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We live in such a primitive era of programming that you shouldn't compare it to printed books, but to scrubbed reusable parchment. We don't write good enough co
by Retra 12y ago
We live in such a primitive era of programming that you shouldn't compare it to printed books, but to scrubbed reusable parchment. We don't write good enough code to last. We don't have robust enough machines to keep it in service.
It's too soon to adopt a philosophical position on what it means to write code. We don't do it well enough to claim to be experts at it.
- derefr 12y agoOne might rebut that with an analogy to the William Gibson quote: quality programming is already here—it's just not very evenly distributed. We write code that lasts all the time. We call it "embedded code." Satellites, nuclear power plants, microwaves, pacemakers, cars—they all run code that lasts. Most code doesn't last, because most code doesn't need to last. It's not part of the profit-function of the business producing the code, so something else gets optimized for: ease and speed of production, say. We can code well when there's any sort of incentive to that outweighs other incentives. It's not even a matter of individual programmer skill, only of systems engineering: having checks and cross-checks, QA reviews and burn-in testing, tolerances, etc. Those things can happen "in the small" at the level of how individual lines of code get written, too. Maybe "we" don't know how to do that. But that's ignorance, not inability. We've never tried.
- Retra 12y agoThat's quality programming by today's standards. And you say it lasts, but there probably isn't a single piece of code that has lasted a full century. That's barely more than a single lifetime. Comparing microwave code to the code I'm talking about is like comparing medieval accounting records to Hamlet. One is far more impressive than the other.