Son, it ain't rocket science!

[Wayward son]

Well Dad, evidently it is!

The ability of programers and gamers has pretty much surpassed the abilities (and computer memory) of my early days.

Heck, they took a man to the moon and brought him back with less computing power than what is found in a cheap digital watch.

Slide rulers and long form have given way to CAD designs and Gigs of data.

This game uses more memory than all Apollo flights together, man I feel old.

Time for a Martini and the hot tub...

[Rocket Surgeon]

I feel like I should make a post here for some reason...

[HarvesteR]

I think the ability of programmers in general has actually decayed... I mean, now we have much more advanced tools that allow us to think on a higher level, and produce more interesting things, but 30 years ago, programmers had to really use their brains to produce just about anything.

It's sad, but I think languages like ActionScript, Python and Javascript are producing a generation of programmers who don't really understand how software works.

Cheers

[softweir]

I agree that on average, programmers are less capable than they used to be. The new development tools have made things so easy for them that people whe once would never have had a chance to produce large projects can now do so and make a living at it.

BUT: I suspect that there are just as many genius programmers as ever - people with real talent and the determination to use it. They tend to be the people who are creating the new tools that everybody else uses. Unfortunately, their visible impact is diluted by the herd of less capable coders.

[Asgar]

I think the ability of programmers in general has actually decayed... I mean, now we have much more advanced tools that allow us to think on a higher level, and produce more interesting things, but 30 years ago, programmers had to really use their brains to produce just about anything.

I think a big problem is the abundance of software we have today. You don't need to hack your own software today – everything is available.

It's sad, but I think languages like ActionScript, Python and Javascript are producing a generation of programmers who don't really understand how software works.

I don't really think languages are to blame, especially not a great language like Python. Languages are just tools. A good programmer is one who knows what tool to use for what task. That includes knowing more than one tool, so someone who just fiddles around a bit with actionscript is certainly no programmer.

I agree that on average, programmers are less capable than they used to be. The new development tools have made things so easy for them that people whe once would never have had a chance to produce large projects can now do so and make a living at it.

And thanks god for better development tools. People often complain about modern software, but I maintain it just got better and better. Anyone who disagrees should try data entry with original 1970 software and hardware.

[McLuv]

I think the ability of programmers in general has actually decayed... I mean, now we have much more advanced tools that allow us to think on a higher level, and produce more interesting things, but 30 years ago, programmers had to really use their brains to produce just about anything.

It's sad, but I think languages like ActionScript, Python and Javascript are producing a generation of programmers who don't really understand how software works.

Cheers

hmmm, I both agree and disagree on this point. While the older generation of programmers had a much closer view on the computing and what their software actually did, the fact that most programmers work on levels above that allows them to accomplish most higher order tasks faster.

The book Godel, Escher, Bach goes a great deal in discussing this and similar heirarchies. Of course it's sad when programmers learn to accept the limitations of their systems, when if they had learned to program on lower levels as well, they could allow for the syntax needed to accomplish what they really need in a clean, optimized fashion.

[Xenoc]

I'm not sure programmers are worse, as much as they've just been able to get lazy with resources; the rampant improvement in memory and processing potential in computing have meant that higher level programming languages are used for almost everything. That results in a lack of optimisation.

The example I always use in this is the game Elite; a massive sprawling universe with real physics and a consistent and functioning economy, all in 16k of memory (i.e.16,000 Bytes, as opposed to the 2,000,000,000 Bytes many games can easily eat up these days).

[Asgar]

I'm not sure programmers are worse, as much as they've just been able to get lazy with resources; the rampant improvement in memory and processing potential in computing have meant that higher level programming languages are used for almost everything. That results in a lack of optimisation.

That's very true. With a billion instructions per second, you often don't notice performance flaws right away. O(n), O(n^3), the one is instantaneous, the other takes half a second.

On the other hand, many languages today have blazingly fast and highly optimized standard libraries, often fail-fast and lazy. So if you have good code and libraries, you have no lack of optimisation. If you're not doing number-crushing, you can often do better with a high-level language than in C.

[foamyesque]

I'm not sure programmers are worse, as much as they've just been able to get lazy with resources; the rampant improvement in memory and processing potential in computing have meant that higher level programming languages are used for almost everything. That results in a lack of optimisation.

