alt Hacker NewsThinking that memorizing insane code rules is being skilled in making software is like thinking that memorizing all the generals' birth days is being skilled in warfare.
Before AI, trying to program even a simple thing was an exercise in frustration from rules that had only been put in place by programmers to protect their own jobs and make it as difficult as possible for a normal person to develop. Oh! You mixed tabs and spaces, now your code will not compile and you're stuck another day. Oh! You forgot a semicolon, now the code won't run, even though the software points out your missed semicolon and thus knows how to fix it.
AI takes care of all that bagage and now I and others can make fully functional software that solves real world problem for real people.
Replies
> memorizing insane code rules is being skilled in making software
That’s on the level of complaining about having to learn music theory to play the piano, or to learn grammar to write a report. Or having to learn the road rules to drive a car on the street.
I've never had a problem mixing tabs or spaces in any language that supported this, which is basically most languages.
I've spent the last three weeks working out a spec and didn't even start the development process yet.
The idea that the syntax of the language would ever be a bottleneck sounds ridiculous to me.
The gate keeping allegations are also incomprehensible. The vast majority of developers are working on making their jobs easier. There wouldn't be an endless stream of new programming languages, libraries and frameworks, if there was a software guild that you needed approval from to work on software. Even if such a guild existed, it would get obsoleted by the competition.
There are cases of people maximizing their own job security by writing terrible and incomprehensible code, but most experienced developers have gotten bitten by their own cleverness and try to make their code as easy to understand and as accessible as possible.
Things like Java Server Faces and Java Enterprise Edition died out a long time ago. The XML craze is over. Roy Fielding style REST/HATEOAS is dead and everything is an HTTP API with OpenAPI docs nowadays. People understand by now that micro service architectures only make sense for organisational purposes but not for technical reasons. NoSQL also waned and everyone is basically putting their JSON into PostgreSQL if they need to store complex hierarchical data.
Why do you even care about irrelevant things like semicolons? Like, any reasonable editor gives you squiggly lines so you can't miss them, meanwhile in practice having a line delimiter helps disambiguate hairy expressions and produce more readable error messages. For me they are an imperceptible cost that I couldn't care less about.
If you talked about null pointers, which are basically a landmine in every line you've ever written, waiting for a chance to explode, maybe you'd have a point but even nullable pointers are an idea that is being relegated to the history books.
I'm afraid you never understood the job if you think it's just "memorizing insane code rules".