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I'm not sure that using dismissive pejoratives ("cowboy programmers") is going to shed any useful light on the issue, especially not when the "cowboy" code repr
by Turing_Machine 6y ago
I'm not sure that using dismissive pejoratives ("cowboy programmers") is going to shed any useful light on the issue, especially not when the "cowboy" code represents the overwhelming majority of the commercially successful code that has been written in the last 50 years.
- pjmlp 6y agoA network effect caused by UNIX having been made available as free beer OS. When I write C, I write because I am forced to do so due to network effects, and qualitiy is certaintly not something that is part of C's features. And yes, cowboy programming fits the hacker culture that sprung off UNIX, the PHP and JavaScript of the 70's. So apply the same quality considerations to C, that you would measure PHP and JavaScript. Hey, apparently there has been tons of quality software written in PHP and JavaScript as well.
- Turing_Machine 6y ago> Hey, apparently there has been tons of quality software written in PHP and JavaScript as well. "Quality software" is a nebulous term. Make it "valuable software", or "software that people will actually pay you money to write". Apple (market cap: about $2 trillion) is Objective-C (slowly transitioning to Swift). Facebook (market cap: about $800 billion) was all PHP for a long time. The "network effects" you mention do not exist with server-based software. You can run any language on the server you want, as long as it spits out well-formed HTML to the client. In fact, these languages are popular because they are terse and powerful. And yes, like all powerful tools, they can kill or maim you in a hurry if you don't use care.