hello!

nostrich:

Bygone Bureau picks the winners for the arguments that matter most. Love this.

My biggest gripe with modern programming is the sheer volume of arbitrary stuff I need to know. My current project has so far required me to know about Python, Django, Google App Engine and it’s datastore, XHTML, CSS, JQuery, Javascript, JSON, and a clutch of XML schema, APIs and the like.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful for all of it, but it just doesn’t seem like what I was promised when I followed SICP for the first time. It just feels like I spend most of my time scouring through documentation and trying to remember umpteen different sets of syntax and class names rather than actually thinking in code.

Back in ye olden days, most programming tasks I performed felt quite natural and painless, just a quiet little chat between me and the compiler. Sometimes longwinded, sometimes repetitive, but I just sat and though and typed and software happened. The work I do these days feels more like being a dogsbody at the tower of babel. I just don’t seem to feel fluent in anything much any more.

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?

This was a comment by jdietrich over at Hacker News. And here is the post that started the discussion. Be sure to read the follow on post as well. The comment I quoted captures my sentiments as well. In our aim to write libraries, frameworks and APIs, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to get into any sort of ‘flow’ when writing code. The analogy of speakers having to keep referring to their phrasebooks is a very apt one. The last fun programming project I did was a university project. And part of the reason why it was that fun was perhaps because I didn’t have to spend hours poring over documentation to learn class names. I wrote a module in C to read and decode a text message. The reading I had to do was about the SMS standard. Importantly I was still thinking in code the entire time.

Is modern programming geared more for assemblers than creators? Where do you stand? What is your preferred language/framework for development?

What do you get every 2-3 years? A new Overkill album! This one is called Ironbound (very nice cover there), and it’s killer stuff. If you haven’t been very pleased with their last couple of albums, this should set your mind at ease. Blitz hasn’t sounded this good in awhile, and the rest of the band is as energetic as ever.

Seth Nickell, on Gnome 3. This and this (among many other reasons) is why I truly believe it’s such an exciting time to be a Linux user today.

Apple tops the list for the 3rd year in a row.

Staying on topic of my last post, this is the why piracy works edition.

The Brads – a comic about web design » Why DRM Doesn’t Work

Just got Burnout Legends for my PSP during the half-price sale. I haven’t had this much fun smashing other vehicles in quite awhile.

Mike Portnoy, on touring with Iron Maiden. These shows are going to kick ass. I’m honestly considering a trip just to see one of these shows.

Sergey Brin’s Online Resume