Why Does Programming Suck?

[Edvard]

Not quite sure I agree with everything this guy wrote but it's a very interesting read nonetheless.

I’m a software developer and since the very beginning I’ve always had mixed feelings about programming. On one hand, you can accomplish so much with it. On the other, it’s a completely frustrating tool to use––not only is the experience horrible, the worst part is feeling that much more could be accomplished if programming didn’t suck.
...
And so, misusing a machine built to do math, that was prematurely optimized, built without simplicity in mind, inspired by the textile industry, backed by no underlying fundamental laws, with no way for us to understand it, that could generate more complexity than we could possibly embrace and armed with zero experience and a completely backwards approach towards problem-solving, we started the business of dealing with accidental complexity in the name of shipping features––known today as programming…

…and a shit-ton of wonderful things popped from the other end. Damn it.

https://medium.com/@...ng-suck-6b253ebfc607

from CodeProject News

[Renegade]

Two of the best things that ever happened to programming are code completion, and the nifty code context help that Microsoft abandoned after Visual Studio 2005. In VS2005 you could simply sit down knowing nearly nothing, start typing, and be productive with a little effort and no external resources needed.

[TaoPhoenix]

Two of the best things that ever happened to programming are code completion, and the nifty code context help that Microsoft abandoned after Visual Studio 2005. In VS2005 you could simply sit down knowing nearly nothing, start typing, and be productive with a little effort and no external resources needed.

-Renegade (December 20, 2015, 03:26 PM)

But ... but ... Renny, ... that was something useful !   It worked! Microsoft can't have that!  They need to be sure they first promise PlaysForSure is marketed, then they make their own Zune that squirts, then kill that off too! And now I can't play Ludum Dare games because XP is too old!

They can't stand to make a product that might be useful and create sales!

Kill it! Kill it now!

 

[MilesAhead]

I am still trying to figure out why Pascal had nested procedure/function definitions.  It was pretty weird to define a function only visible inside the current function/procedure, that you are only going to call one time, in most cases, during the run of the outer procedure/function.  Some kind of Lambda expression would probably have made more sense.

Afa general craziness I am resisting interfacing to computers via speech.  Once they start talking back it is only a matter of time before they talk back with attitude.  Just like WTA/ATP tennis players I don't want to be seen arguing with a machine. 

[MilesAhead]

Two of the best things that ever happened to programming are code completion, and the nifty code context help that Microsoft abandoned after Visual Studio 2005. In VS2005 you could simply sit down knowing nearly nothing, start typing, and be productive with a little effort and no external resources needed.

-Renegade (December 20, 2015, 03:26 PM)

I hate how VS finds all these references to stuff I am not working with.  Like I am doing C# so it gives me references to COBOL or Fortran or Java or some other stuff off topic.  I agree the old way was great for faking it.  Much more fun to stumble through than study in advance.

[Edvard]

I am still trying to figure out why Pascal had nested procedure/function definitions.  It was pretty weird to define a function only visible inside the current function/procedure, that you are only going to call one time, in most cases, during the run of the outer procedure/function.  Some kind of Lambda expression would probably have made more sense.
...

-MilesAhead (December 20, 2015, 05:23 PM)

Not a problem here, though I consider myself a Pascal tinkerer.  Pascal isn't the only culprit either; Lisp, Javascript, Actionscript, Wolfram, D, MATLAB... even the 'Big Four' scripting languages (Python, Ruby, PHP, Perl) more or less. Yes, things like this can be abused, like nesting to ridiculous levels (which is almost never done unless you're masochistic), or the Funarg problem^w, which isn't the end of the world.  There are advantages of nesting as well, like avoiding global variables or namespace pollution.  See Nested_function^w, and this post: Re: Nesting functions- Why?. 
Either way, nested functions in an object-oriented language aren't really needed, and most modern dialects of Pascal (Delphi, Freepascal, GNUPascal) have object capabilities built-in, so the point is a little more moot now. 

[Tuxman]

Whether programming sucks completely depends on the language and chosen runtime.

[TaoPhoenix]

I'm gonna go with "that could generate more complexity than we could possibly embrace and armed with zero experience..."

Because normally to get that level of explosion of complexity required entire college degrees. (Remember the about six sets of standard high school courses before it "got tough in college"?)

Now we get fantastically complicated discussions every year in Nany! And people making Ludum Dare games by inventing frameworks called TurtleBrains!

 

[MilesAhead]

To me it's not the programming that sucks but the debugging.  Not necessarily stepping through code but just figuring out what is broken.  My brain feels like a sponge with the fluid violently squeezed out after an hour or so.  But it is tough to let go until you have an idea how to fix it. 

[TaoPhoenix]

To me it's not the programming that sucks but the debugging.  Not necessarily stepping through code but just figuring out what is broken.  My brain feels like a sponge with the fluid violently squeezed out after an hour or so.  But it is tough to let go until you have an idea how to fix it. 

-MilesAhead (December 24, 2015, 04:26 PM)

To me it's all like interconnected Dante circles of hell.

Say the first is total despair like the first time you see the Rosetta stone but don't know yourself how to speak *any* of the three old languages!



Then the archaeologist comes to you and says "But the first one is easy!"


So he does the first one for you. Then you start trying to debug the Ancient Egyptian third one and the glyph for "peace in the Kingdom" (maybe some kind of bird with a branch) gets smudged and comes out "Kill them all!"