Secrets of Programming and Development
@craigmaloney "We don't know what we're doing." I see that all the time and I don't agree.
It's perfectly understandable that programmers who are just getting started don't know and need to learn. But if "we" programmers, as a whole, don't know what we're doing, we have a problem.
Secrets of Programming and Development
@noeldemartin @craigmaloney We, as a whole, don't know what we are doing. I'm programming for about 27 years, have about 16 years of job experience, and for all that time, i'm constantly trying to better my craft. And i've gotten better, sure, but me personally and "we" as a community still have a long way to go. This isn't that surprising, if you think about how long it took math, physics, etc. to get where they are now.
Secrets of Programming and Development
@tauli @craigmaloney The fact that we still have a long way to go, and I agree, doesn't mean we don't know what we are doing.
For example, when you create a sign up form, you know you shouldn't be storing user passwords in plain text, right? That's one example of knowing what we are doing.
It doesn't mean we are perfect. But saying that implies we haven't learned a thing. If you don't know what you are doing, what's difference between you and a new dev?
Secrets of Programming and Development
@tauli @craigmaloney It's only semantics, I am interpreting "we don't know what we are doing" as knowing nothing and you are interpreting "we don't know what we are doing" as not having the perfect solution. I don't think we have the perfect solution, so I actually agree with you on that.
I guess if we interpret "we don't know what we are doing" as not having the perfect solution, nobody knows what they are doing in most disciplines, not only programming.
Secrets of Programming and Development
@noeldemartin @craigmaloney yea, ok. we obviously know something, but not everything. i'm trying to put into words, what i mean exactly when i say "we don't know, what we are doing", but that's actually quite hard and won't fit into 500 chars. This xkcd seems to be a good first approximation https://xkcd.com/2030/
Secrets of Programming and Development
@tauli @craigmaloney Yeah I agree 😀 I think the intention when using that sentence is to encourage new developers to keep going, even if it they don't understand everything. And to show that programming is nothing special and anyone can do it. That's good, but I'm not sure that sentence is the best way to convey that message. After all development is every day more important in our society, so I hope that at least we know "something".
This is an instance-of-one managed by Noel De Martin.
Secrets of Programming and Development
@noeldemartin @craigmaloney i'd say, that there is currently no proven way to write large, complex software that is stable and secure. OOP was the way we went to explore in earnest in the 90s (the ideas are older, i know) but has imho never produced any promising results. imho functional programming seems the way to go, but Haskell is the best we have right now, dependent types are still being figured out and homotopy type theory is still in active research.