6 ms·

> But there is something becoming more familiar to me as I go back to the wild west of C programming (where very little happens behind the scenes I might point

by hgs3 3y ago

> But there is something becoming more familiar to me as I go back to the wild west of C programming (where very little happens behind the scenes I might point out - no garbage collection here!). I share this sentiment. I pursued computer science because of the romanticized notation of tracking every bit and byte and talking directly to the hardware. I know I'm not alone given the popularity of old-school fantasy consoles and consumer microcontrollers, like Arduino. It saddens me to say but if I were starting over today I might not enter the field professionally. Most modern development is gluing components together and wrangling packages. It's so far removed from the machine and the distance is only growing.

Aperocky 3y ago
imo a self contained component are the same as bit and byte. To me, the draw of programming being that it is both a logical puzzle and a constructive endeavor, brings me a lot of joy to be able to see my stuff work. Whether that's manipulating memory bytes or using a package someone else wrote to do something I want, there's little difference in terms of satisfaction.
xupybd 3y ago
The most unfulfilling days for me are when my dependencies seem to fall over. I have a project that only builds in one version of Visual Studio on my machine. I know it's bad, I know I should get to the bottom of it before it becomes a real problem, but it's soul crushing work.
- nasmorn 3y ago
  Interestingly as frustrating as this sometimes is I tend to become obsessed with not letting the computer win. So it feels much less like work than some kind of mythical quest with a very shallow plot.
- bombolo 3y ago
  > The most unfulfilling days for me are when my dependencies seem to fall over. I tend to pick only stuff that is packaged in a distribution, if at all possible. They usually do a decent job at gatekeeping the countless libraries created by people that have no idea on how to make a library.
worrycue 3y ago
> I pursued computer science because of the romanticized notation of tracking every bit and byte and talking directly to the hardware. Isn’t computer science mostly math? Figure people in computer science would be more at home with the abstract stuff like Haskell where you can’t even see the underlying hardware and your programs are expressed as a bunch of (declarative) functions where sequential execution of instructions is a very small part of your programs.
- bcrosby95 3y ago
  Um, no. At most schools, the only place you might touch something as esoteric as Haskell is in a programming languages class.
  - bombolo 3y ago
    At my university haskell was required from the start and used in several courses.
- hdidhxifj 3y ago
  it used to, outside of the us. now everywhere is java 101.
vlovich123 3y ago
> Most modern development is gluing components together and wrangling packages. It's so far removed from the machine and the distance is only growing. That’s actually what I love most about things today. Hard components I might want to use probably already have a ready to made library I can start with. Time from inception to prototype to production is so short that it really removes a lot of the tedium. I wish it could be even shorter but a lot of the time I’m writing code is because there isn’t something that meets my specific requirements. I wish AI could fill that gap but it feels like we’re an extremely long way away from that. In other words, the part I enjoy most is the high level problem solving or even coming up with what new requirements might be to solve a problem. The mechanical aspect of realizing the vision can be fun but it can also be quite frustrating / repetitively tedious.
- yurishimo 3y ago
  Same for me as well. I don't want to talk to hardware because the ideas I have in my head are so removed from that problem space. I want to build tools to help normal people do stuff or create automation. I fully understand and appreciate that to make all of that work, the low level stuff also needs to be fast and functional, but I'm not the person to make that optimization. I really enjoy being a web developer despite most of us being the new butt of the so many programmer-centric jokes.
  - vlovich123 3y ago
    To be clear, I want to be able to program hardware too. I’m talking about end to end system design. Building databases and operating systems that work drastically different from today. It’s really hard (and insanely expensive) for one person to realize a vision of a wide ranging new way of doing things. NPM is fine but too many people add what should be 20 straightforward copy-pasted lines as an external dependency (lodash being an extreme example).
  - randcraw 3y ago
    But does the cut-and-paste model of coding scale to 30+ years of developing code? I don't know of any problem domain that's so deep and compelling that I could stay engrossed in solving high-level tasks for that long. Either I have to change domains (as I have maybe 4 times in my 37 years), or vary my routine by occasionally diving into the nitty gritty of low-level code and O/S services. Being a _user_ of code doesn't appeal to me at all. I work at a big pharma and know lots of biologists and especially chemists who are proficient programmers. They use code (more than craft it), but they're impassioned by the science itself. Coding is merely a tool to them, the means to a more compelling end. I don't share their perspective, nor do I want to compete in that space, so I get my jollies by learning the info extraction process and diving into the cool, underserved, often complicated parts, like image quantification and pattern enhancement/recognition in raw and dirty data. That often requires some math and some low level bit twiddling, in code and in signals. I can't imagine cutting and pasting my way through that world, nor would I ever want to.
