It is fairly common for the people who have been in the industry to complain about how the youngsters don’t know what they are doing and without all the fancy helpful gadgets/IDE’s they wouldn’t be able to do anything and how things were better the way the person doing the complaining does it because that is how they learnt how to do things! The rant below was posted to Hacker News a little while ago in response to an question about coPilot and I wanted to share some of my thoughts around it. But first, lets read the rant:
After decades of professional software development, it should be clear that code is a liability. The more you have, the worse things get. A tool that makes it easy to crank out a ton of it, is exactly the opposite of what we need.
If a coworker uses it, I will consider it an admission of incompetence. Simple as that.
I don’t use autoformat, because it gets things wrong constantly. E.g. taking two similar lines and wrapping one but not the other, because of 1 character length difference. Instead I explicitly line my code out by hand to emphasize structure.
I also hate 90% of default linter rules because they are pointless busywork designed to catch noob mistakes.
These tools keep devs stuck in local maxima of mediocrity. It’s like writing prose with a thesaurus on, and accepting every single suggestion blindly.
I coded for 20 years without them, why would I need them now? If you can’t even fathom coding without these crutches, and think this is somehow equivalent to coding in a bare notepad, you are proving my point.
Let’s break this gem down and take it line by line.
After decades of professional software development, it should be clear that code is a liability. The more you have, the worse things get. A tool that makes it easy to crank out a ton of it, is exactly the opposite of what we need.
If a coworker uses it, I will consider it an admission of incompetence. Simple as that.
This is a false premise. There are times where extra code is a liability but most of times the boiler-plate and error-checking etc is required. The languages today are more complex than what was there 20 years ago. I know because I have been coding for over 25 years now. It is easy to write Basic/C/C++ code in a notepad and run it, in fact even for C++ I used TurboC++ IDE to write code over 25 years ago… We didn’t have distributed micro-services 20 years ago and most applications were a simple server-client model. Now we have applications connecting in peer-to-peer model etc. Why would I spend time retyping code that a decent IDE would auto-populate when I could use that time to actually solve more interesting problems.
This is the kind of developer who would spend days reformating the code manually to look just right instead of coding the application to perform as per specifications.
I don’t use autoformat, because it gets things wrong constantly. E.g. taking two similar lines and wrapping one but not the other, because of 1 character length difference. Instead I explicitly line my code out by hand to emphasize structure.
This is a waste of time that could have been spent working on other projects. I honestly don’t care how the structure is as long as it is consistent and reasonably logical. I personally wouldn’t brag about spending time formatting each line just so but that is just me.
I also hate 90% of default linter rules because they are pointless busywork designed to catch noob mistakes.These tools keep devs stuck in local maxima of mediocrity. It’s like writing prose with a thesaurus on, and accepting every single suggestion blindly.
I am not a huge fan of linter but it is a good practice use this to catch basic mistakes. Why would I spend manual effort to find basic issues when a system can do it for me automatically?
I coded for 20 years without them, why would I need them now? If you can’t even fathom coding without these crutches, and think this is somehow equivalent to coding in a bare notepad, you are proving my point.
20 years ago we used dialup modem and didn’t have giga-bit network connections. We didn’t have mobile-phone/internet coverage all over the world. Things are changing. We need to change with them.
Why stop at coding with notepad/vi/emacs? You should move back to assembly because it allows you full control over the code and write it more elegantly without any ‘fluff’ or extra wasted code. Or even better start coding directly in binary. That will ensure really elegant and tight code. (/s)
I had to work with someone who felt similarly and it was a painful experience. They were used to of writing commands/code in Hex to make changes to the system which worked for the most part but wasn’t scalable because they didn’t have others who could do it as well as him and he didn’t want to teach others in too much detail because I guess it gave them job security. I was asked to come in and create a system that allowed users to make the same changes using a WebUI that was translated to Hex in the backend. It saved a ton of hours for the users because it was a lot faster and intutive. But this person fought it tooth and nail and did their best to get the project cancelled.
I am really tired of all these folks complaining about the new way of doing things, just because that is not how they did things. If things didn’t change and evolve over the years and new things didn’t come in then we would still be using punch cards or abacus for computing. 22 years ago, we had a T3 connection at my university and that was considered state of the art and gave us a blazing speed of up to 44.736 Mbps that was shared with the entire dorm. Right now, I have a 400Mbps dedicated connection that is just for my personal home use. Things improve over the years and we need to keep up-skilling ourselves as well. There are so many examples I can give about things that are possible now which weren’t possible back then… This sort of gatekeeping doesn’t serve any productive purpose and is just a way for people to control access to the ‘elite’ group and make them feel better about themselves even though they are not as skilled as the newer folks.
The caveat is that not all new things are good, we need to evaluate and decide. There are a bunch of things that I don’t like about the new systems because I prefer the old ways of doing things. It doesn’t mean that anyone using the new tools is not a good developer. For example, I still prefer using SVN instead of GIT because that is what I am comfortable with, GIT has its advantages and SVN has its advantages. It doesn’t mean that I get to tell people who are using GIT that they are not ‘worthy’ of being called a good developer.
I dare this person to write a chat-bot without any external library/IDE or create a peer-to-peer protocol to share data amongst multiple nodes simultaneously or any of the new protocols/applications in use today that didn’t exist 20 years ago
Just because you can’t learn new things doesn’t mean that others are inferior. That is your problem, not ours.
– Suramya