Good Programmers Do Like to Code; Its All the Other Crap They Dont Like

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Wednesday, March 28, 2007

the.codist{} – Good Programmers Do Like to Code; Its All the Other Crap They Dont Like

Amen.

Posted in Computers | 1 Comment »

One Comment

  1. Stephen Uitti says:
    2007/03/28 at 10:59 am

    In the original rant, it was “programmers don’t like to code, they like to solve problems”. I expected the article to be a stupid troll. But instead, he writes as if he believes it.

    One argument is this: “If programmers liked to code, we’d all be writing in machine language to this day. You can write that stuff all day and get precious little of the real problem solved.” True – programmers produce nearly the same number of lines of code per unit time for any language that they’re proficient at. So, a language that does more per line of code is better, right? So, why aren’t we all programming in APL?

    But machine language’s “get little done per line of code” is an incorrect perception. Back in the day, when i needed to write in z80 assembly, it took tons of code to get an integer divide. So, that’s not productive, right? In C, you just tell it to divide. But, the thing is, there was no divide available. And once it was, calling the divide routine is just a few lines, and quick to write at that, as it is basically mechanical. It’s quicker to write by alot, compared to writing that original divide routine. But the divide routine was much more fun to write.

    The fact is, I’d still be writing highly efficient machine language if it could work on basically any machine. And even there, the issue isn’t that i want to solve bigger problems. The issue is that if i become too specialized – tied to a machine architecture of many, it could become too hard to get my next job. Where would i be now, if for example, i was the world’s best machine language programmer for Dec’s Alpha?

    Industry doesn’t hire programmers to write machine language for the same reason. What if they’d spent 50 million dollars on assembly language for the Alpha? Could they sue Intel or Compaq for killing it? Hardly. Much better to have bloatware in Java with 10% of the performance.

    But there are embedded processors. They aren’t the z80 anymore. But there does seem to be industry standard chips now. That could be alot of fun.

    Lastly, not all programmers think that all the other tasks aren’t so much fun. Of late, i’ve recognized that i’m often in the mood to write documentation. It’s all about art. Imagine that.