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Now you know why programming is not considered engineering. There are plenty of programmers who pride themselves in not caring about "theory" ("I didn't go to s

Now you know why programming is not considered engineering. There are plenty of programmers who pride themselves in not caring about "theory" ("I didn't go to school and now I'm making money building cool stuff!!") and thus history is repeated.

paganel 10y ago
You don't need much CS theory in order to develop and maintain a CRUD app. I've been a programmer who gets paid to write code for 11 years now, and I'd say most of the code I've seen wasn't that much complicated than a CRUD app. Also, I don't feel the need to be called an engineer. I just write code, hoping that it would work most of the time, under as many diverse circumstances as possible and trying to meet the client's needs. It sounds trivial, there's no "theory" in it, but sometimes is hard as hell to do all these 3 things right.
- mbrameld 10y ago
  I think this is a case of not knowing what you don't know.
- eru 10y ago
  Some insights inspired from theory help a lot with writing CRUD apps. (Also of course, inspired from outside and then explored further by `theoreticians'.) The most successful of these are now invisible. Either because they are available libraries or so ingrained in the background of what we are doing. See for example regular expressions, parsers, garbage collection, databases, file systems, CPUs. For CRUD apps, "Out of the tarpit" (http://shaffner.us/cs/papers/tarpit.pdf http://shaffner.us/cs/papers/tarpit.pdf) is an interesting paper that I hope describes how the mainstream programmer will build CRUD apps in perhaps ten years time. (I already used a variant of their techniques in a previous job, and it was rather pleasant.) But yes, in practice knowledge of theory often acts more as a gatekeeper for getting into the likes of Google than you will use it. But when you do spot some opportunities to replace endless workarounds and tedious manual monkey-work with an elegant overarching principle, it often makes all the hours spent studying worth it. As an great practical example: shake (http://shakebuild.com/ http://shakebuild.com/) is a build-system that was born out of our frustrations with Gnu Make at Standard Chartered Bank. Similarly, Bloomberg used to use C++ to describe financial derivative contracts. Those derivative contracts don't fit well into class hierarchies. Switching to an embedded DSL approach embedded in a functional language made the software easier to write and more robust to common errors especially when maintaining.
  - paganel 10y ago
    > See for example regular expressions, parsers, garbage collection, databases, file systems, CPUs. Of course we're all standing on the shoulders of giants. So does the milk-man, who goes door to door using a vehicle of which he doesn't know much about how it was built/what its underlying principles are (is it a Otto-based engine? or a Diesel one? does the milk-man need to know the laws of TD?), but that vehicle is paramount to the milk-man's financial success, so to speak. All I'm saying is that we don't all need to be like Rudolph Diesel, Nikolaus Otto or James Clerk Maxwell, we can still do our jobs as programmers perfectly fine the same as a regular milk-man does, we don't need to know the theory behind CPUs, garbage collection and the like in order to write code that does stuff. Don't get me wrong, I get what you're saying and understand your points, I just think that right at this moment the programming world needs more "milk-man-like programmers", because if we build walls around our profession ("you can only be a programmer if you know CS theory" and the like) then nothing good would come out of it. I mean, we will certainly build some cool, nice programs, but the world right now doesn't needs just some, few "cool, nice programs", the world needs lots and lots of code. In order to have lots and lots of code we need more programmers.
    - prmph 10y ago
      It is precisely this attitude that has hampered the development of programming into a respected profession. The world does not need lots and lots of code or programmers; the world needs less but better code and programmers, quality over quantity. But this objective is thwarted when the idea keeps being thrown around that "everybody can, and should, code." There is already a glut of bad code developed by "programmers" unaware of what they do not know and unwilling to continue learning to improve. Bad code, be it un-secure, un-performant, or un-usable code, is turning off consumers, and the earlier we sit up and seek way to improve code and product quality, the better.
    - ajbetteridge 10y ago
      And that's the attitude that leads to the cure glut of IOT hardware with significant security bugs or no security at all. Build it fast and ship asap is not a sound plan for any software,and even less so for something that needs security. Anyone with an incentive of formal CS theory education will write better software than the same person before they had that education.
posterboy 10y ago
That's not true, technical colleges award bachelors in engineering for applied computer science in economics, media design and, indeed, computer engineering.
jsmith0295 10y ago
I don't really think it has much to do with going to school. I think theory gets ignored because some portion of an engineering team has no interest in learning it, so we cater to the lowest common denominator because its the less expensive option, at least in the short term. It's actually the passionate people who managed to get into this without a degree that have been the most interested in new ideas in my experience.

