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When programmers had to really know what they were doing....

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by moore-margaret

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I was throwing out stuff from an old file cabinet in my office yesterday, and came across a few oldies but goodies that I hadn't looked at in at least 10 years....IBM Enterprise Systems Architecture/370 Reference Summary, and INTEL Processors Memory Addressing Schemes are 2 references as well as handouts from a class an old supervisor taught way back when.....Windows - An Operating System from the perspective of a Programmer (also referred to as Developer or Software Engineer). Maybe I'm just not hooked into the right group anymore, but it seems to me that modern programmers just don't get it....I recently sat through an incredibly moronic introduction to a popular CMS that reminded me of something I would have seen in 6th grade (if we had computers back then...). When I started out programming, I was expected to know a little bit about everything....now it seems that many developers only know how to do what they do and actually believe that it would be hard to teach other developers.....they claim their code is really, really complicated....c'mon guys. Do you think some of us never wrote complicated code? I miss the days of intelligent conversations about memory addressing and efficient coding....who cares whether we pick Drupal or DotNetNuke for our next CMS?

4 replies

by jaqui

the only member here who feels like that.
Many of us have little respect for the new programmers, they are nothing but script kiddies.

by shellbot

I won't flatter myself and call myself a programmer..but I know a bit of this and a bit of that..
However, I know the code..and i know cr@p code..and it abounds these days. I'm sure some of my own is horrendous, but I don't pretend it is anything but! Then again, I'm a DBA..so if you ask me to code a new web page..don't expect perfection!

I reckon anyone who calls thier code "complicated" doesn't understand the code they wrote and can't explain it, hence why they can't teach anyone else what its doing.

My hubby is freak at programming..he writes some awesome stuff..but still seems to take the approach that programming is still "iteration and selection"..its simply how you do it..

anyways..I've got an MCP in VB.NET and in all honesty..its worth less than toilet paper..but whatever..employers like to see it.

by tony hopkinson

Just throw more machine at it, it's a lot cheaper than a developer who doesn't need to.

My first book on 'programming' was Rodnay Zak's 'The Z80 Processor'. I'd love to see the carnage if you gave it to a modern day cookie cutter, and then asked them to roll hEll0, round an eight digit LED display.

Right I'll just get this marquee component off the palette.....

I wonder if you talked to some of the old time assemby guy's they would say what these modern guys (us !), they think a multivibrator is a deluxe sex toy. :p

If your code is complicated, you are looking at it wrong, you wrote it wrong, or (well and usually) there's a bad case of code rot.

by jackofalltech

I still have a quick-reference card that shows all the options of the different Register/Memory combinations for BAL instructions (MVS Assembler for those who don't know), we had to MEMORIZE that stuff in order to pass the class and be allowed to write programs for the company.

I still remember what it was like to work with a non-linear memory map, the old segment:address combo stuff.

With the great gains in hardware speed and capacity, it's too easy the code these days.

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