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Yeah! Exactly! What he said! | by Avium | 2009-05-08 10:20:04 |
| Dude, I've been saying that for YEARS |
by SnArL |
2009-05-08 12:24:10 |
When I was a sophomore in HIGH SCHOOL, I wrote an IO library in assembly language optimized for the 80386's 32-bit instruction set. I also struggled and just about beat my head on my desk when trying to implement a 3-dimensional array in C using pointers. I learned LISP and how to use vi as they were requirements for the programming contests that my school participated in.
When I was a senior, as part of my CS independent study class, I wrote a graphing calculator program. Using linked lists and binary trees, the evaluation engine converted an algebraic expression from infix to postfix (recursively, using parenthesis as markers for order of operation parsing).
My freshman year in college, I took a class that taught LISP, Prolog, and Ada. I aced my assembly language course, and all of the assignments for my data structures class were written (much to the annoyance of my professor) in ANSI C.
Then the curriculum shifted, and everything was Object-Oriented and Java. I *HATED* it, and pretty much lost my passion for programming.
When I got into the real world, and started to have to deal with applications written in Java, and I came to loathe Java even more. The applications had memory leaks and were rather buggy. I realized exactly what the problem was...
You see, my data structures and AI teacher in high school once told us that coding was easy, but programming was an art. Any monkey can sit down and write code, but true programming takes skill. Being able to design your data structures to mesh with your code, and having your algorithms WORK, and making sure that your pointers always reference the correct address, and memory allocated ALWAYS needs to be freed...these things require a level of thinking and problem-solving that most people simply DON'T POSSESS.
But Java...Java removes the NEED to think about these things. Ostensibly so that the programmer can focus on the design. But the problem is that if you never have to chase down an odd pointer dereference (what pointer type is this variable again? Where in memory is it being stored, and what's my offset supposed to be?) or fix a memory leak, you don't get used to thinking creatively to solve problems. You just regurgitate the same stuff that you memorized in your Java class. The language makes it easy to write sloppy code, because it covers up those mistakes for you. And as a result, we've got a LOT of monkeys writing sloppy, inefficient code that's poorly designed and not enough REAL programmers. And the software companies LOVE this, because their armies of monkeys can churn out this crap in very little time and they can then turn around and charge their customers support contract fees to fix the bugs that result.
Programming is SUPPOSED to be hard. It's supposed to require you to reevaluate your implementation every time you run across a bug so that in the end, your code WORKS the best way that it can. |
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[ Reply ] |
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Sure you do. | by MatthewDBA | 2009-05-08 12:32:43 |
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It's entirely subjective | by SnArL | 2009-05-08 13:15:33 |
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there's a reason why programming is now easy | by joresgump | 2009-05-08 14:01:04 |
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