ryandrake 3y ago
> It saddens me to say but if I were starting over today I might not enter the field professionally. Most modern development is gluing components together and wrangling packages. It's so far removed from the machine and the distance is only growing. I don't know what's sadder: That this kind of programming is becoming a lost art, or that nobody seems to care. I got my first job out of college partially because in the interview when I was asked to implement some algorithm XYZ in "any language I choose" I went with X86 assembly and nailed it. Well-performing code was highly valued at that company. Knowing how to ensure your code fit into the cache and your memory accesses stayed on one page were considered critical programming skills. Now, outside of a few rare embedded or game engine jobs, nobody seems to give a shit about any of this. It's just "glue these APIs and libraries together and ship the resulting crap as soon as it barely runs." Nobody cares about the size of the resulting executable. Nobody cares about or even knows their code's runtime heap footprint. Nobody cares or even measures how many cache misses they're encountering. I feel like an old grandpa even typing this stuff out. The worst part is that end users are the ones that end up losing. It's their system resources that are ultimately being wasted.
- nyarlathotep_ 3y ago
  Absolutely correct. Not to mention most of my time as a "Developer" is spent managing busted CI/CD pipelines, container crap, whatever cloud-yaml things, fighting broken dependencies/build issues, cargo-culting test suites. I program way more on weekends/nights on toy/tutorial stuff than I do at work, ironically.
- visarga 3y ago
  I have known programmers who don't know how a float is represented in memory. I just can't comprehend how they can gloss over basics like that.
  - hugatest 3y ago
    And why is that necessary knowledge? Don't get me wrong, once you go down to embedded you sometimes do need to know and sometimes it just improves your understanding (and it's kinda cool anyway), but if you do high-level work, perhaps web work, all you need to know is the abstract interface of floats as a data type. What operations you can do, what is guaranteed about the result of those operations (loss of precision etc). In other words, why would a Haskell programmer need to know the IEEE FP standard?
the_only_law 3y ago
My entry to the field was a bit odd. I’ve been a hobbyist since I was a kid, but I never wanted to enter the files professionally, at least not the way I did. I knew I wouldn’t like it. But my immediate post high school plans fell through I spent a year working crappy jobs until I eventually figured “you know I bet I could get a job as a software developer if I tried”. It surely would do a lot better for paying the bills. Nowadays I mostly tell people: I didn’t get into programming for the money, but that’s sure as hell why I entered the industry. Of course, it looks like my little stint is over, but I don’t know what to do now. On paper it’s the only thing I’m qualified for that’s not unskilled labor.
- digging 3y ago
  Why is your stint over now?
  - the_only_law 3y ago
    I stopped caring about industry trends and hype years ago. I was able to get away with it by coasting on what I did know for years, but otherwise I’ve been very narrow (not really true, but in the context of the job market it is). Funny enough this was somewhat on purpose as I was planning to leave anyway, but I thought I had a couple more years than I did. On top of that, the jobs I still see seem want want increasingly obscure specializations I don’t have. I haven’t had a job for over half a year, and there doesn’t seem to be any sign of that changing. The recruiters dried up a while back and I’ve only had sparse interviews, which have been some of the most antagonistic I’ve ever had. It’s not any particular “type” of company either. Both the tech profit center companies and the tech cost center companies don’t want me.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
wing-_-nuts 3y ago
'System' languages like c / c++ / rust are a natural fit for hobby programming because you're writing something to run on your machine, to scratch your particular itch. All the better if that language is able to run on a little microcontroller and move an actuator or what have you. I say that to contrast with 'application' languages like java, nodejs, or whatever. I'm not saying hobbiest stuff doesn't get written in those but you're a lot less likely to see an OSS spring or react app on someone's github than you're likely to see some cool little command line program that does one small thing.
randcraw 3y ago
I've noticed the same transition away from wrenching your own low-level code to making high-level calls to routines written by others. Maybe that's partly because my employer (a big pharma) tends to attract either IT types or bench scientists, but few who are pure computist CS types inclined to get their fingernails dirty with bit twiddling. After 17 years working in biomedical R&D, each time a low-level CS topic happens to arise, I'm surprised again by how much it resonates with me and attracts my rapt attention. Alas, because pharmas seldom hire CS grads, there seem to be few with whom I can share my glee. Or maybe today's CS grads speak a different language too.

