Do We Even Need Programmers Any More?

Grok Headline matches for Do We Even Need Programmers Any More?

Hiring Programmers: A Programmers a
Programmer, right? by David K. Every

Hiring Programmers: A Programmers a
Programmer, right? by David K. Every 11/12/2003 01:23 PM
Human Resources people, Managers, and general users, have no idea how simple or complex computer programming is. They think that they can just throw programmers around from one task to another, then some HR people select computer programmers based on language (Syntax), and not what really matters (skills and abilities). This would be like hiring an employee based on what school they attended and not what subjects they studied! This article will give some non-programmers a better idea of what Programming is about, and what they should be looking for when hiring programmers.

For The Programmers...

For The Programmers... 04/22/2004 12:01 PM
I've just come across a piece of code with the following comment (paraphase): "This function returns 0 when is true, and 1 when is false. Please be aware when testing as a boolean."
AARGHHH!!!!

MS Programmers: So Like Us

MS Programmers: So Like Us 02/16/2004 02:46 PM
It turns out Microsoft's Windows programmers have to deal with the same crap as the rest of the world's programmers. Kuro5hin.org has put up a overview of the comments in the recently leaked Microsoft source code. (Some of the comments are not rated G. If you use a text-to-speech reader, cover your kids' ears. )

In the struggle to meet deadlines, I think pretty much all programmers have put in comments they might later regret, including swearwords and acerbic comments about other code or requirements. Also, any conscientious coder will put in prominent comments warning others about the trickier parts of the code. Comments like "UGLY TERRIBLE HACK" tend to indicate good code rather than bad: in bad code ugly terrible hacks are considered par for the course. It would therefore be both hypocritical and meaningless to go through the comments looking for embarrassments. But also fun, so let's go.

The overall conclusion is rather flattering towards Microsoft: a lot of good code, with the obligatory ugly hacks for compatibility with other stuff. No stolen open source, either. Better go have a look before their cease-and-desist shows up.

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Vi for programmers

Vi for programmers 08/09/2004 07:51 AM
CNET Aug 9 2004 10:09AM GMT

Vi for programmers, part 2

Vi for programmers, part 2 07/26/2004 05:37 AM
CNET Jul 26 2004 10:27AM GMT

On the generosity of programmers

On the generosity of programmers 03/28/2005 08:44 AM

1/2/02: "Of course there's nothing wrong with financiers, we need them to get our stock public. But as a group they did something really stinky to the software industry in the last part of the last decade -- they helped promote the myth that programmers work for free. In their folklore we're so selfless that we're willing to write new software and fix bugs, without being paid to do so. Another way of looking at it -- they get to keep all the money and programmers get nothing."

Programmers So Far Underwhelmed by JSF

Programmers So Far Underwhelmed by JSF 03/08/2004 11:16 PM
Some developers say the latest Web application specification needs third-party vendor tools before they will use it.

Programmers Notepad

Programmers Notepad 01/04/2004 01:14 PM
PN2 0.5 "mingus" released

Primates as Programmers

Primates as Programmers 12/31/2003 10:43 AM
Primates as Programmers. New firm breaks the mold. Hires primates as programmers leading to significant cost savings!

SAP to add 500 programmers in India

SAP to add 500 programmers in India 05/07/2004 05:39 PM
ZDNet May 7 2004 9:13PM GMT

UI Design for Programmers

UI Design for Programmers 06/02/2004 04:14 AM

I rather enjoyed reading Gadgetopia's informal review of Joel Spolsky's book User Interface Design for Programmers.

Microsoft Ad for PHP Programmers

Microsoft Ad for PHP Programmers 04/07/2005 09:28 AM

An interesting Google ad appeared on the site today. It may still be there:

That's probably wise, to go after people "working" for the competition. I wonder what their CTR is and how they qualify a "successful conversion."

WEB DEVELOPERS/ PROGRAMMERS

WEB DEVELOPERS/ PROGRAMMERS 06/12/2004 06:40 PM
Kingsport Times News, TN - 11 hours ago ... A background in HTML, PHP, UNIX and CSS are important considerations for this rewarding position that include a weekly salary, health, 401K and paid vacations. ...

