Re: [TUHS] more about Brian... [ really GC vs malloc/free languages ]

Larry McVoy writes: I look at this from a different perspective. The world needs a lot of programmers these days. It takes a lot of work to have internet-connected refrigerators push advertising, to make washers and dryers sing about their work, to have Bixby piss off Samsung phone users, to ensure that IoT devices are insecure, and of course to leak personally identifying information on government web sites. This is critical work and there just aren't enough "good" programmers to go around. I view people that programming for Android, making web pages unusable, and so on, as if they're using domain-specific languages. The difference is that while many of us grew up loving domain-specific "little languages" these languages are huge. While I'm not an expert here, I'm sure that being an expert in the Android, IOS, Java, or WWW ecosystems involves more "learning" than many of us had to do when we learned our craft. A big problem with our profession is that we have no agreed on terminology to distinguish among practitioners. A story told to me by a co-worker in the '80s illustrates this well. Ken had gone home for Christmas with his family. One of his uncles took him aside and asked something like "Hey, you're a computer guy. Can you help me with this .COM and .BAT stuff?" Ken replied "Don't have a clue what you're talking about." When Ken related this story to me, he said "The funny thing about it was that we both walked away thinking that the other person didn't know anything about computers." I think some of what we're debating here is whether or not "programmers" need to understand fundamentals. Many of us think that they do, but we're not the ones working on a subscription model for starting your car. I replaced my deck last summer. Had to do a lot of contractor interviewing. I didn't choose one who said "I can do it" and showed me photos of work he had done. I chose one who said "I can do it" and looked around and said "You know, won't be able to tell until I get the old one removed but I think that there some things that need fixing underneath." Another example, because I'm also a hardware engineer. Many digital circuit designers think that digital is an isolated domain. There was a time a few decades ago when an analog engineer couldn't get a job. But then there was an awakening when folks realized that everything was analog at its core and all of a sudden "full stack hardware engineers" were writing their own tickets. Sure, many digital designers said "Why do I need to know this stuff? Nobody uses Rubylith anymore and the DRC (design rule checker) software takes care of stuff for me. Analog designers bail those people out when things don't work. To me, a big problem with what I'll call domain-specific programmers is that they get involved in standards and specifications and aren't trained in how to abstract. So standards are produced that result in enlarged, more complex domains. One of the best examples is CSS, a standard that is too complex to be documented. I have no clue as to how many CSS properties exist anymore. It's not cleanly designed, and of course with the addition of each new property the interaction matrix grows exponentially. And the increasing number of mode-switching properties is growing the number of interaction matrices. There are literally thousands of things a CSS "programmer" needs to know, yet people still ask question like "How do I vertically center something" because it's still hard to do. Even the worst programming language is orders of magnitude simpler than CSS. But hey, CSS isn't "programming" so of course it's better. Bottom line to me is that people with serious expertise are always going to be needed. Someone has to design the hardware, someone has to make the tools used to design the hardware, someone has to implement programming languages and operating systems and all that. But that's a different domain than what the majority of the world wants today. Jon