8 ms·

I can't source the video that I watched 5-6 years ago [0] but it made a point about the increasing numbers of programmers and how the majority had less than 5 y

I can't source the video that I watched 5-6 years ago [0] but it made a point about the increasing numbers of programmers and how the majority had less than 5 years of experience. It made sense in the context of IT/web continually having a larger involvement in our lives. [0] https://youtu.be/ecIWPzGEbFc?si=A4qBR2YdX-0CV2bM https://youtu.be/ecIWPzGEbFc?si=A4qBR2YdX-0CV2bM thanks to comment by wild_egg Can safely say after 20 years that there's maybe a bunch of information I don't need to know anymore that people <5 years experience probably would never need. OTOH experience is experience and knowing the constructs of things and their reason for being is always helpful. And that there's plenty less experienced programmers than me that can do many things I can't even imagine. TBF it's a pretty wide field, this Turing complete stuff.

wild_egg 3y ago
> I can't source the video that I watched 5-6 years ago but it made a point about the increasing numbers of programmers and how the majority had less than 5 years of experience I believe that was in this Bob Martin talk — The Future of Programming https://youtu.be/ecIWPzGEbFc?si=A4qBR2YdX-0CV2bM https://youtu.be/ecIWPzGEbFc?si=A4qBR2YdX-0CV2bM
- ricardo81 3y ago
  Yes! That's the one. Struggled to source it.
bee_rider 3y ago
It is a rapidly advancing field because it is young, so it makes sense that we’d accumulate a lot of ephemeral information. It feels like we’re still in the alchemist days. Eventually the chemists will come along. They’ll systemize our ad-hoc observations and jettison a ton of them. Until then… Neuton was an alchemist and he still made some pretty big contributions.
- dasil003 3y ago
  I agree with the first part, but not sure about the second. I believe software is much more engineering than science. The challenge is in organizing the bits. Most of the things learn, debate and design in software are more less arbitrary structures created to facilitate our own cognition. The hard science behind computers is much more cleanly abstracted away, compared to, for example, chemical engineering. For that reason, I don't believe software advances in the same way that natural sciences do. It's much more social in the sense that groups rally around different ideas and implementations, and wherever that energy goes also shapes the new ideas to bloom on top. Put another way: I think almost everything in software is arbitrary. Certainly some ideas are better than others, but on balance everything is a tradeoff, and I don't really expect for some powerful new discoveries or ideas to reshape the industry towards more structure and efficiency. I think it's more likely that AI replaces human programming entirely (although I dont think that's likely either).
  - osigurdson 3y ago
    A better analogy for software engineering is search. Given our current position and a desired change, we search for a solution in the fog. Analogies to other problem domains often fall short as search doesn’t feature as prominently.
  - saltcured 3y ago
    There are layers here. The purest theoretical CS is like mathematics in general. Also necessarily structured around cognition, but seemingly groping for something more fundamental or universal. I'd agree lots of software is like engineering in that it is further tilted towards the practitioners and marketplaces and their limitations. It has more focus on cost-effective repeatability and risk management. But, traditional engineering is more rooted in some physical reality. I.e. civil engineering has basis in physics and materials science, because those drive failure modes and design criteria. The more social aspects---say evacuation routes for fire safety---developed within an existing practice that already been formalized to manage risks of structural failure etc. But, lots of software is far detached from such a physical realm. It is more like legislation or contract law, or the arts. It's all about what people want to say or hear and display to each other. Massive influence from the cognitive and social context. It may be colored by technique and available materials or resources, but thanks to Moore's Law and friends, these practical limits have less and less influence on the shape of the outcome. Significant failure modes can be rooted in the vagaries of psychology, social sciences, or even political sciences. However, software diverges from law or arts when we attempt to scale it up. We want to reach speeds that cannot be supervised and quality controlled by a human operator, or volumes