Usability for Programmers

Usability for Programmers 01/22/2003 04:20 AM

Programmers Are Idiots

Programmers Are Idiots 08/02/2004 01:32 PM

So I'm out here in Boston (home of the Free Speech Zone) at a seminar on distributed enterprise application development. The instructor is Pinku Surana, who certainly seems to know his stuff. I found this interesting article in his blog, where he argues that programmers are idiots, and I have to say he makes a pretty good case.

I occasionally teach IT programmers. I've taught over 100 people now and I can honestly say I've met maybe 5 good programmers. The rest are dangerously incompetent. In fact, they are so profoundly ignorant of computer science and programming that they actually believe they are fairly good. This is the perverse effect of ignorance: because they don't know what they don't know, they think they know everything. Brookes' Mythical Man Month described the uberprogrammers who are mysteriously 10x more productive than the average. I would go further and say the uberprogrammers aren't really so uber; rather, the average is abysmal.

He goes on to say that if non-IT companies want effective software, they should ditch their programmers and demand flexible software from vendors.

I agree with him on the first point. We, as programmers, are not nearly as good as we think we are. I think it probably stems from the fact that even a novice programmer knows more about computers than nearly everyone he knows, and they all praise him for being "so smart" when he fixes their printer or gets rid of their virus problem. My mechanic is "so smart" about replacing my car's water pump. Noone really praises him for it because cars have been around a long time and there's not much magic to them. I don't think I'd have my mechanic build me a new car from scratch, though.

I disagree with Pinku on the idea that you can solve your software problems by demanding configurable and interoperable software from vendors. It's a great idea in theory, but when you start dealing with vendors in reality, it quickly breaks down. We already demand these things from vendors, and they either don't deliver, or don't deliver as expected. Most programmers dislike vendor solutions because they're crappy in some way and hard to integrate with. That's because the vendor's programmers are idiots, too. The vendor's programmers spend a lot of time griping about how the customers write crappy architectures that are hard to integrate with their "well-written" solution. So, which is more dangerous, the idiot you know or the one you don't?

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Vi for programmers, part 1

Vi for programmers, part 1 07/26/2004 05:37 AM
CNET Jul 26 2004 10:26AM GMT

XML Keeps Programmers Regular

XML Keeps Programmers Regular 03/19/2003 10:24 PM
...using regular expressions, that is. In response to Tim Bray's dirty little habit of parsing XML with regular expressions, Jon Udell writes:

If the XML gods are resorting to Perl and Python hackery to shred documents, are we just spinning our wheels? I don't think so. But this is, perhaps, an unusual case. ... I can, however, make excellent use of the text stream underlying XML abstractions. So, which way to regard a document becomes a kind of Necker cube puzzle. The bad news: it's confusing. The good news: it's useful.

When the suggestion of XMLizing Blosxom templates came up a week or so ago, I (calmly) dared the proponent to install any number of Perl XML modules under Mac OS X. After all this time, it's still horrid stuff. And then there are those who, at the mercy of their ISPs, don't even have the choice of installing an XML parser.

That said, XML parsing has become a regular part of the modern programmer's nutritious breakfast. There're mouthfuls of RSS to consume, the Google Web API to Google, and the breadth and depth of the Amazon to explore. What's a happy parser-less hacker to do?

I just co-authored a book, 1/4 of which relied heavily on the availability of not only an XML parser, but a SOAP stack. Faced with the reality that more than a handful of readers wouldn't have either at their disposal, I wrote a hack sure to turn the stomach of any XML purist while turning many a hacker frown upside-down... "NoXML, Another SOAP::Lite Alternative" for the Google Web API.

XML jockeys might well want to avert their eyes for this one. What is herein suggested is something just so preposterous that it just might prove useful -- and indeed it does. NoXML is a drop-in alternative to SOAP::Lite. As its name suggests, this home-brewed module doesn't make use of an XML parser of any kind, relying instead on some dead-simple regular expressions and other bits of programmatic magic.

Elegant? Depends on your definition. Pure? As the driven beach sand. Work? You betcha!