Thing is, compilers are now, and have been for some time, better at optimising code than any but the very best programmers anyways. In some languages it's true you take performance hits-- Java, I'm looking at you-- but human brainshare is much better spent on figuring out what you want computers to do than sorting out the precise order of your Assembly/binary level jump tables.

[Entroper]

I don't think programmers are getting worse. I think the fact that the tools are getting better is lowering the bar, so people who would not have been smart/talented enough to be programmers 20, 30, 40 years ago, can be programmers today. There are still plenty of smart and talented programmers today, but the average might be weighed down.

[cray]

BUT: I suspect that there are just as many genius programmers as ever - people with real talent and the determination to use it. They tend to be the people who are creating the new tools that everybody else uses. Unfortunately, their visible impact is diluted by the herd of less capable coders.

I saw an interesting New York Times blog about piano virtuosos becoming increasingly common:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/14/arts/music/yuja-wang-and-kirill-gerstein-lead-a-new-piano-generation.html?_r=3&pagewanted=1

Among the observations were the new generation of students:

'A reason that pianists are getting technically stronger is that as in sports, teachers and students are just learning to practice the craft better, becoming better conditioned and getting better results. But as Mr. Kalish suggests, another reason is that pianists are rising to the challenges of new music that pushes boundaries.

'When the 1996 movie “Shine,†about the mentally ill pianist David Helfgott, raised curiosity about Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto, Mr. Lowenthal was asked by reporters whether this piece was as formidably difficult as the movie had suggested. He said that he had two answers: “One was that this piece truly is terribly hard. Two was that all my 16-year-old students were playing it.â€

'Some months ago I was speaking about the issue with the pianist Gilbert Kalish, who teaches at Stony Brook University on Long Island. He said that when Gyorgy Ligeti’s études, which explore new realms of texture, sound and technique at the piano, gained attention in the 1990s, they were considered nearly impossible. Only experts like the French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard could play them, it was thought. But now, thanks to greater familiarity, Mr. Kalish said, “my students at Stony Brook play them quite comfortably.â€

'But audiences and critics tolerated a lot of playing that would be considered sloppy today. Listen to 1920s and ’30s recordings of the pianist Alfred Cortot, immensely respected in his day. He would probably not be admitted to Juilliard now. Despite the refinement and élan in his playing, his recording of Chopin’s 24 études from the early 1930s is, by today’s standards, littered with clinkers.'

I'm wondering if this applies to programmers.

In addition to more powerful computers and simplified high-level programming languages, programmers - like pianists - have several more advantages of those of the 1960s - 1980s:

1) Knowledge that's it has been done. 90% of groundbreaking science and engineering is proving something is possible. After you successfully run the Manhattan Project once, everyone else is going to have proof that, yes, you can make nukes. The rest is just repeating the engineering. The Manhattan Project was an epic undertaking for the US; 10 years later, a frosty little country of a few million people felt it was quite reasonable to make a fully automatic atomic cannon. Today, we've solved a lot of software problems - like bipedal robots - which stalled computer programmers for decades.

2) Those solutions are readily available. There are algorithms and programming techniques available with a brief internet search that weren't even conceived in the 1960s. Hell, I just learned more about sorting algorithms with a 15-minute wikipedia binge last week than I learned in a year of early 1990s high school programming (and I'm 20 years out of practice with programming).

3) Thorough dissemination of successes and availability of information sets, programmers - like pianists - have higher goals they know are achievable.

There are far more programmers now than in the 1960s. You can have a dozen Java-stunted drones for every virtuoso and still have more genius programmers than in the 1960s. Today, it's a hobby for a small group of folks to produce a 64-bit GUI, web-capable OS written in assembly that fits on a single 3.5' floppy.

[jgjiscool]

I have produced a few small programs that work with repeat (I) {...} every sixtieth of a second and it doesn't compute this fast enough to do anything else. It just crashes. It basically equates to: read something from a map structure, add 1 to a variable, do it eight times. It cancels out ALL of the drawing events and sends back 'Not Responding'.

I even made a debug file which told me what it was doing and when. Here's an extract:

#####.## LINES_init started - if you do not see this before the next LINES_init, the program has crashed: '-- End of Log --'

#####.## LINES_draw started execution

#####.## LINES_draw executed successfully

#####.## LINES_step started execution

#####.## LINES_step started execution

#####.## LINES_step started execution

#####.## LINES_step started execution

#####.## LINES_step started execution

#####.## LINES_step started execution

And so on. Took out the data reading and it was fine.