Name: Anonymous 2008-07-08 4:41
By using these new RAD "development environments", the "software companies"
can quickly produce working, although extremely bloated programs. The ultimate
question is: What is better, an array of many hastily written and inefficient
programs, that are being created nearly instantaneously, or a single, highly
efficient, very elegantly designed one? This is an example of the "quality or
quantity" problem - monetarily-greedy software companies will of course want
to push their awful products for sale to the unwary lusers as fast as they can
while those that code for a desire to gain knowledge, to express oneself, to
show their ability, will carefully plan and design every aspect of their final
product, and proceed cautiously with care and attention to detail. It is after
they have developed substantial skills that they begin to train for time. Even
in the time-limited environment of a Competition, the entire design process is
carried out, although in an abbreviated manner. Never do they hastily "throw
some routines together and hope it'll work."
The other major problem with the programming population is the lowering of the
intelligence of programmers - today, all one needs to do is obtain a compiler
for any of the various free "beginner languages" available, write a few lines,
and compile them into a working (but highly inefficient) program. There is no
requirement to learn how exactly the machine itself functions, nor how source
code gets translated into a "program file" by the compiler. As a result, there
is a lowering of intelligence, a growing trend towards stupidity ("All you do
is write a few lines and press the Compile button"). If this continues, in the
future, "programmers" (they are no longer programmers, just "writers of code")
may never truly know that what they are doing is not real programming, nor the
fact that they are producing far more inefficient programs than they should. I
even doubt that they will know what efficiency means. If such a situation ever
occurs, all is lost, and we may never again be able to recover from it. Due to
this situation, we must stop the decline of intelligence quickly, by educating
all of the programmer population, especially the "writers of code", about this
decline in intelligence, in an attempt to "reform" them into true programmers.( ´ω`) Discuss.