by hgs3 3y ago

Aperocky 3y ago

imo a self contained component are the same as bit and byte. To me, the draw of programming being that it is both a logical puzzle and a constructive endeavor, brings me a lot of joy to be able to see my stuff work. Whether that's manipulating memory bytes or using a package someone else wrote to do something I want, there's little difference in terms of satisfaction.

xupybd 3y ago

The most unfulfilling days for me are when my dependencies seem to fall over. I have a project that only builds in one version of Visual Studio on my machine. I know it's bad, I know I should get to the bottom of it before it becomes a real problem, but it's soul crushing work.

nasmorn 3y ago
Interestingly as frustrating as this sometimes is I tend to become obsessed with not letting the computer win. So it feels much less like work than some kind of mythical quest with a very shallow plot.
bombolo 3y ago
> The most unfulfilling days for me are when my dependencies seem to fall over. I tend to pick only stuff that is packaged in a distribution, if at all possible. They usually do a decent job at gatekeeping the countless libraries created by people that have no idea on how to make a library.

worrycue 3y ago

> I pursued computer science because of the romanticized notation of tracking every bit and byte and talking directly to the hardware. Isn’t computer science mostly math? Figure people in computer science would be more at home with the abstract stuff like Haskell where you can’t even see the underlying hardware and your programs are expressed as a bunch of (declarative) functions where sequential execution of instructions is a very small part of your programs.

bcrosby95 3y ago
Um, no. At most schools, the only place you might touch something as esoteric as Haskell is in a programming languages class.
- bombolo 3y ago
  At my university haskell was required from the start and used in several courses.
hdidhxifj 3y ago
it used to, outside of the us. now everywhere is java 101.

vlovich123 3y ago

> Most modern development is gluing components together and wrangling packages. It's so far removed from the machine and the distance is only growing. That’s actually what I love most about things today. Hard components I might want to use probably already have a ready to made library I can start with. Time from inception to prototype to production is so short that it really removes a lot of the tedium. I wish it could be even shorter but a lot of the time I’m writing code is because there isn’t something that meets my specific requirements. I wish AI could fill that gap but it feels like we’re an extremely long way away from that. In other words, the part I enjoy most is the high level problem solving or even coming up with what new requirements might be to solve a problem. The mechanical aspect of realizing the vision can be fun but it can also be quite frustrating / repetitively tedious.

yurishimo 3y ago
Same for me as well. I don't want to talk to hardware because the ideas I have in my head are so removed from that problem space. I want to build tools to help normal people do stuff or create automation. I fully understand and appreciate that to make all of that work, the low level stuff also needs to be fast and functional, but I'm not the person to make that optimization. I really enjoy being a web developer despite most of us being the new butt of the so many programmer-centric jokes.
- vlovich123 3y ago
  To be clear, I want to be able to program hardware too. I’m talking about end to end system design. Building databases and operating systems that work drastically different from today. It’s really hard (and insanely expensive) for one person to realize a vision of a wide ranging new way of doing things. NPM is fine but too many people add what should be 20 straightforward copy-pasted lines as an external dependency (lodash being an extreme example).
- randcraw 3y ago
  But does the cut-and-paste model of coding scale to 30+ years of developing code? I don't know of any problem domain that's so deep and compelling that I could stay engrossed in solving high-level tasks for that long. Either I have to change domains (as I have maybe 4 times in my 37 years), or vary my routine by occasionally diving into the nitty gritty of low-level code and O/S services. Being a _user_ of code doesn't appeal to me at all. I work at a big pharma and know lots of biologists and especially chemists who are proficient programmers. They use code (more than craft it), but they're impassioned by the science itself. Coding is merely a tool to them, the means to a more compelling end. I don't share their perspective, nor do I want to compete in that space, so I get my jollies by learning the info extraction process and diving into the cool, underserved, often complicated parts, like image quantification and pattern enhancement/recognition in raw and dirty data. That often requires some math and some low level bit twiddling, in code and in signals. I can't imagine cutting and pasting my way through that world, nor would I ever want to.

