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> 99.5% of programming consists of gluing together calls to library functions. First, my own career was not as pathologically skewed as this. I did mostly glue
by loup-vaillant 5y ago
> 99.5% of programming consists of gluing together calls to library functions.
First, my own career was not as pathologically skewed as this. I did mostly glued together calls to library functions, but I have done a fair share of algorithmic work, such as parsing and image processing. (And cryptography, though that was mostly done on my free time so I’m not sure that counts). Maybe web dev is like that, but I didn’t do web dev.
Second, this is a huge problem. This means that very few of us actually know how to program. And the problem feeds on itself: if one doesn’t know how to program, it will be easier, more tempting, to take on some significant dependency instead of just implementing the part you need, while tailoring it to your use case. Eventually knowledge is lost.
- Const-me 5y ago> Eventually knowledge is lost There're thousands teams all over the world working on various projects which require people to program. At the very least, someone needs to write and maintain these libraries. Also there're interesting domains like game development, CAD/CAM/CAE, HPC, embedded. Knowledge is transferred within such teams.
- TchoBeer 5y agoWhy would it be better for tens of tthousands of people to rewrite the same bit of code over and over again, ? This amount of code reuse sounds excellent to me.
- loup-vaillant 5y agoBecause then they would learn to write that code. Because it’s not the same exact bit of code, but just a part, or a different version depending on the exact context. Because taking on a dependency is just as costly as rewriting the thing, if not more… Code reuse is good, but we should not forget that its costs are not nil.