Re: [9fans] quote o' the day

["Patrick Kelly" <kameo76890@gmail.com>]

On Thu, 25 Mar 2010 14:31:20 -0300, <blstuart@bellsouth.net> wrote:

> It's this kind of intellectual ugliness that makes the
> teacher in me hang my head in shame.  How could
> we be managing to produce a whole generation of
> programmers who actually buy into that stuff?  And
> it's not as if it's a fad that's getting better.  If anything
> it's getting worse.  Somehow we've made it laudible
> to go to any lengths to avoid writing a line of real
> code and to run as far away from hardware as we
> can.  That and worship at the alter of "code reuse"
> have created a world where if one abstraction is
> good, then 432 must be better.  If a symbol appears
> that's not defined in 17 different places all surrounded
> by #ifdef's, then that's not "professional."  Everyone
> is afraid to point out the nudity of the XML monarch
> for fear of being branded as one afraid of change.

I assume you haven't studied human behavior much... sadly we are socially
dependent, we will follow even if we know something is harmful. Look at
fad diets and superstitions.

I always have to laugh at the code reuse crap; I though that was what a
library was. Do modern programmers not know how to create libraries? That
must not be true, there are something like 11 libraries on UNIX that all
do the same stuff, repeated for each new instance of 'stuff'.

Sadly I think this may be the state the computer industry is heading into;
hacks upon hacks, with little logical design. These hackers using
techniques from the 1970's to program machines in the 2000's .. 2010's;
all the while these techniques have decayed and warped to "fit" the modern
era.

May be I've studied too much history and may be I've studied too much
psychology, but, I think the only way for things to change for the better,
is for what we have now to collapse. I do hope I'm wrong.

> I humbly extend my apologies for any of this that
> might have been promulgated by any of my former
> students :(
>
> \end{soapbox}
>
> BLS
>
>


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