publicduende wrote:fschmidt wrote:Let me clarify this. What publicduende is saying is just crap. What has happened to development is that development tools have turned to shit, so development has become the process of using shit. This has made real development harder, not easier. I am developing real products everyday, so I know. One project is my dating app. This needs to work on Android and iOS (Apple). Both of these development environments are absolute crap. Even developing simple things on them is painful, but doing anything creative is a nightmare. The same applies to other areas of development.
One other point is that this isn't just a corporate problem. All programmers, including open-source programmers, are now producing shit. They simply reflect modern culture and they have absolutely no sense of good design.
All this will show up in the real world with increasingly unreliable software. Expect an increasing number of failures and disasters caused by malfunctioning software.
That's it fschmidt, you've exhausted my respect pool. You're clearly a shadow of your former self, an ex-competent programmer who traded his rational mind and passion for keeping abreast with technology developments with the usual mix of religious paranoias and racist banter. And let's add complete sexual starvation, for completeness. You're no more no less than a slightly more technically competent version of Cornfed.
If you bothered to peek into the "now" you would realise that development tools are now far more sophisticated than they were when you stopped learning about software development, about 20 years ago. So sophisticated that even a monkey could grab a PC and craft a multi-platform mobile app without much effort. Software engineering being more democratic and open to more people inevitably means a drop in code efficiency, or elegance, or correctness. In short: quality.
Your poor arse is probably stuck with C and eMacs and Fortran 77 if it can proclaim that a "dating app" on Android and iOS is an insurmountable task that you can't be bothered handling and you have to sit down in despair and complain about. Sour grapes anyone? You prefer glorifying your past and the tools of yore rather than learning about the new ones and get productive with them. As a fellow developer, you probably know how knowledge staleness is detrimental to our profession. I would add that even worse is the arrogance to judge the new tools before even trying them!
Ever heard of Xamarin/Monotouch to cross-develop your dating app (God knows the world needs another one) on Android and iOS? Whoops, sorry. To use that you would need to learn C#/.NET, and you haven't even tried to master Java because you are so happy to cloak your intellectual laziness with the blanket statement that all which happens today is shit, and there's no point learning it. Sour grapes anyone (part II)? If you focused less on building virtual synagogues and fantasising about Filipino poon and more on updating your skills, you would realise that tools are there, and easier than ever to use an do useful stuff with.
Which brings me back to my initial point, that the crux of the matter isn't the quality of the tools, which are always made by an elite of good to great devvies, but the quality of the average person who uses them to deliver software that has less and less innovation, creativity and productivity value, and by extension monetary value. To the point that every Indian or Thai freelancer can create a product that ticks all the boxes without having to know too much about relational databases, concurrent programming or Agile.
It's quite sad, because you were one of the few people left on HA whose good judgment I could trust, if anything because you do sound like you had a good career behind you. Oh well, some wines age well, some others turn straight into vinegar.
I confess: I penned that response on my train back home, after a bro-date with my best friend involving two fine bottles of wine, lobster and salmon ceviche. Sweet intoxication causes people to do that, you know. Anyway, perhaps I shouldn't have come across that heavy. 