Sorry for the delay--I was on a plane this morning.
Posted on 03/18/2014 4:40:53 PM PDT by OneWingedShark
Sorry for the delay--I was on a plane this morning.
Not a problem at all — hopefully pingees
will benefit from the [admittedly limited] discussion above.
PS — I hope your flight was a good one.
I’m a little surprised with the name, given how Squid is the name of a very well known open source Web Proxy Server that has been around for years.
“Ada was an idea who’s time was over before its specifications were finalized.”
And whose time will arrive again when enough people get killed by software written under the “programming by caffeinated hubris” model.
Hehe. I hear you! I sure have had to deal with an oversized ration of that over the years.
But, in all honesty, how does Ada combat hubris?
I'm really interested.
As one who hires programmers.
I am not strictly an Ada fan, but I think that the idea of actually having a specification, a design, and documentation will make a comeback when a software disaster involving lives, money, or both occurs and people outside our industry start to look at how we do things. The need for this kind of rigor was recognized in the 70’s, but now that the cost of fixing bugs in the field has dropped, it has devolved back into nonverbal hackers feverishly pounding out reams of indecipherable code.
I'm not sure you're right, though. Here's why...
Let me make an analogy. Bear with me a second here.
I'm an electrical engineer, right? I always loved electronics. Even before I could design electronics, I loved the idea of designing electronics.
I actually got a chance to design some cool stuff, in the '70s, '80s, and '90s. By the mid-1990s, I found myself doing more and more design work in software, instead of in hardware.
My rationalization of this (to myself) was this: I can produce more functionality per unit time in software than I can in hardware.
Now, with computers so fast, memory so cheap, and peripheral equipment (displays, cameras, scanners, digitizers, etc.) so inexpensive and high quality, there's almost no reason to design anything electronic. Whatever you want is already designed and expressed in chip form. A pure "circuit design" type of electrical engineer just can't compete with the combination of digital logic and firmware, integrated at the chip level.
Here's where the analogy comes in.
The kind of high-quality, carefully designed code-level software development you're describing may be (and this is just a theory with me) going the way of high-quality electronic design, the kind you do with transistors, transformers, op-amps, that sort of thing.
It's being replaced with the activity of what are called "script kitties." This term, although it originates in the hacker world, seems to me to describe what is going on in the larger computer world.
Young people, getting out of college now, don't really know that much about the inner workings of computers. They don't care about memory, or about speed, or about parallelization, or bus bandwidth, or any of those low-level concepts.
Instead, they "rack-and-stack" software components that they get on-line, and glue them together with PHP and Python. I hate those languages. I like C++, and even C, because they're "so close to the metal."
But I'm an anachronism, and I admit it.
I'm not saying you are wrong in your concerns about quality, and I'm not saying your idea doesn't have merit. But what if the pendulum never swings back?
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