Why I Don’t Program Much Anymore
There’s been some great discussions about the state of programming. Confession: I’m much more of a sysadmin and architecture guy than anything else at this point. If it doesn’t have a quick configuration file or a GUI, at this point, I don’t do much with it because I don’t have the time to learn everything. That’s even after focusing our core web environment on two technologies (php/python) and doing our best to reject anything that doesn’t fit into them.
Here’s the first one: Whatever Happened to Programming @ The Reinvigorated Programmer, and here’s it’s second part: It May Not Be As Bad as All That.
Pay special attention to the addendum in that second article. The money quote for me was in the big pull from a comment by jdeitrich on HackerNews:
We talk about ‘flow’ quite a lot in software and I just have to wonder what’s happening to us all in that respect. Just like a conversation becomes stilted if the speakers keep having to refer to their phrasebooks and dictionaries, I wonder how much longer it will be possible to retain any sort of flowful state when writing software. Might the idea of mastery disappear forever under a constant torrent of new tools and technologies?
It’s the death of the hobbyist programmer. There’s a new framework release in Symfony or Zend Framework every time I re-surface a week or two later. Even with 10 years experience with programming, unit tests, and a decent level of comfort from the experience with 0.x versions and up of these frameworks, I spend all the time I *should* be coding with my nose in the docs updating code that’s been deprecated or migrated. Just keeping up in one framework can be a full time job.
How can anything get done like this?
My solution: Don’t add a dependency without good cause. Build with good bricks that you understand very well, and never put any layer between you and the system that you don’t actually need.
It helps if you start with a language that encourages this philosophy of development, but you do it anywhere.
Patterns over frameworks.
I feel your pain. All of those revisions but for what? it just makes jogging the constant pace to keep even. What we need is an order of magnitude change in efficiency & simplicity to make programming fun again.