Thu, 14 Sep 2006

Why Johnny Can't Code

Now this is an interesting article. Indeed, I encountered the tail end of this in my last years as a developer, when I was managing the R&D department. You have no idea how many people out there that call themselves developers have only ever used one modern, RAD language system (usually Visual C++ or Visual BASIC) and simply can't grasp the whole concept of writing all the code themselves. And they usually didn't even get the fact that they were loading libraries to do the nifty tricks - most of them thought that BitBlt was a feature of C++!

Now, I love my Builder and Delphi environments, and can really be pretty incredibly productive in them. But even they hide such things as the main program entry point, and they stack so many libraries so deep that unless you're familiar with what's going on under the hood you have no idea how the programs you write actually work.

Which is OK for an old geezer like me - I do understand what's going on under the hood. But as this article so succinctly points out, a lot of todays kids (and tomorrows developers) don't even know that there is a hood!

And that's going to be a problem.

Salon has an article named 'Why Johnny Can't Code', an interesting examination of the dearth of line programming languages available today. At first I wanted to read this and say aha, here's a simple line oriented language that's available through open source, but after reading the article I couldn't find any. And being an old fart, I remember the days spent with edlin and basic."

(link) [Slashdot]

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