1 Feb
2023
1 Feb
'23
7:50 a.m.
COFF'd
I think general software engineering knowledge and
experience cannot be
'obsoleted' or made less relevant by better languages. If they help,
great, but you have to do the other part too. As languages advance and
get better at catching (certain kinds of) mistakes, I worry that
engineers are not putting enough time into observation and understanding
of how their programs actually work (or do not).
I think you nailed it there mentioning engineers in that one of the growing norms these
days is making software development more accessible to a diverse set of backgrounds. No
longer does a programming language have to just bridge the gap between, say, an expert
mathematician and a compute device.
Now there are languages to allow UX designers to declaratively define interfaces, for data
scientists to functionally define algorithms, and WYSIWYG editors for all sorts of things
that were traditionally handled by hammering out code. The concern of describing a
program through a standard language and the concern that language then describing the
operations of a specific device have been growing more and more decoupled as time goes on,
and that then puts a lot of the responsibility for "correctness" on those
creating all these various languages.
Whatever concern an engineer originally had to some matter of memory safety, efficiency,
concurrency, etc. is now being decided by some team working on the given language of the
week, sometimes to great results, other times to disastrous ones. On the flip side, the
person consuming the language or components then doesn't need to think about these
things, which could go either way. If they're always going to work in this paradigm
where they're offloading the concern of memory safety to their language architect of
choice, then perhaps they're not shorting themselves any. However, they're then
technically not seeing the big picture of what they're working on, which contributes
to the diverse quality of software we have today.
Long story short, most people don't know how their programs work because they
aren't really "their" programs so much as their assembly of a number of
off-the-shelf or slightly tweaked components following the norms of whatever school of
thought they may originate in (marketing, finance, graphic design, etc.). Sadly, this
decoupling likely isn't going away, and we're only bound to see the percentage
of "bad" software increase over time. That's the sort of change that over
time leads to people then changing their opinions of what "bad software" is.
Look at how many people gleefully accept the landscape of smart-device
"apps"....
- Matt G.