Skip to main content

Why is software development still so hard?

Total experience to date: thirty-one years.

Started with UCSD Pascal and Z80 assembler. Currently into Haskell and Prolog and anything functional. Putting all that to one side, as we all know that the language you use to implement a solution is by and large irrelevant, no really, you know it is… I find myself lately finding it harder and harder to want to embark on any sort of personal project.

A mere twenty years ago I was brimming with enthusiasm for it but these days I just find myself wanting to watch cat videos on YouTube.

Initially...

I was spell-bound (and to some extent still am) at the age of eleven that you could “express an idea” in the language that the computer could understand, be it BASIC or whatever was available and then sometime later have that idea executing. Of course, the idea has to be information processing centric; that’s what the infernal machines do so well.

Eventually...

I realised that you could express solutions using any number of techniques ranging from things like Forth, OO with C++ or functional like Haskell or OCaml. And of course there is LISP, which basically does all of the above and from which languages continue to steal their latest batch of “new” features.

Ultimately...

One realises that none of it matters. What matters is the logical process of teasing out “the solution” from “the requirements”. So why oh why are there new languages appearing more and more? Yes, we are headed into the future heavily into parallelism, concurrency and fault tolerance and new languages promise to deliver those things. But until that happens, what about the poor clients who just want working solutions?
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

PHP and Lisp: multiple-value-bind (MVB)

This is another article in my attempts to find new ways of looking at PHP and making it less of a chore to type in all that code. As much as I love PHP I hate wasting keystrokes. More typing is more errors is more grief. Being an off and on user of Lisp, although not as much as I used to, one of the things that I always liked in Lisp was the ability to be able to return multiple values from a function at once using (values) and then marry that with (multiple-value-bind) to create convenient named bindings for whatever you were about to do. I recently found myself wanting to return a couple of values from a helper function and I just didn't want to go to the trouble of having to type all those character required to create an array with keys for the two values and then I remembered MVB and a little light went on in my head! If somebody else has already done this then I apologise up front but it was new to me and I haven't seen it anywhere else so this could be a first! ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Angular.JS ... absolutely awesome BUT...

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh! Sort the documentation soon please!  More soon, I really do like it though. :)
Post a Comment
Read more

You are not here not reading this post...

Some days it's hard to really appreciate what a software developer is or does. And I have "been one" for over a quarter of a century and I still don't know what I do. I can translate management speak into meaningful English and then understand what "they need" as opposed to "what they think they need." I can translate "business requirements" into an internal mental model composed of data stores and processes and subsequently translate that model into "working code" in any language you care to mention to produce a "deliverable". But... I still don't truly understand what happened along the way. I think it is more to do with the underlying nature of the universe rather than the mechanical processes. Codds rules and normalisation for instance, one can learn, understand and apply these rules to great effect but what does "de-normalisation to 2NF" mean to a bunch of atoms and molecules which don't...
Post a Comment
Read more