ryandrake 3y ago

> It saddens me to say but if I were starting over today I might not enter the field professionally. Most modern development is gluing components together and wrangling packages. It's so far removed from the machine and the distance is only growing. I don't know what's sadder: That this kind of programming is becoming a lost art, or that nobody seems to care. I got my first job out of college partially because in the interview when I was asked to implement some algorithm XYZ in "any language I choose" I went with X86 assembly and nailed it. Well-performing code was highly valued at that company. Knowing how to ensure your code fit into the cache and your memory accesses stayed on one page were considered critical programming skills. Now, outside of a few rare embedded or game engine jobs, nobody seems to give a shit about any of this. It's just "glue these APIs and libraries together and ship the resulting crap as soon as it barely runs." Nobody cares about the size of the resulting executable. Nobody cares about or even knows their code's runtime heap footprint. Nobody cares or even measures how many cache misses they're encountering. I feel like an old grandpa even typing this stuff out. The worst part is that end users are the ones that end up losing. It's their system resources that are ultimately being wasted.

nyarlathotep_ 3y ago
Absolutely correct. Not to mention most of my time as a "Developer" is spent managing busted CI/CD pipelines, container crap, whatever cloud-yaml things, fighting broken dependencies/build issues, cargo-culting test suites. I program way more on weekends/nights on toy/tutorial stuff than I do at work, ironically.
visarga 3y ago
I have known programmers who don't know how a float is represented in memory. I just can't comprehend how they can gloss over basics like that.
- hugatest 3y ago
  And why is that necessary knowledge? Don't get me wrong, once you go down to embedded you sometimes do need to know and sometimes it just improves your understanding (and it's kinda cool anyway), but if you do high-level work, perhaps web work, all you need to know is the abstract interface of floats as a data type. What operations you can do, what is guaranteed about the result of those operations (loss of precision etc). In other words, why would a Haskell programmer need to know the IEEE FP standard?

the_only_law 3y ago

My entry to the field was a bit odd. I’ve been a hobbyist since I was a kid, but I never wanted to enter the files professionally, at least not the way I did. I knew I wouldn’t like it. But my immediate post high school plans fell through I spent a year working crappy jobs until I eventually figured “you know I bet I could get a job as a software developer if I tried”. It surely would do a lot better for paying the bills. Nowadays I mostly tell people: I didn’t get into programming for the money, but that’s sure as hell why I entered the industry. Of course, it looks like my little stint is over, but I don’t know what to do now. On paper it’s the only thing I’m qualified for that’s not unskilled labor.

digging 3y ago
Why is your stint over now?
- the_only_law 3y ago
  I stopped caring about industry trends and hype years ago. I was able to get away with it by coasting on what I did know for years, but otherwise I’ve been very narrow (not really true, but in the context of the job market it is). Funny enough this was somewhat on purpose as I was planning to leave anyway, but I thought I had a couple more years than I did. On top of that, the jobs I still see seem want want increasingly obscure specializations I don’t have. I haven’t had a job for over half a year, and there doesn’t seem to be any sign of that changing. The recruiters dried up a while back and I’ve only had sparse interviews, which have been some of the most antagonistic I’ve ever had. It’s not any particular “type” of company either. Both the tech profit center companies and the tech cost center companies don’t want me.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

wing-_-nuts 3y ago

'System' languages like c / c++ / rust are a natural fit for hobby programming because you're writing something to run on your machine, to scratch your particular itch. All the better if that language is able to run on a little microcontroller and move an actuator or what have you. I say that to contrast with 'application' languages like java, nodejs, or whatever. I'm not saying hobbiest stuff doesn't get written in those but you're a lot less likely to see an OSS spring or react app on someone's github than you're likely to see some cool little command line program that does one small thing.

randcraw 3y ago

I've noticed the same transition away from wrenching your own low-level code to making high-level calls to routines written by others. Maybe that's partly because my employer (a big pharma) tends to attract either IT types or bench scientists, but few who are pure computist CS types inclined to get their fingernails dirty with bit twiddling. After 17 years working in biomedical R&D, each time a low-level CS topic happens to arise, I'm surprised again by how much it resonates with me and attracts my rapt attention. Alas, because pharmas seldom hire CS grads, there seem to be few with whom I can share my glee. Or maybe today's CS grads speak a different language too.