Comments on: Not Just Coding

By: Tea Leaves - Digital Schmigital

Tea Leaves - Digital Schmigital — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 23:42:58 +0000

[...] I was feeling pretty good about myself last week. I was able to read an infuriating article in the New York Times and because I am more mature and grounded these days, I was able to see past all of the little peeves in the piece and write an impassioned critique of the big picture problems. [...]

By: Guy Sherr

Guy Sherr — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 03:41:51 +0000

See, all you are really saying is that there is a thriving class of people who, if you permit, wear the cloak, and wave the wand of a Wizard, and don’t know any of the spells.

Oh, wait just a second. People like this have been around since, um, ah… Time Immemorial.

By: James Taylor

James Taylor — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 00:49:02 +0000

I posted a piece on this article too (http://www.edmblog.com/weblog/2007/01/does_everyone_e.html). I think part of the problem is that people good at programming do think differently (more logically, more precisely, more pedantically) about a problem than most business people do. Technology to bridge that gap exists and has existed for a while but many business people like being able to blame programmers. Getting everyone on the same side involves the communication skills you mention, and technology/approaches that engage technical and business skills in defining a solution
JT
http://www.edmblog.com

By: Mark Denovich

Mark Denovich — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 23:43:10 +0000

I disagree with the entirety of bithead’s last paragraph… that universities teach too little advanced math and are little more than job training.

We should be so lucky if universities taught the profession of software engineering. At best they teach the science of computing, at worst they fail to do both. I’ve interviewed/hired enough fresh talent from CMU to know how ill-prepared they are to produce software in a commercial setting. I believe the bit-centric approach is a large reason for the disconnect between some programmers and the non-programmers forced to work with them.

By: Ken Anderson

Ken Anderson — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 21:43:24 +0000

I agree wholeheartedly with what you had to say about Intentional Software and blogged about it earlier today. Good point about the ridiculous description of software engineers – you should write a letter to the editor. I have worked around software engineers for years, and the best ones can absolutely communicate with users and figure out what they want – if they couldn’t they would never get anything done. I also agree with your comments about “just programming”. I was more of an analyst/manager type most of my career but had always wanted to understand programming and computer science so I went back to school and got my Master’s in CS (just finished in December and still recuperating!) Seriously, it was a great experience and I didn’t know how much I didn’t know until I started down that path. My program was pretty rigorous – a fair amount of math and formal logic. I now find that it is 10 times easier to learn a new technology than before because I have a good foundation now. If undergraduate CS programs are really not providing this any more, than the software engineering profession is in trouble.

By: bithead

bithead — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 16:10:48 +0000

@vextorspace: True enough – I was being unfairly hard on admins and you’re right about IT still being a relatively young field.

By: vextorspace

vextorspace — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 15:19:44 +0000

I’d wouldn’t equate admins with engineers. Admins would equate to field technicians. And I think that given the length of time the field has been developing relative to say mechanical engineering, it is doing pretty well. I will agree that many universities could do much better. My university (Western Washington U) had some excellent teachers and the silliest curriculum I’ve heard of. I was a math major fortunately, but when I took computer classes I found out that I was the only student who had taken any logic classes. The curriculum didn’t teach logic to the programming students until they were seniors!

-Doug

By: bithead

bithead — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 14:52:02 +0000

The part about programmers not knowing what users want is by far the most delusional part of the article, perhaps followed closely by Bill Gates as a programmer-billionaire (programmer, indeed). All in all, this guy just exposed himself as ignorant about his topic, to say the very least.

However, the state of the software industry is indeed sad. What passes for ‘standards’ in IT is openly laughable in other true engineering fields. For any programmer to call themselves an engineer is a complete travesty and standing insult to real engineers. And the situation seems to be getting worse. Try to differentiate, for example, between the OS and an application to even a seasoned admin (well, windows admin anyway) and you get a blank stare as if speaking a lost tongue. Its as if the process of ‘dumbing down’ is slowly making headway into the ranks of programmers themselves.

Personally, I fault universities for this. A student can get a ‘computer science’ degree without any advanced math at all, or even advanced programming (like systems programming), or even any abstract knowledge of how computers work. It as if computer science degrees are now little more than job training.

By: Andy P

Andy P — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 12:56:30 +0000

Interesting. Either there’s a limit on the number of characters you can put in a comment, which is why my previous post got cut off halfway through; or more likely, it didn’t like the fact I had less-than (<) signs in my post. Which is kind of ironic, as it happened right in the middle of the bit where I was demonstrating WHY it’s important for a programmer to know whether a string is safe or not, and HOW Hungarian notation, properly used, makes that much easier.

Well… I’m not going to retype the rest of what I wrote, as I feel the point is proven – though as the rest of you may never get to actually READ my point, it’s only really proven to myself…

By: Andy P

Andy P — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 12:53:33 +0000

On Hungarian notation: it is much maligned and misunderstood. The kind of Hungarian notation you see in MFC or DirectX code looks like this, and is completely pointless:

DWORD dwValue;

… where dw merely repeats the fact that it is a DWORD. Simonyi intended his notation to be used as something like this:

float posNormValue;

…which indicates that it is a positive normalised value, and that’s information that is not contained merely in the type of the variable. Or, as another example:

string usUserInput;

…where us indicates that the string is unsafe, that is it might be user input to a webpage, and has not been security checked for HTML tags or script code, so should not be directly written back into another webpage. In this way, merely looking at the name of the variable tells you things you need to know, which almost never includes the type of the variable. Just looking at an unsafe string variable name, a programmer using this notation would never write something like this:

output