XML Is Too Hard For Programmers

XML Is Too Hard For Programmers 03/19/2003 10:25 PM
Tim Bray: "The notion that there is an 'XML data model' is silly and unsupported by real-world evidence. The definition of XML is syntactic: the 'Infoset' is an afterthought and in any case is far indeed from being a data model specification that a programmer could work with. Empirical evidence: I can point to a handful of different popular XML-in-Java APIs each of which has its own data model and each of which works. So why would you think that there's a data model there to build a language around?"

For Perl Programmers : only

For Perl Programmers : only 03/19/2003 10:25 PM
Brian Ingerson's curious new module allows you to specify which version of a module you want Perl to load - and even to install multiple versions at the same time. Let's hear about it from the man himself!

Epistemology and Ontology of Programmers

Epistemology and Ontology of Programmers 06/17/2004 11:54 AM
A new paper by David King and Chris Kimble of York Univerisity explores the philisophical assumptions about reality behind common software design methods. The paper, titled "Uncovering epistemological and ontological assumptions of software designers" (PDF format), explains that object-oriented design is not based on a rationalist epistemology but, instead, argues that knowledge is the result of observation. OO design further relies on the assumption that once a description is derived by observing reality, the two somehow remain synchronised, allowing a programmer to learn new things about reality by studying his description of it! A "holistic" design method also described seems to be the only method denying the equivalence of both the programmer's mental model to reality and the programmer's code to his mental model. This seems most likely to me but the paper points out embedded software applications in which an almost exact match between model and reality exists. A simplified slide-presentation (PDF format) of the paper is also available. Okay, it's not specifically robotics related, but I found it very entertaining.

Programmers Need Font Love, too!

Programmers Need Font Love, too! 08/17/2004 01:37 AM

Direct and Related Links for 'Programmers Need Font Love, too!'

“Programmers have very particular font needs. A font for programming must be monospaced, extremely readable, and must sharply distinguish between similar characters, such as capital O and zero and the number 1, capital I, and lowercase L. In addition, good programming fonts allow you to view more lines of code on screen at once. Courier, Courier New, Terminal, and FixedSys are common fonts people tend to use for programming. However, there are many better alternatives…

Mozilla Foundation Looking for Web
Programmers

Mozilla Foundation Looking for Web
Programmers 07/23/2004 12:47 PM

Surveying Computer Programmers

Surveying Computer Programmers 04/16/2004 01:01 AM
DDJ Apr 16 2004 5:25AM GMT

ActionScript 4 Java Programmers

ActionScript 4 Java Programmers 09/14/2004 06:12 PM
Project Started

AnyEdit Programmers Editor and IDE

AnyEdit Programmers Editor and IDE 08/30/2004 02:28 AM
Release of AnyEdit 2.0 Beta 2

The Pragmatic Programmers Interviewed

The Pragmatic Programmers Interviewed 06/26/2004 12:34 PM

TPSM-10: Happy Programmers

TPSM-10: Happy Programmers 01/16/2004 10:56 AM
Programmers are the foot soldiers in the technology wars: the closer you get to the big-money decisions in the corner office, the less people actually care about code and coders: get the business priorities right, the thinking goes, and then worry about making the technology happen. I actually have some sympathy with that thinking. But there are a lot of programmers and they make a lot of everyday decisions: do these add up enough to make them important influencers of technology success?...

Are developers programmers or engineers?

Are developers programmers or engineers? 02/12/2003 11:52 PM
Google was released after Alta Vista, Apple was released after DOS," and Safeway.com came after Webvan, said Cooper, reciting a list of other examples as well. ...

Bible Is Getting Even Friendlier to
Programmers

Bible Is Getting Even Friendlier to
Programmers 02/13/2003 01:21 PM
This basically makes my documents smarter," Peters says. Smith says the idea came from using APIs offered by megasites Google and Amazon. ...

IBM on the hunt for Firefox programmers

IBM on the hunt for Firefox programmers 04/13/2005 02:52 PM
Big Blue looks to hire techies to adapt the open-source browser to work well with its server software.

