🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <DpJyGG.FKK@hkuxb.hku.hk>, h9290246@hkuxa.hku.hk (Zsoter
Andras) wrote:

>I am certainly not a very good C programmer (well, passable but I am mostly
>Assembly-ist and Forth-ist) but I cannot imagine how someone cannot
>learn how to use pointers or dynamic allocation.
>Are there really such people around who call themselves programmers?
>[I always thought that languages that hide these details [like how to
>allocate such and such on dynamic storage] were designed to be used
>by non-programmers (eg. someone wants to write something simple
>at home, does not want to spend countless number of hours on it
                ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>so learns something like BASIC where you don't have to worry about
>how your strings are stored).

AHHH! You see, there are lots of professional programmers (probably most)
who really love being able to play for 'countless hours' playing with
pointers and stuff. I'm a computer science graduate, and I used to love
programming for the sake of programming. Fortunately or unfortunately, I
outgrew that stage of my childhood.

The fact that programming was hard, and that management came to expect
that the software was always late, led to the situation that programmers
who loved to play with pointers and stuff could easily keep their
employers relatively tamed while they played with their pointers and
stuff. Of course the employers weren't really happy with this, but it was
the best they could get under the circumstances.  They would write
articles like "Why the Software is Always Late."

The employers were always looking for ways to cure the software backlog,
improve the productivity of their children (oops, I meant to say
programmers) etc.  They saw the promise of object oriented programming as
allowing massive reuse and productivity. Of course they don't REALLY
understand this stuff themselves, and they rely on the advice of their
technical staff to recommend what technologies and languages they should
use to obtain these miraculous results. The technical staff that they went
to was often the new bright people that they had brought in to do all this
pretty but hard to understand workstation user interface stuff, not the
bulk of their staff who most likely were grizzled but experienced COBOL
programmers (who really do consitute the silent majority of professional
programmers to this day). Of course the technical staff, who want after
all to play with programming, pick the technologies and tools which give
them the most toys to play with, after all, if the boss thinks he's
getting what he wants, what do we care, we're UNIX gurus, and the more
like kernel programming stuff looks like the better we like it cause we
can spend so much time having fun.

The problem is that the boss is getting more tired of not getting what he
wants and is starting to hear that other bosses maybe are getting what
they want by picking other technologies and tools, that don't require
programmers to spend all their time debugging memory allocation, dangling
pointers, etc. etc. etc.

In the meantime, I got tired a long time ago of debugging these problems
while effectively writing the same code over and over and over again to do
binary trees, or b-trees or sorts or whatever, the only difference being a
few little details of data types, memory allocation etc. etc. etc. I just
wanted to get the job done, which after all is what the bosses are looking
for.

That's why I'm a Smalltalk programmer! A proudly professional, computer
science degree carrying, well-paid, respected in the circles which I care
about,  Smalltalk Programmer. 

Now if Java, which is effectively a poorly implemented stripped down
version of Smalltalk with a C++ flavored syntax, and lacking a few
important features (like block closures), can do the job, good for it. I
have my doubts however, due to it being let out into the cold cruel world
without all of the support it needs. It also is riding the bubble of the
WEB environment, which while useful, looks like it is being overhyped as
the universal UI so that companies can use  Netscape as the '90s version
of a 3270 and get thin clients which they seem to believe will run on late
'80s hardware that they don't want to upgrade. The backlash to that idea
seems relatively inevitable, and besides when we're talking about
browser/web server programming we're really talking about JavaScript which
really isn't the same thing as Java at all.  I myself predict that Java
will just be another holding action between the technical staff and the
bosses.

-- 
Rick DeNatale
Still looking for a cool signature ;-)