What is computer programming? Is it art, engineering craft, or science? I think it's all of it to a certain extent. You can do it for fun and pleasure and for money and fame. If you miss love and care, it will frustrate you. Otherwise, it will please you well.
yes, but that is true of all jobs, the workers do the work and others often profit from it more than they do of course most of those jobs going overseas to India now, so there is that
yep, India is being sent all desktop jobs, coding, autocad, oracle setups, SPI datasheets. Neither Trump or Biden will do sweet fk all to stem the tide of the loss of STEM jobs to India.
Yes, you can be the God of your machine! What a great feeling! To be almighty is one of the reasons why humans invented God. Especially the Christian God, which is more man-alike than other Abrahamic Gods.
I am finishing my second degree. My first was in criminal justice and as you may have guessed, it's completely useless. I am now finishing my IT degree with an emphasis on front-end development.
If you mean coding why should they? They're the **** jobs of programming and will soon be automated themselves anyway. Much better we learn how to code the coding machines. How do you keep robots from taking over? Build better robots to take over from them. It's like Trump telling all the coal miners he was going to "save" all the most awful dangerous and debilitating jobs that have ever existed while Hillary said she would retrain them for better jobs. Turned out they were all automated out of existence anyway. Politics cannot stop progress.
I read that neither Linus or Steve could understand Assembly language, but that Bill dreamt in Assembly language and that was as a break from Machine language. (90's joke)
States like CA are putting a damper on foreign outsourcing of IT jobs, by making it illegal for other countries to access customer data for their States Citizens so now the companies have to hire Americans to do those jobs for CA now that doesn't really help CA as those people could work in other States, but it does throw a wrench in it as the fines are high for businesses violating the law mega corps can probably work around it, smaller ones might be too scared too "California’s new data privacy law brings U.S. closer to GDPR" https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/14/californias-new-data-privacy-law-brings-u-s-closer-to-gdpr/ "Companies around the world are scrambling to properly protect their customers’ personal information (PI). However, new regulations have actually shifted the definition of the term, making everything more complicated. With the California Consumer Privacy "
There is no art, engineering, craft or science, all things are the same. This is one of the very few things that the Medieval world understood and we do not. Read the preface to Isaac Asimov's View From A Height. (read the whole book too, it's dated in spots but still good)
reading more on the CCPA, not sure if it would prevent foreign outsourcing or not, says there may be exceptions for service providers, this was added to protect them from getting a violation for credit card payment processing and such, not sure how far that would go and if outsourcing would be considered a service provider
After almost 5 decades in IT I can say that it was a rewarding career to have and I enjoyed the challenges. All good design is a mixture of art, craft and science. It does not matter whether it is the back end coding, the database structure or the UI there is room to include both elements. A technically perfect program, database or UI can be ugly while bug riddled programs, slow databases and clunky UIs can all be artistic. The key is to COMBINE all of the necessary elements in a way that makes it appear effortless and pleasing to not only the end user but to everyone involved in operating and supporting the system too. TBH there is not much out there that meets the criteria of art, craft and science IMO but as someone who can look at a UI and know immediately whether the code behind is either good or bad it is unfortunate that there are no effective standards and/or awards for combining art, craft and science. Yes, there are some attempts out there but the focus is rarely on the art, craft or science but rather on the "flavor of the month" fad that becomes a bandwagon until the next one comes along. Perhaps the reason for our failure is the pressure to deliver without having the time to design all of the elements for optimal performance in all aspects. One would need to be an IT Polymath to be able to do this and there really aren't that many of them out there.
