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After having read the article Built to Last[1] from the latest issue of Logic Magazine over my morning coffee, and spending breakfast pondering my coming day of

After having read the article Built to Last[1] from the latest issue of Logic Magazine over my morning coffee, and spending breakfast pondering my coming day of figuring out if we can disentangle some stuff I'm working on from the increasingly complex and inscrutable Big Data ecosystem, and if it's even going to be possible to get management to approve it when the requests to stick RSS feeds into DBMSes are forever piling up, and generally thinking about my own mid-career situation, and, this comment really hit me like a punch in the gut. This quote from Built to Last is going to stick with me for a while: "... many people don’t even see the preference for complex languages for what it is: an attempt to protect one’s status by favoring tools that gate-keep rather than those that assist newcomers." I'm not leaving the industry any time soon. At least in the abstract, I do like what I do for a living, and believe that there are still some habitable spaces left in the field of informatics. But there's a part of me that is beginning to wonder if the best and most comprehensive literary (sort of) analogy for modern software engineering culture isn't the Orks from Warhammer 40,000. [1]:https://logicmag.io/care/built-to-last/ https://logicmag.io/care/built-to-last/

someguydave 6y ago
Alternatively, one could take the view that low-abstraction languages are designed to turn programmers into replaceable parts. This benefits the “low-quality for low-price” software vendor culture at the expense of programmer’s pay and status and also at the expense of the customer’s ownership and quality experience.
- mumblemumble 6y ago
  This attitude, both from the business side and from the developer side, has always struck me as an egregious misapprehension about where the value in software development lies. It's never about the code. It's about getting the job done, and the code is just a tool for getting it done. And getting the job done is ultimately about domain expertise, or design skill, or engineering acumen, or any number of more abstract skills. When developers get all protectionist about complex technical tooling instead of focusing on perfecting their ability to get the actual job done, that's a moral own goal. It doesn't challenge the idea that developer skills are inherently low-value and replaceable, it takes the idea as a given, and asks, "OK, since we're inherently low-value and replaceable, how can we artificially make it harder to replace us?" Me, I don't want to respond to the idea that I'm just a code monkey by trying to be the fanciest code monkey imaginable. I don't want to be a code monkey in the first place.
notacoward 6y ago
> "... many people don’t even see the preference for complex languages for what it is: an attempt to protect one’s status by favoring tools that gate-keep rather than those that assist newcomers." Don't forget the ones who jump onto a new language or framework so that by dint of experience they can be the gatekeepers for the next generation. This was staggeringly apparent with both Java and Go, each in their time.
- samatman 6y ago
  Let's conjugate the whole thing, shall we? I learn new languages for technical development and to stay curious and fresh. You learn new languages for job security. They want to gatekeep the next generation.
martinhath 6y ago
In case anyone is inclined to go read the article, let me (potentially) save you a click with the following excerpts from it: > the last thing many male computer scientists entering the field wanted was to make the field easier to enter or code easier to read, which might undermine their claims to professional and “scientific” expertise. > Take the C programming language: it was created in 1972, but as one of the current COBOL programmers I interviewed pointed out, nobody makes fun of it or calls it an “old dead language” > There’s an old joke among programmers: “If it was hard to write, it should be hard to read.” > it’s perhaps no wonder that a committee-designed language meant to be easier to learn and use And, of course, the quote from the comment to which I'm replying: > many people don’t even see the preference for complex languages for what it is: an attempt to protect one’s status by favoring tools that gate-keep rather than those that assist newcomers. If any of these quotes even resembles something you _might_ think about this field, maybe you'll get something out of reading the whole article. Personally, these quotes are so backwards to me that the author could just as well have written "Programmers can breathe under water" or "grass is the cornerstone of a well balanced diet".
codazoda 6y ago
This is interesting, and it may be partially true, but I'm not convinced it's malice, as that statement seems to indicate. Last year I wrote a small book called "Splash of Code", which teaches newcomers to code (in JavaScript) in a way that similar to the way I learned 30 years ago. I selected JavaScript because the barrier to entry is low, you just need a browser. Many programming ecosystems are daunting to setup these days but there are still some easy systems we can use to introduce newcomers without all the modern complexity. Browsers have come a very long way in the last 10 years and are a pretty amazing platform for development. Once you learn a little bit you can start to write amazing software for a cross-platform worldwide audience.

someguydave 6y ago

Alternatively, one could take the view that low-abstraction languages are designed to turn programmers into replaceable parts. This benefits the “low-quality for low-price” software vendor culture at the expense of programmer’s pay and status and also at the expense of the customer’s ownership and quality experience.

mumblemumble 6y ago
This attitude, both from the business side and from the developer side, has always struck me as an egregious misapprehension about where the value in software development lies. It's never about the code. It's about getting the job done, and the code is just a tool for getting it done. And getting the job done is ultimately about domain expertise, or design skill, or engineering acumen, or any number of more abstract skills. When developers get all protectionist about complex technical tooling instead of focusing on perfecting their ability to get the actual job done, that's a moral own goal. It doesn't challenge the idea that developer skills are inherently low-value and replaceable, it takes the idea as a given, and asks, "OK, since we're inherently low-value and replaceable, how can we artificially make it harder to replace us?" Me, I don't want to respond to the idea that I'm just a code monkey by trying to be the fanciest code monkey imaginable. I don't want to be a code monkey in the first place.

notacoward 6y ago

> "... many people don’t even see the preference for complex languages for what it is: an attempt to protect one’s status by favoring tools that gate-keep rather than those that assist newcomers." Don't forget the ones who jump onto a new language or framework so that by dint of experience they can be the gatekeepers for the next generation. This was staggeringly apparent with both Java and Go, each in their time.

samatman 6y ago
Let's conjugate the whole thing, shall we? I learn new languages for technical development and to stay curious and fresh. You learn new languages for job security. They want to gatekeep the next generation.

martinhath 6y ago

In case anyone is inclined to go read the article, let me (potentially) save you a click with the following excerpts from it: > the last thing many male computer scientists entering the field wanted was to make the field easier to enter or code easier to read, which might undermine their claims to professional and “scientific” expertise. > Take the C programming language: it was created in 1972, but as one of the current COBOL programmers I interviewed pointed out, nobody makes fun of it or calls it an “old dead language” > There’s an old joke among programmers: “If it was hard to write, it should be hard to read.” > it’s perhaps no wonder that a committee-designed language meant to be easier to learn and use And, of course, the quote from the comment to which I'm replying: > many people don’t even see the preference for complex languages for what it is: an attempt to protect one’s status by favoring tools that gate-keep rather than those that assist newcomers. If any of these quotes even resembles something you _might_ think about this field, maybe you'll get something out of reading the whole article. Personally, these quotes are so backwards to me that the author could just as well have written "Programmers can breathe under water" or "grass is the cornerstone of a well balanced diet".

codazoda 6y ago

This is interesting, and it may be partially true, but I'm not convinced it's malice, as that statement seems to indicate. Last year I wrote a small book called "Splash of Code", which teaches newcomers to code (in JavaScript) in a way that similar to the way I learned 30 years ago. I selected JavaScript because the barrier to entry is low, you just need a browser. Many programming ecosystems are daunting to setup these days but there are still some easy systems we can use to introduce newcomers without all the modern complexity. Browsers have come a very long way in the last 10 years and are a pretty amazing platform for development. Once you learn a little bit you can start to write amazing software for a cross-platform worldwide audience.