paganel 10y ago

You don't need much CS theory in order to develop and maintain a CRUD app. I've been a programmer who gets paid to write code for 11 years now, and I'd say most of the code I've seen wasn't that much complicated than a CRUD app. Also, I don't feel the need to be called an engineer. I just write code, hoping that it would work most of the time, under as many diverse circumstances as possible and trying to meet the client's needs. It sounds trivial, there's no "theory" in it, but sometimes is hard as hell to do all these 3 things right.

mbrameld 10y ago
I think this is a case of not knowing what you don't know.
eru 10y ago
Some insights inspired from theory help a lot with writing CRUD apps. (Also of course, inspired from outside and then explored further by `theoreticians'.) The most successful of these are now invisible. Either because they are available libraries or so ingrained in the background of what we are doing. See for example regular expressions, parsers, garbage collection, databases, file systems, CPUs. For CRUD apps, "Out of the tarpit" (http://shaffner.us/cs/papers/tarpit.pdf http://shaffner.us/cs/papers/tarpit.pdf) is an interesting paper that I hope describes how the mainstream programmer will build CRUD apps in perhaps ten years time. (I already used a variant of their techniques in a previous job, and it was rather pleasant.) But yes, in practice knowledge of theory often acts more as a gatekeeper for getting into the likes of Google than you will use it. But when you do spot some opportunities to replace endless workarounds and tedious manual monkey-work with an elegant overarching principle, it often makes all the hours spent studying worth it. As an great practical example: shake (http://shakebuild.com/ http://shakebuild.com/) is a build-system that was born out of our frustrations with Gnu Make at Standard Chartered Bank. Similarly, Bloomberg used to use C++ to describe financial derivative contracts. Those derivative contracts don't fit well into class hierarchies. Switching to an embedded DSL approach embedded in a functional language made the software easier to write and more robust to common errors especially when maintaining.
- paganel 10y ago
  > See for example regular expressions, parsers, garbage collection, databases, file systems, CPUs. Of course we're all standing on the shoulders of giants. So does the milk-man, who goes door to door using a vehicle of which he doesn't know much about how it was built/what its underlying principles are (is it a Otto-based engine? or a Diesel one? does the milk-man need to know the laws of TD?), but that vehicle is paramount to the milk-man's financial success, so to speak. All I'm saying is that we don't all need to be like Rudolph Diesel, Nikolaus Otto or James Clerk Maxwell, we can still do our jobs as programmers perfectly fine the same as a regular milk-man does, we don't need to know the theory behind CPUs, garbage collection and the like in order to write code that does stuff. Don't get me wrong, I get what you're saying and understand your points, I just think that right at this moment the programming world needs more "milk-man-like programmers", because if we build walls around our profession ("you can only be a programmer if you know CS theory" and the like) then nothing good would come out of it. I mean, we will certainly build some cool, nice programs, but the world right now doesn't needs just some, few "cool, nice programs", the world needs lots and lots of code. In order to have lots and lots of code we need more programmers.
  - prmph 10y ago
    It is precisely this attitude that has hampered the development of programming into a respected profession. The world does not need lots and lots of code or programmers; the world needs less but better code and programmers, quality over quantity. But this objective is thwarted when the idea keeps being thrown around that "everybody can, and should, code." There is already a glut of bad code developed by "programmers" unaware of what they do not know and unwilling to continue learning to improve. Bad code, be it un-secure, un-performant, or un-usable code, is turning off consumers, and the earlier we sit up and seek way to improve code and product quality, the better.
  - ajbetteridge 10y ago
    And that's the attitude that leads to the cure glut of IOT hardware with significant security bugs or no security at all. Build it fast and ship asap is not a sound plan for any software,and even less so for something that needs security. Anyone with an incentive of formal CS theory education will write better software than the same person before they had that education.

posterboy 10y ago

That's not true, technical colleges award bachelors in engineering for applied computer science in economics, media design and, indeed, computer engineering.

jsmith0295 10y ago

I don't really think it has much to do with going to school. I think theory gets ignored because some portion of an engineering team has no interest in learning it, so we cater to the lowest common denominator because its the less expensive option, at least in the short term. It's actually the passionate people who managed to get into this without a degree that have been the most interested in new ideas in my experience.