Subj : Re: Are programmers like this in the real world?
To   : comp.programming
From : davebsr
Date : Wed Jul 27 2005 06:35 am

Charles Richmond wrote:
> davebsr wrote:
> >         [snip...]         [snip...]         [snip...]
> >
> > Therefore, I would argue, you cannot work yourself out of a job - a job
> > will always be there for a person who can do those things. And a person
> > who can make the tools good enough that anyone can use them easily will
> > probably be quite successful for doing so. Look at Microsoft. Perhaps
> > now the task is to teach this mass of new programmers the real skills -
> > not 'how to draw a box', but how to really build for quality, how to
> > build a program that his or her users will love.
> >
> I object to the notion that Microsoft "builds for quality", unless you
> are referring to *poor* quality. I have been around for all the decades
> that Microsoft built its empire, and I am aware of how the fortune was
> made.
>

I wasn't implying MS builds for quality. I was saying that they made
the development tools for their platform easy to use - which means that
there was a large influx of developers - which, in part, led to their
growth. I would argue that because GNU/Linux's developement tools are
easy for a lot of people to use, that platform also has a lot of
growth. But now that I flesh out that opinion, the 'making better
tools' idea seems to only apply to platforms, which rarely benefits the
individual programmer the way it benefits Microsoft.

I guess the core of my argument is that programming is hard enough to
do _really_ well that just making the tools better only makes one
aspect of it easier. And if you make good, reliable tools available,
then everyone, from developers to users, benefits.

By 'better tools' I don't mean that everything should be Visual
Basic-ized either. I mean cutting down on the 'gotchas' that trip up
people. I mean making the languages clear to understand and follow.
Maybe someday that will mean everything is a gui, drag-n-drop. And
maybe someday we won't need that many programmers any more, because
everyone can do it all themselves. But I bet that the opposite will be
true - someone will need to maintain those tools, and write better
ones, and write new systems that can't be written in tools like that.
And I bet if computers are that easy to use, they'll be even more
popular than today. Maybe.

.