of support tasks that cannot be managed by an affordable human workforce, or impactful decision-making and effects that cannot be adjudicated by a higher court. You need something like engineering here to manage risk, but there is no physical basis for building codes etc. Not only the new software products, but even the elements of risk are social constructs. But I think the metaphors are broken as one pushes too hard "up the stack", into AI replacing knowledge workers and analysts. Our current best social systems completely depend on human adjudicators in hierarchical layers of oversight. Courts that can comprehend the big picture and resolve differences when our other abstract social activities go wrong. I am nervous about a future where tech behaviors become too complex for such oversight. Or worse, where naive practitioners think they can solve it with another layer of unproven tech. Instead of turtles all the way down, it becomes some faith-based electronic oracles all the way up?
- bombcar 3y ago
  The chemists are already here, the Knuths and such - it's just being ignored or isn't directly "relevant" yet. It's like building buildings without "building science" - which, surprisingly, we have actually been doing in many ways to the current date. There aren't really formal schools of "be a carpenter and build a house" - it's all very master/apprentice even if it is not formally so everywhere. And since things like "energy usage" of the building didn't really matter until recently, many buildings just kept being built the way they always have. Now things like "can we keep this building comfortable at much less energy usage with some additional up-front costs" are coming to the forefront, and how buildings are built is slowly changing. Compared to that, software is very in its infancy, because the real only bottom line items are "does it mostly work" and "did it not cost infinity dollars more than it made".
  - osigurdson 3y ago
    “Building Science” is normally called civil engineering.
    - bombcar 3y ago
      It's a term thrown around by various people to refer to "building houses with something slightly later than 1950s designs". When people hear "civil engineering" they think "skyscrapers, bridges, roads" - this is more like "if you wrap a house in insulation, it's insulated better, but that can also cause moisture capture, which destroys it" type engineering.
  - bluetomcat 3y ago
    It's not in its infancy. The fundamental problems regarding algorithms and data structures, OS theory and formal language theory are well understood and have articles on Wikipedia. We know Amdahl's law, the CAP theorem and the ABA problem. The problem is the explosive decentralised development of tools, languages and frameworks under a hyper-competitive neoliberal economic system. Someone invents a language to lock programmers to their platform. Another programmer creates a tool to transpile that language to their half-assed dialect of another language. This leads to a huge problem of entropy and inefficiencies at all levels.
fnordpiglet 3y ago
After 40 years of programming, 33 of that professionally, I can’t think of anything that was a waste to learn other than scrum. Syntax is something I never learned, I programmed with man pages and manuals open at all times. But every language and technology I learned taught me something useful about a fundamental problem in computing and systems. The way we address problems gets wrapped in different clothes but the problems themselves are the same. There’s no short cuts, and I know for a fact that as a programmer I’m orders of magnitude more capable than my 5 years in self. I’m excited to learn more and do new things more now than ever because they will unlock more of the craft to me. The only thing I worry about is my body and mind failing me at some point, not that I’ll run out of things to learn or be lapped by those younger than me.
- mp05 3y ago
  > I can’t think of anything that was a waste to learn other than scrum. Believe me, I have plenty of criticisms of that entire culture but it has a lot of good ideas. What in particular (besides the obvious overwrought ceremony) do you find not worthwhile?
  - dpritchett 3y ago
    The more skilled I become over the decades the more I prefer either Hickey’s hammock-driven development or a simple kanban setup.
    - mp05 3y ago
      > simple kanban setup That's probably the essence of the "good parts" that I referenced.
    - fnordpiglet 3y ago
      Yeah I think kanban is the right model for almost every development team. Teams embedded in a massive orchestrated project across many teams waterfall actually is pretty reasonable.
    - apsurd 3y ago

