Once upon a time, at the birth of the computer industry, to get a computer to do anything at all, one had to learn all about electronics, assembly language, design patterns, algorithms and how to solve problems efficiently.
Some time later, a commercial need arose for differently skilled people who could translate specifications into 'computer language'. Contrary to pioneering work, it was expected that getting things done would be like shoveling a hole or digging a grave, and thus was the genius of the original programmer buried, no longer considered to be anything more than a function of time.
For many years, in many commercial projects, the sponsors desired nothing more than to find a "code monkey", to do no more than 'explode' some English instructions into smaller instructions, all of which were obvious, mechanically translate these into machine language, and carefully type these translated copies of the requirements into awful green glowing CRT monitors in damp dark dungeons, cold and out of sight.
And thus arose mountains of cold, unmaintainable, inefficient code, which nonetheless served commercial purposes because computing power was so cheap.
From within these mountains of code, a hero was born, and for many years, he has been digging. One day to emerge, filthy and sweaty from trials and tribulations - yet triumphant! For he had worked hard, and improved his circumstances greatly.
And now the future! Miniaturized devices, super high traffic social networking sites, and logistics applications, where real programmers would subject business requirements to the discipline of limited hardware, memory, cpu cycles, and time. A return to the old-school mentalities of thrift, efficiency, and prudence. A recognition that sometimes doing the right thing competently is in the best interests of the project, the organization, and perhaps even the world!!
Friday, January 2, 2009
Thursday, January 1, 2009
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