Wednesday, March 29, 2017

Coding Today vs. the 80s

Andrew Wulf:

Unlike back then when we had little to work with, today we have an embarrassment of riches available for free. The problem is now there is too much information, much of it is of variable quality, often out of date, wrong, or poorly described. First you have to figure out what to ask for, often your Google searches are very indirect as describing your problem in a way that includes the right words is often hit or miss. Then you get 500,000 results; now you have to filter through what you find, trying to answer your question or find an algorithm or idea, and then the fun begins of evaluation. Is this what I need? Is this up to date? Does this make any sense to me, can I understand it? Is it possible to integrate into what I already have? Is this library trustworthy, will it be supported?

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Going into work and knowing virtually everything I would be doing that day would be a fun adventure in programming is something I no longer see. Some days at work I get almost no coding done due to all the other stuff (despite coding being what I am supposed to do given that we have way too few people) and I do really miss that “primitive” time.

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