wild_egg 3y ago

> I can't source the video that I watched 5-6 years ago but it made a point about the increasing numbers of programmers and how the majority had less than 5 years of experience I believe that was in this Bob Martin talk — The Future of Programming https://youtu.be/ecIWPzGEbFc?si=A4qBR2YdX-0CV2bM https://youtu.be/ecIWPzGEbFc?si=A4qBR2YdX-0CV2bM

ricardo81 3y ago
Yes! That's the one. Struggled to source it.

bee_rider 3y ago

It is a rapidly advancing field because it is young, so it makes sense that we’d accumulate a lot of ephemeral information. It feels like we’re still in the alchemist days. Eventually the chemists will come along. They’ll systemize our ad-hoc observations and jettison a ton of them. Until then… Neuton was an alchemist and he still made some pretty big contributions.

dasil003 3y ago
I agree with the first part, but not sure about the second. I believe software is much more engineering than science. The challenge is in organizing the bits. Most of the things learn, debate and design in software are more less arbitrary structures created to facilitate our own cognition. The hard science behind computers is much more cleanly abstracted away, compared to, for example, chemical engineering. For that reason, I don't believe software advances in the same way that natural sciences do. It's much more social in the sense that groups rally around different ideas and implementations, and wherever that energy goes also shapes the new ideas to bloom on top. Put another way: I think almost everything in software is arbitrary. Certainly some ideas are better than others, but on balance everything is a tradeoff, and I don't really expect for some powerful new discoveries or ideas to reshape the industry towards more structure and efficiency. I think it's more likely that AI replaces human programming entirely (although I dont think that's likely either).
- osigurdson 3y ago
  A better analogy for software engineering is search. Given our current position and a desired change, we search for a solution in the fog. Analogies to other problem domains often fall short as search doesn’t feature as prominently.
- saltcured 3y ago
  There are layers here. The purest theoretical CS is like mathematics in general. Also necessarily structured around cognition, but seemingly groping for something more fundamental or universal. I'd agree lots of software is like engineering in that it is further tilted towards the practitioners and marketplaces and their limitations. It has more focus on cost-effective repeatability and risk management. But, traditional engineering is more rooted in some physical reality. I.e. civil engineering has basis in physics and materials science, because those drive failure modes and design criteria. The more social aspects---say evacuation routes for fire safety---developed within an existing practice that already been formalized to manage risks of structural failure etc. But, lots of software is far detached from such a physical realm. It is more like legislation or contract law, or the arts. It's all about what people want to say or hear and display to each other. Massive influence from the cognitive and social context. It may be colored by technique and available materials or resources, but thanks to Moore's Law and friends, these practical limits have less and less influence on the shape of the outcome. Significant failure modes can be rooted in the vagaries of psychology, social sciences, or even political sciences. However, software diverges from law or arts when we attempt to scale it up. We want to reach speeds that cannot be supervised and quality controlled by a human operator, or volumes of support tasks that cannot be managed by an affordable human workforce, or impactful decision-making and effects that cannot be adjudicated by a higher court. You need something like engineering here to manage risk, but there is no physical basis for building codes etc. Not only the new software products, but even the elements of risk are social constructs. But I think the metaphors are broken as one pushes too hard "up the stack", into AI replacing knowledge workers and analysts. Our current best social systems completely depend on human adjudicators in hierarchical layers of oversight. Courts that can comprehend the big picture and resolve differences when our other abstract social activities go wrong. I am nervous about a future where tech behaviors become too complex for such oversight. Or worse, where naive practitioners think they can solve it with another layer of unproven tech. Instead of turtles all the way down, it becomes some faith-based electronic oracles all the way up?
bombcar 3y ago
The chemists are already here, the Knuths and such - it's just being ignored or isn't directly "relevant" yet. It's like building buildings without "building science" - which, surprisingly, we have actually been doing in many ways to the current date. There aren't really formal schools of "be a carpenter and build a house" - it's all very master/apprentice even if it is not formally so everywhere. And since things like "energy usage" of the building didn't really matter until recently, many buildings just kept being built the way they always have. Now things like "can we keep this building comfortable at much less energy usage with some additional up-front costs" are coming to the forefront, and how buildings are built is slowly changing. Compared to that, software is very in its infancy, because the real only bottom line items are "does it mostly work" and "did it not cost infinity dollars more than it made".
- osigurdson 3y ago
  “Building Science” is normally called civil engineering.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    It's a term thrown around by various people to refer to "building houses with something slightly later than 1950s designs". When people hear "civil engineering" they think "skyscrapers, bridges, roads" - this is more like "if you wrap a house in insulation, it's insulated better, but that can also cause moisture capture, which destroys it" type engineering.
- bluetomcat 3y ago
  It's not in its infancy. The fundamental problems regarding algorithms and data structures, OS theory and formal language theory are well understood and have articles on Wikipedia. We know Amdahl's law, the CAP theorem and the ABA problem. The problem is the explosive decentralised development of tools, languages and frameworks under a hyper-competitive neoliberal economic system. Someone invents a language to lock programmers to their platform. Another programmer creates a tool to transpile that language to their half-assed dialect of another language. This leads to a huge problem of entropy and inefficiencies at all levels.

fnordpiglet 3y ago

After 40 years of programming, 33 of that professionally, I can’t think of anything that was a waste to learn other than scrum. Syntax is something I never learned, I programmed with man pages and manuals open at all times. But every language and technology I learned taught me something useful about a fundamental problem in computing and systems. The way we address problems gets wrapped in different clothes but the problems themselves are the same. There’s no short cuts, and I know for a fact that as a programmer I’m orders of magnitude more capable than my 5 years in self. I’m excited to learn more and do new things more now than ever because they will unlock more of the craft to me. The only thing I worry about is my body and mind failing me at some point, not that I’ll run out of things to learn or be lapped by those younger than me.

mp05 3y ago
> I can’t think of anything that was a waste to learn other than scrum. Believe me, I have plenty of criticisms of that entire culture but it has a lot of good ideas. What in particular (besides the obvious overwrought ceremony) do you find not worthwhile?
- dpritchett 3y ago
  The more skilled I become over the decades the more I prefer either Hickey’s hammock-driven development or a simple kanban setup.
  - mp05 3y ago
    > simple kanban setup That's probably the essence of the "good parts" that I referenced.
  - fnordpiglet 3y ago
    Yeah I think kanban is the right model for almost every development team. Teams embedded in a massive orchestrated project across many teams waterfall actually is pretty reasonable.
  - apsurd 3y ago