So it seems I’m not the only one who has this perspective on the software development industry and it is even more rare that he also calls it “progress” just like I do. Although I use the term sarcastically and he says we’re not really making progress, which is the same thing.
So as proof that there are other people who also see the constant churn of the same stuff over and over as a giant waste of time, I give you this guy, I guess his name is uncle bob.
The smackdown:
http://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2016/07/27/TheChurn.html
The follow up:
http://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2016/09/01/TheLurn.html
Unlike me however, he offers some good examples of ways to improve the lot.
I’m starting to think that we’ve reached peak-smart. Basically there’s some bar at which most programmers basically top out at, which is what makes them go redo everything over again in a similar but different shiny sort of way. And I think they do that, because that’s it. They’ve topped out. Getting into machine learning is HARD. Whereas learning yet another silly language syntax to regurgitate the same software is easy and comforting.
Obviously there are some above-the-bar guys because machine learning exists, but I expect these are the same guys who are working on the self driving cars and the voice recognition stuff.
So it makes sense that as problems get harder, fewer and fewer people are able to solve them, and the software developers who can’t, just fall back and find a new javascript library to draw neato webpages in.
Speaking of, I’m really out of date with the web world thank The Great CPU and I’ve been doing back end block device stuff which I love. So I was surprised to find out about AMP.
I think it stands for “we’ve finally made web rendering so bad it’s unusable, so we’re hacking in yet another layer of crap to try and make it perform tolerably well.”
Go ahead everybody, go learn your next javascript AMP compliant library. Have a good time.