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This kind of thing reminds me of a phrase from cycling: It never gets easier, you just go faster. I feel like that's absolutely how software is. As we have be

This kind of thing reminds me of a phrase from cycling: It never gets easier, you just go faster. I feel like that's absolutely how software is. As we have better frameworks and libraries and everything the job doesn't get easier. But what happens is that it's now possible to do something with a team of three that might have taken thirty before. Just look at Python/django or Ruby/Rails vs doing all that yourself with C and cgi-bin. How big would the C project be before it started to become difficult to work on by virtue of its many lines of code? I'm not saying these new frameworks solve any kind of difficult theoretical problems by the way. And it's still work to make a django or Rails site. But there are many startups that got going in the last decade with just a few people that during the dotcom bubble might have taken 30, 50, even 100 folks to try and turn into reality.

goatlover 7y ago
Unless they were using Lisp or Smalltalk.
- karmakaze 7y ago
  Using lisp is like having a very high quality 3D printer. You can make anything like other high quality 3D printers but you start with very little else. Where I think we've progressed much further is in the way of cloud/managed services and lightweight devops. Easy app development still seems close like AirTable but never quite here.
segmondy 7y ago
It does get easier too. Better frameworks and libraries have made the job so much easier! The challenge I see is that people don't know how to code. They know the keywords of the language, they know programming constructs, design patterns, algorithms, frameworks, but they don't know how to program. You can know all the ingredients, you might even know the recipe but that doesn't make you a good chef or mean you know how to cook. Something that I have not seen taught anywhere, no in schools, not at work, not on a thousand online courses is "HOW TO PROGRAM" This is why things have gotten hard for many people, they don't know how to program. But for those that do know how to program, things have gotten actually much more easier.
- umvi 7y ago
  Well, when people are promised untold riches if they simply "Become a programmer in 2 weeks with our Python bootcamp!" what do you expect? Hordes are now flocking to this industry for the $$$, but have little-to-no interest in the craftsmanship/inner workings aspect of it. I spent hours the other day helping one of our new devs solve an issue he couldn't solve himself, and after explaining why his code was broken several times in several ways, I got the impression he didn't really care about the backstory I was providing on stack vs. heap memory; he just wanted me to help unblock him as quickly as possible so he could continue to make progress on his task.
- ticmasta 7y ago
  >> This is why things have gotten hard for many people, they don't know how to program But how does this explain programming over the past 30+ years? You can't blame code camps as to why programming in the 90's has not gotten a magnitude easier, or even harder as you posit. And what exactly do you mean "how to program"? you throw a lot of shade at the people, institutions and resources involved but don't shine any light on this missing piece...
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    > You can't blame code camps as to why programming in the 90's has not gotten a magnitude easier It has. Things that were hard problems then are simple tasks today. OTOH, if you want to get paid a princely salary, you have to do the things that are still nontrivial. The stuff that has been trivialized has stopped being valuable, the things that used to be intractable but have been reduced to merely challenging have taken their place as worth paying for.
  - segmondy 7y ago
    Lack of frameworks made things simpler for folks back in the day, they programmed fine by luck. Lack of frameworks meant less distraction. Today, frameworks, libraries, API, platforms, configuration nightmare make things harder for those that don't know how to program because they become distracted. In my opinion, knowing how to program is about knowing exactly where to focus on, where to begin so you can get to the core of the problem. For those that know how or have the intuition, they can move much faster. When I talk about focus, I don't mean concentration, but knowing where to direct your attention. Think of it like triage. But it's even harder. When you have a system, let's say it has 100 components, and it's miss behaving. If you know and understand the system, you can know how to narrow down what the root cause might be. On the other hand, if you have been giving the go ahead to build a system, you might know if you need 10 or 100 components. If you even figure it out, which one do you build face? What order do you build them in? Those matter. This is what I mean by programming. The solution prescribed today is that of design docs, build a prototype, build an MVP, Those I believe help a bit, but not that much.

goatlover 7y ago

Unless they were using Lisp or Smalltalk.

karmakaze 7y ago
Using lisp is like having a very high quality 3D printer. You can make anything like other high quality 3D printers but you start with very little else. Where I think we've progressed much further is in the way of cloud/managed services and lightweight devops. Easy app development still seems close like AirTable but never quite here.

segmondy 7y ago

It does get easier too. Better frameworks and libraries have made the job so much easier! The challenge I see is that people don't know how to code. They know the keywords of the language, they know programming constructs, design patterns, algorithms, frameworks, but they don't know how to program. You can know all the ingredients, you might even know the recipe but that doesn't make you a good chef or mean you know how to cook. Something that I have not seen taught anywhere, no in schools, not at work, not on a thousand online courses is "HOW TO PROGRAM" This is why things have gotten hard for many people, they don't know how to program. But for those that do know how to program, things have gotten actually much more easier.

umvi 7y ago
Well, when people are promised untold riches if they simply "Become a programmer in 2 weeks with our Python bootcamp!" what do you expect? Hordes are now flocking to this industry for the $$$, but have little-to-no interest in the craftsmanship/inner workings aspect of it. I spent hours the other day helping one of our new devs solve an issue he couldn't solve himself, and after explaining why his code was broken several times in several ways, I got the impression he didn't really care about the backstory I was providing on stack vs. heap memory; he just wanted me to help unblock him as quickly as possible so he could continue to make progress on his task.
ticmasta 7y ago
>> This is why things have gotten hard for many people, they don't know how to program But how does this explain programming over the past 30+ years? You can't blame code camps as to why programming in the 90's has not gotten a magnitude easier, or even harder as you posit. And what exactly do you mean "how to program"? you throw a lot of shade at the people, institutions and resources involved but don't shine any light on this missing piece...
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > You can't blame code camps as to why programming in the 90's has not gotten a magnitude easier It has. Things that were hard problems then are simple tasks today. OTOH, if you want to get paid a princely salary, you have to do the things that are still nontrivial. The stuff that has been trivialized has stopped being valuable, the things that used to be intractable but have been reduced to merely challenging have taken their place as worth paying for.
- segmondy 7y ago
  Lack of frameworks made things simpler for folks back in the day, they programmed fine by luck. Lack of frameworks meant less distraction. Today, frameworks, libraries, API, platforms, configuration nightmare make things harder for those that don't know how to program because they become distracted. In my opinion, knowing how to program is about knowing exactly where to focus on, where to begin so you can get to the core of the problem. For those that know how or have the intuition, they can move much faster. When I talk about focus, I don't mean concentration, but knowing where to direct your attention. Think of it like triage. But it's even harder. When you have a system, let's say it has 100 components, and it's miss behaving. If you know and understand the system, you can know how to narrow down what the root cause might be. On the other hand, if you have been giving the go ahead to build a system, you might know if you need 10 or 100 components. If you even figure it out, which one do you build face? What order do you build them in? Those matter. This is what I mean by programming. The solution prescribed today is that of design docs, build a prototype, build an MVP, Those I believe help a bit, but not that much.