also foreign outsourcing has hindered development as used to be a group of developers owned a project and had pride in it and kept improving on it now the corps have to come up with a plan and ask developers to make the change, often developers that are not familiar with the app, ect.... because once that paid for work is done, they are not gonna be looking for improvements, as they are no longer getting paid it makes for cheaper coding, but quality also suffers
I definitely disagree that anything ridden with bugs that crawls along so slow it locks up the UI and also has a crap UI is artistic, but I suppose beauty is in the eye of the beholder. 50 years is a long time - that puts you back to 1970 at least, before anyone even called it IT, much less just Tech, am I right? I spent a year in ChE grad school writing a C++ program based on the Borland Turbo Vision App Framework / API. I might have spent around 1200 hours that year learning to code C++. I made no progress for weeks on end. I had to code a serial interface to a Hewlett-Packard gas Chromatograph and could absolutely not get them to talk. C3PO wasn't around then and to my knowledge hasn't shown up today yet either. I was browsing through a section of programming related books at a bookstore called Hawley-Cooke Booksellers around Feb 95 when I saw a book titled, C Programmer's Guide to Serial Communications I started flipping through it and saw several concepts that I'd become a bit familiar with and a whole lot of Joe Campbell going into the weeds with designing abstraction layers so that code could be mutually developed for Z80 platforms and 8088 platforms with their different UART chipsets. Ugh, skipping the Z80 stuff I calmed down and started to try and see if there was something in this book to tell me what the fk I was missing to get my PC to talk to my HPGC. Maybe after 10 to 15 minutes I spotted something fkng crazy. I was so pissed off, I had to send a bit masked word to the damn chip to turn it on. Why! Why in the world does the damn chip have an on/off bit? I bought the book, coded the UART on mask, and voila! I could finally start coding the HP command sequences in earnest. I'm not sure I'd have finished my thesis if I'd not found this book. My out of department EMCS advisor had pretty much blown me off once already. If I'd known then what I know now, I'd have called HP for help and there's a real good chance they'd've directed me to Joe's Book.
Absolutely right! One of the worst websites I ever had the misfortune to encounter that the owner considered to be a masterpiece of design and style. Just loading the UI took forever and dumped all kinds of avoidable errors. Yup, it was the 70's and the hardware and software of that time dated back to the 50's and 60's. I started programming in machine code on a 24k RAM mainframe that occupied an entire floor of the building. I am not in the least surprised given that the 3 basic essentials when it comes to any new technology are the technology itself, which was C++ in your case, effective training courses or tutorials and access to expertise. You can scrape by with only two out of the three but with only one of them you will always struggle. There were all kinds of nasty gotcha's to be encountered before there were decent standards and manuals. Predating the internet meant that we had to rely upon whatever was available and our own ingenuity. I figured out the basic concepts of object oriented programing and building in meaningful error reporting into my own code long before it was ever standardized. It made my life easier and my code more stable in what was known as the era of spaghetti code.
24k filling up the floor, man, mindblowing stuff. Toroid core memory, legend! I had a class on object oriented programming, I think maybe it was in Pascal. The young grad student teaching the class didn't know what coding with objects meant and the textbook we had didn't explain it worth a crap either. I bought Stroustrup's book and another book on IO Streams that helped quite a bit. Stroustrup took a bit of time to even begin to understand, but once it started to click, I learned some really amazing tricks and concepts. Borland Turbo Pascal 5.5 was the best. Its debugging features were excellent. Its auto-initialization of variables spoiled me and it took me three months in the Borland C++ world before I finally disciplined myself enough to code all the required inits. It's debugging was nowhere close to Pascal's. I finally just went with pragma controlled text file outputs.
That's why the customer gets a working product that leaves many wishes for enhancements. And we're happily waiting for his new order. This makes our cash register ring again.
Was it one of the DEC machines? PDP-11, I suppose. C++ (C with classes) was a big hype in the late 2000s, but then many coders recognized that plain old C did a better job. Especially on embedded systems with memory constraints and low CPU power.
I always delivered the easy enhancements as a "bonus" to the customer which gave them more incentive to be satisfied and recommend me to new customers which leads to growth.
Speaking from my own personal perspective I never considered either C or C++ to be ready for "prime time" programming but that criticism could apply to virtually all of the languages around at that time. By then I was doing way more design work than coding so it was more a matter of helping others debugging their code. I never understood why other programmers could never read their own code backwards towards the source of their errors. It is just reverse logic but somehow they could not look at the error and realize that it contained everything they needed to know to find where it occurred.
Its an abstract creative process, fun to do as a hobby, miserable thing to do as a job. Once I left the industry I spat and never looked back. I sometimes still hack around and code for the dopamine releases. I never heard someone doing it for fame, I find this idea strange