Griffin Technology looking for
programmers

Griffin Technology looking for
programmers 10/31/2003 12:46 PM
Griffin Technology is looking for Mac programers for work in C++, Mac OS X, Mac OS 9, driver development and applications. "We'd love local but, knowing the market, can pull from the Southeast," Jeff Pack, chief operating officer of Griffin Technology, told MacCentral.

Python programmers resourcer

Python programmers resourcer 11/12/2003 04:32 PM
pyprc-1.0 - first release

U.S. Programmers: Bargains Go Begging

U.S. Programmers: Bargains Go Begging 04/27/2004 01:55 AM
Business Week Apr 27 2004 6:13AM GMT

Useful file metadata for programmers

Useful file metadata for programmers 03/30/2005 09:29 PM
Michael McCracken: “In light of the upcoming release of OS X 10.4, and its sure-to-be blockbuster new Spotlight feature, I was thinking about what kind of metadata I would want stored for my source code files. What information would be most useful to search for or use to define smart folders?”

Google: The Last Best Place for
Programmers

Google: The Last Best Place for
Programmers 06/05/2005 11:56 PM

The engineering staff at Google threw a big party for Silicon Valley nerds last Thursday night, complete with band and Cinco de Mayo-themed food and drink.  The last time I visited was so long ago that Segways were still cool (Google still has a few but today they gather dust in a corner).  Google has grown up to employ over 3000 people and occupies a campus built for Silicon Graphics (SGI; kids: this was a Unix workstation company that bloomed in the late 1980s and faded as Sun grew).  The center is built around a volleyball court and an endless pool, complete with lifeguard until 9 pm.  The company provides all of the fun things that profitable companies can provide, e.g., haircuts, massages, day care for kids, free meals, etc.

Larry Page, one of the founders, gave an inspiring talk about what a great time this is to be an engineer.  He recalled how at one point Google had five employees and two million customers.  Outside of Internet applications it is tough to imagine where that would be possible.  Page also talked about the enjoyment of launching something, getting feedback from users, and refining the service on the fly.  The Google speakers made a persuasive case that there is no better place to be a programmer.  No startup company is going to have a 5000-machine cluster available to launch a new service or a guaranteed first day audience of 100 million people.  Financially it might also make much more sense to work at Google as opposed to a startup.  For teams of engineers who create a lot of value for Google the company is able to hand out $millions or tens of $millions in bonuses, to be shared among a group of 5-10 programmers.  That is admittedly a small percentage of the new advertising reveue that Google earns from a new service but it is in absolute terms more than someone is likely to make creating the same service at a startup, where hardly anyone is likely to find out about it and use it.

One of the anecdotes that Page related was about an experienced Silicon Valley executive who told him, several years ago, "in the long run, every company is led by either marketing or sales; you just have to choose which it is going to be in Google's case."  This prophecy does indeed seem to be true for the big tech companies.  Microsoft never does anything because an engineer thinks it is fun or cool; they wait for the marketing department to notice a new product from a competitor and then go to work.  Oracle seems to be led by their sales organization.  They add features if customers are telling the sales people "this is what I need to make it worth buying the next release."  Google remains an engineering-led company.  They launch Google Maps with satellite imagery because they can.

As I wandered through the party and through the offices I kept noticing more and more familiar faces and the names of former students whom I remembered as among the smartest and nicest.  They will, of course, need all of those smart people if they are to deliver on their long-term goals.  Doing search right will eventually require machine understanding of natural language, i.e., full artificial intelligence.

Volunteer Programmers Wanted

Volunteer Programmers Wanted 12/28/2003 11:43 PM
Active Network is looking for volunteer programmers who are willing to help or lead a complete redesign of our back and front end systems.

235,000 Fewer Programmers by 2015

235,000 Fewer Programmers by 2015 12/19/2003 11:30 AM

Ben Ramsey's Webl0g: Programmers with CS
Degrees?

Ben Ramsey's Webl0g: Programmers with CS
Degrees? 08/16/2004 08:45 AM
Over on Ben Ramsey's weblog today, there's a new posting that I know personally several people have wondered in the past (especially friends back in school) - Does a PHP programmer need a CS degree?

Joel Gives College Advice For
Programmers

Joel Gives College Advice For
Programmers 01/05/2005 03:57 PM

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Do We Even Need Programmers Any More?

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