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I think it is increasingly true over time. The amount of software use is increasing and the quality of programmers required to solve problems with software is

by fnid2 17y ago

I think it is increasingly true over time. The amount of software use is increasing and the quality of programmers required to solve problems with software is declining. There's a lot of open source out there, so you can see the code and see that it isn't that great a lot of times, but it gets proliferated with marketing, much like factory goods. Imagine the furniture artisans from the 1800's looking at the quality of furniture sold in the stores today... shoddy materials, weak joints, poor finishing. It's almost the same today in software -- or at least the trend is in that direction. You can still get quality furniture today with solid wood, great finishes, and sturdy construction, but you have to pay 10x or 20x the price of something from IKEA. Same is true of software. So you could say it is less true for "good" programmers, but it's also less true for good furniture makers. If it is true that abundance creates scarcity, the abundance of bad software and programmers has created a scarcity of good software and programmers, just like every other industry. Besides, saying it isn't true for good programmers is a like the No True Scotsman fallacy. What is a good programmer? Is a good programmer someone for whom it isn't true? Can you quantify what it is that makes a good programmer? Can software users tell the difference? I don't think they can.

jerf 17y ago
"Besides, saying it isn't true for good programmers is a like the No True Scotsman fallacy." No, because I can point to the people I'm referring to. In 1960, we did not have a lot of dedicated QA staff, dedicated sysadmins and IT, dedicated server farms, and so on and so on. Programmers have grown up auxiliary support personnel around them. The same has been true of doctors for a long time ("nurses") and will be more true, but the core doctors will actually be dealing with less and less of the routine. The problem with your "software is getting crappier like furniture" theses is that it's flat-out wrong. If software was today as crappy as it was in 1980, the Internet would not work. We can't have the same bug-count-per-feature we had back then, we've got a crapload more features for bugs to be in! What is true is that we've got frameworks and libraries of a quality the programmers of the 1980s could only dream of, and a programmer can take these and trade technical quality for speed of development, and while the result can still be quite messy it is simply an option that didn't exist in 1980. On the whole though, software is radically better now than it was then; the alternative is not even technically feasible, it wouldn't even begin to work. Seriously, if you think I'm on crack, go back and find the oldest source code you can. What you remember as a shining example of bug-free code will be revealed to be code that by modern standards is barely holding together and fails to exhibit bugs only because the task it takes on is so small there's hardly any room to trick it into doing something wrong. Not a viable path going forward.
yardie 17y ago
You are looking at the past through gilded eyes and if you were an adult back in those times you would have a different viewpoint. I suffered the same thing. Romanticizing TV shows from the 80s. They looked larger then life because I was just a kid. But now when I watch them, I hear crappy dialog, poor acting, weak plots, and cheap special effects. Things you couldn't get away with today. Some people see programming the same way. Programmers back then had to rely on tricks because the hardware wasn't up to snuff. Those same tricks also make problems as the software goes. Also, I just built my kitchen out of IKEA. If anything IKEA kitchens are the closest equivalent to todays software. Different, but interchangeable parts that fit a standard (the API). The cabinets that were replaced were 30 years old. And what you see is what you got. A little bit of rot meant the whole thing had to be torn out. If I needed to replace a door I would have to have one custom made; same for the drawers. Now, not all IKEA is great. I had a cheap IKEA office cabinet and compared to the kitchen cabinet of the same dimensions it was 1/3 the weight. But the price reflected the quality of the goods and sometimes all you want is a cheap office cabinet, other times you want a sturdy kitchen cabinet with a 25 year warranty.

by fnid2 17y ago

jerf 17y ago

"Besides, saying it isn't true for good programmers is a like the No True Scotsman fallacy." No, because I can point to the people I'm referring to. In 1960, we did not have a lot of dedicated QA staff, dedicated sysadmins and IT, dedicated server farms, and so on and so on. Programmers have grown up auxiliary support personnel around them. The same has been true of doctors for a long time ("nurses") and will be more true, but the core doctors will actually be dealing with less and less of the routine. The problem with your "software is getting crappier like furniture" theses is that it's flat-out wrong. If software was today as crappy as it was in 1980, the Internet would not work. We can't have the same bug-count-per-feature we had back then, we've got a crapload more features for bugs to be in! What is true is that we've got frameworks and libraries of a quality the programmers of the 1980s could only dream of, and a programmer can take these and trade technical quality for speed of development, and while the result can still be quite messy it is simply an option that didn't exist in 1980. On the whole though, software is radically better now than it was then; the alternative is not even technically feasible, it wouldn't even begin to work. Seriously, if you think I'm on crack, go back and find the oldest source code you can. What you remember as a shining example of bug-free code will be revealed to be code that by modern standards is barely holding together and fails to exhibit bugs only because the task it takes on is so small there's hardly any room to trick it into doing something wrong. Not a viable path going forward.

yardie 17y ago

You are looking at the past through gilded eyes and if you were an adult back in those times you would have a different viewpoint. I suffered the same thing. Romanticizing TV shows from the 80s. They looked larger then life because I was just a kid. But now when I watch them, I hear crappy dialog, poor acting, weak plots, and cheap special effects. Things you couldn't get away with today. Some people see programming the same way. Programmers back then had to rely on tricks because the hardware wasn't up to snuff. Those same tricks also make problems as the software goes. Also, I just built my kitchen out of IKEA. If anything IKEA kitchens are the closest equivalent to todays software. Different, but interchangeable parts that fit a standard (the API). The cabinets that were replaced were 30 years old. And what you see is what you got. A little bit of rot meant the whole thing had to be torn out. If I needed to replace a door I would have to have one custom made; same for the drawers. Now, not all IKEA is great. I had a cheap IKEA office cabinet and compared to the kitchen cabinet of the same dimensions it was 1/3 the weight. But the price reflected the quality of the goods and sometimes all you want is a cheap office cabinet, other times you want a sturdy kitchen cabinet with a 25 year warranty.