February 16, 2016 at 7:08 am
Rod at work (9/1/2015)
Wayne West (8/31/2015)
Wow, a 35,000 word article? That's a short story! It took me pretty much a full day to read it! (don't tell my boss)It had a lot of useful information, but I thought it was a weak in answering the base question of "Can you tell me what code is?" So many people think that 'any programmer = any programmer' and don't realize how specialized we are. To people in the public, I call myself a programmer. To computer people, I call myself a DBA/database developer because they know that a question about malloc() is probably not going to get a good answer if posed to me. While in a period of unemployment, I had an ex-girlfriend wanting me to sign up at a local school for a degree in game programming. It took a lot of explaining that game programming != the database work that I'd specialized in.
Code is instructions telling the computer what to do and it can take so many forms that it requires focused discussion to really answer it more clearly than that. The article did a nice job of pointing out some of the advantages/disadvantages of different languages and explained frameworks well, but I don't think it would be very clear to someone who was just a computer user and didn't know anything about programming: using my parents as examples of this comes to mind. 😀
I like the way you put it, that 'any programmer = any programmer' is a way of people not realizing our specialization. The way I explain it to people who aren't in IT or development is saying that IT/dev professions are like the medical field. Then I use the illustration that if you need heart surgery you go to a cardiologist, not a pediatrician. And just saying they're both doctors doesn't cut it. Their different types of doctors specializing in different areas. People tend to get that analogy.
I use the same.
Gaz
-- Stop your grinnin' and drop your linen...they're everywhere!!!
February 16, 2016 at 7:10 am
dietztm (8/26/2015)
I agree with the OP. In my experience software has only two jobs: it converts input into data and it converts data into information.Data though, that's where it gets interesting.
Ah, a generalisation that won't belittle what anyone does whatsoever. Just like "Data? You just read it and write it."
Gaz
-- Stop your grinnin' and drop your linen...they're everywhere!!!
July 26, 2019 at 1:49 pm
Management said, "Why's it going to take so long? It's just a web page." Management thought it was basically like writing a Word document. You pump it out in an afternoon and your done. My co-workers were flabbergasted and had to spend a significant amount of time explaining that it wasn't just a simple Word document that Management was asking for.
I call them the data jumpers. "Well the data is right here, can't it just kind of jump over there?" No, it can't.
July 26, 2019 at 11:39 pm
I generally agree with what the editorial says, but I'm appalled by the article referenced. Anyone who thinks that C, a language in which numbers can't be distinguished from pointers (ie storage adresses), is a good language is an idiot. Most of the errors (including many of the security faults) in Unix and related systems and apps have been a direct consequemce of this idiocy in the C language design. But the referenced aricle contains a long overpiasing section about C, so it encourages people to believe that the failure to distinguish numbers and addresses, the impossibility of doing any sort of trace of data access, and all the other inevitable consequences of this utterly stupid language design are harmless, instead of recognising that they have been responsible for most software problems for several decades.
Tom
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