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I can still remember
how happy I was the
first time my friends
and I managed to
program a Pong alike
game on our Texas
Instrument calculators.
It took us weeks
before figuring out the
algorithm and months
before being able to
render something decent,
almost playable,
with zeros and ones on
the screen.
By Bertrand Besnard
At that time, we had to understand
low level languages that young folks
can not even name today. We had no
debug tool and the only way to understand
why our application crashed
was to try to reproduce the case… on
paper.
Later on, I studied in the only university
in France that was teaching both
Cobol and Java. Their philosophy was
that however important Java was becoming
(it was the beginning of the
two thousands), it was still important
to understand the main concepts of
IT. They also forced their students to
learn the language theory but that
was just for the fun. In my last year
there, only 6 years after programming
my first pong game, we had to produce
an OpenGL 3D first person
shooter game. It was nothing that we
would ever use later on in our lives,
but understanding the key concepts
of 3D and being able to use complex
math was more important than filling
up a CV. The whole project took us a
couple of weeks.
With today’s technologies, you can
build up a playable level of a single
game with the latest lighting and texturing
technologies in just a couple of
hours, thanks to the power, the diversity
and the flexibility of the available
tools.
The same concept applies to pretty
much everything that requires coding.
We went from writing eighty characters
per line with no objects, to defining
a variable name and a method call
represented by a box.
Nowadays, most people learn IT the
“fast way” that is, with tools that enable
auto-completion, give coding
advices and have integrated GUI
builders based on drags and drops.
Creating an application has never
been that easy. A couple of clicks here
and there, a Google search or two and
voila!
But is time sparing worth sacrificing
knowledge? What is the big picture on
a long term perspective? What will
happen to hardcore experts?
If programming is that easy, debugging
becomes harder. With all that
generated code and programming
conventions not always being respected,
if someone else than the
original developer has to read and fix
the code, things can become quite
hard and costly. How many of us had
to fix a code which contained variable
names like txtBox1, txtBox2…, or
even worse, ex girlfriends’ names?
How many hours are spent yearly debugging
simple mathematics operations
because precedence rules are
Programming:
from too hard
to too easy
not respected? Those are just the
easy ones, the most common and
harder coding mistakes include, but
are not limited to: global variables accessed
and modified randomly, methods
of tens of lines, exceptions being
caught but discarded…
There are tons of resources out there
for developers to learn from and many
acronyms to discover or to deeper investigate
like TDD or BDD (test driven
deployment), which is an often mentioned
key to high quality softwares,
SOLID (Single responsibility, Openclosed,
Liskov substitution, Interface
segregation and Dependency inversion)
which describes the “first five
principles” of object-oriented programming
and design and so many more.
Thanks to the internet, knowledge is
only a click away, motivation however,
has to be found somewhere else.
On a long term perspective, without
proper training, programmers won’t
learn much more about the fundamentals
and might become somewhat
limited. Their errors’ becoming someone
else’s to fix and their lack of
knowledge becoming time consuming
for others.
Most companies understand that
principle and have found an easy solution,
encouraging through different
means, their employees to develop
their skills through seminars, conferences,
classes and basically everything
that can potentially make one
become better. This tendency has
started in most countries that understand
that programming can be a career
path and not only another step on
a stair that leads to management.
Unfortunately, training individuals
can be costly and not everyone can
afford it. That is where dedication and
thrive to learn kick in, buying a book
and reading it is affordable by most.
The other problem implied is that as
time goes by, experts will become
rarer and busier, leaving new programmers
to themselves, in charge of their
own fixing, eventually leading to chaos
and destruction of the world as we
know it.
Already in 1995, Niklaus Wirth stated
that “software is getting slower more
rapidly than hardware becomes faster”.
A variant by David May is even
more explicit by doing a corollary with
Gordon Moore’s law: “Software efficiency
halves every 18 months, compensating
Moore’s law”.
This proves that knowledge is the key
to a good programmer and IT, as every
single science, always evolves and so
should the people working with it.
Bertrand Besnard is a
French Software Engineer
who migrated to Oslo.
He has since then been
working on some of the
biggest Norwegian
projects as environment
administrator such as
NAV and Autosys. He is
currently employed by
Steria. He is interested
in process analysis and
human interactions and
travels the world to
discover different
cultures, and food.
All kind of food.
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