Python I "got" something too : writing tools, coding, etc. is not like mathematics (like Scheme) anymore. It became a social activity. I'm in the field of ERP right now (arguably not the most theory-oriented stuff). It's because I spend most of time using API's by other and making API's in the hope that they will be used by other (none of those API being worth much in terms of computer "science" (stuff like algorithm). I'm also building tools to augment productivity of other people; which is also quite social. So from the abstract Scheme programming, I've moved to Python social programming. That keeps me happy (I must confess that studying Voronoi diagrams, or 3D structures packing remain what made me really tick :-) )

Derpdiherp 10y ago

Have you considered getting into embedded development? You tend to be dealing with much lower level code and closer to the hardware. It's fun :)

jdmoreira 10y ago
Thanks for this comment. Actually I have considered embedded a lot. I love C, specially free standing C. I will probably move to embedded soon. Problem is I have lot of experience with iOS but not that much experience with embedded, I'm willing to get a pay cut just to get out of iOS but there's a limit of how low I can go. There's also a lot more iOS jobs than embedded jobs! edit: Other than C, I'm very curious about rust and nim-lang. I do not know C++ though. Hope that won't be a problem.
- Derpdiherp 10y ago
  Yes making career moves from one technical field to another can be difficult - I hope you manage to find somewhere that'll take you on without putting you over a barrel. I've found that it entirely depends what level of embedded development you want to enter - for instance I mainly work with C++ and MSQL databases on our platform - because our main device runs linux this makes sense. But other related products that we sell run on bare metal and are written in pure C. Having a strong knowledge of C will most certainly get you far in this field, but perhaps learning the ins and outs of C++ wouldn't be such a bad idea if you have the spare time - the more niches you can fit in the easier it will be to pick up that job you really want.