Thursday, March 01, 2012

I Don't Know How Anybody Does It

I see they are wanting school kids to get into programming now? This isn't a bad idea, everybody claims to be a programmer these days yet how many actually know the core skills (we're not talking copy and paste from examples on the web here)?

But I do worry what they are letting themselves in for because maybe I'm just getting old but I've had my fill of it. Back in the good old days you could write a good program in say 6 months and then 3 years later it would still be a good program. For the past 5 or so years I've noticed that by the time I've finished something (using super new RAD tools, so a matter of weeks to finish a project) it is already out of date. 90% of stuff is now so reliant on the Internet and yet the Internet changes so much on a day to day basis that writing solid software is an almost impossible task, it's a major pain in the ass. We live in a world of constant updates, what the hell was ever wrong with if it's not broke don't fix it? Why can't we have good old protocols like SMTP, POP3, FTP any more? I wrote programs in 1997 around those and they still work great! However I've got software that I wrote in 2010 to take advantage of certain web services using SOAP and they might as well not exist. All it takes is some twat on the other side of the world to "update" something and all your work is for shit. Bastards.

Listen to me kids, forget computers, forget programming, do something real with your lives. Learn how to fix pipes, play with wires or build walls. This computer lark is just bullshit. Bring on the Zombie apocalypse.

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