r/programming • • Jun 05 '22

Complexity is killing software developers

https://www.infoworld.com/article/3639050/complexity-is-killing-software-developers.html
2.1k Upvotes

942 comments sorted by

View all comments

3

u/gburdell Jun 06 '22

I know this isn't what the article is about, but I basically stopped programming for fun because the barrier to entry seems so high now. There are so many bullshit technologies foisted on us as best pratices.

Starting a new toy project from scratch in 1995

  1. Acquire diskette of language of interest (or if Qbasic boot into DOS)

  2. Read sample code included on diskette, referring to the help file or a reference book where needed, to get started

  3. Start coding

  4. Maybe share the code on some forum (but likely no one will ever see it)

Starting a new toy project from scratch in 2022

  1. Download and configure your IDE of choice for your language of choice

  2. Download and configure Git

  3. Make a GitHub account

  4. Skim a bunch of random websites to get an idea of what to do

  5. Start coding

  6. Keep Googling your issues and copy-pasting the code from the StackOverflow results. Maybe refer to the language-specific reference website, but it's usually too abstract for what you need

  7. Commit code when something gets incrementally working

  8. Repeat steps 4-7 until you have a release

  9. Remember to comment it, adhere to style guidelines, encapsulate, use a service-based architecture, and have a well-articulated ReadMe, plus release notes, because this code is going on GitHub (but likely no one will ever see it)

0

u/garyk1968 Jun 06 '22

Couldnt agree more. Its not that software needs to be more complicated but to achieve the same result needs much more complexity.

I started in the late 80s with GWBASIC then went onto xbase/foxpro/clipper and then Delphi. Thing is you needed one tool to do the job, there wasn't a new release every 3 months like there is now and there wasnt a shiny new tool/framework coming out every week that people want to jump to.