Anybody can Program
I still can't decide whether professionalizing programming is a good idea or not
Posted by 11/21/2005
Brief History
Back in 1995 or so when I started to do something that resembled programming, I remember
a lot of people got a book on CGI, a book on Perl and a book on Html and they were
'programmers'. If you had the wherewithal you could program. It reminded
me of the days when someone could call themselves a lawyer or an architect and just
start practicing (Abraham Lincoln, Louis Sullivan being examples of each).
At the same time I've often cited the need for programming to be professionalized
(although ironically this would cut me out) - and even in the mid 90's I hated Perl.
My only experience at the time was writing an Access database, and messing
around with Visual Basic. CGI web applications just seemed very
strange compared to that. And I couldn't look at Perl and tell what it was doing.
It wasn't readable in that sense. It also made me feel stupid, and nobody likes
feeling stupid. If someone had showed me then, what I'm doing now, say some scenario
like logging onto a Linux box via ssh, doing a quick vi session to edit a configuration
file and running something mysterious like /usr/sbin/apachectl graceful
- I would have thought that looked incredibly boring and tedious. I never
would have believed that was what I'd be doing 10 years later.
Although much maligned nowadays, at the time Access, VBA and Visual Basic seemed like the arrival of something important. It made programming more accessible to the artist in me. And all the APIs for the MS Office products, how they all tied together - the consistency among applications - was really interesting. I'm not sure what happened over the next 10 years. All those things sound terrible to me now. And I'm actually adverse to 'drag-and-drop' programming, when it was really the only way I would have started. The intro Pascal class and the old green-on-black screens of the mid eighties completely killed my interest. Now I like the green-on-black. No fluff. Nothing fancy. Quick. Efficient. To the point.
Professionalization
Sometimes I advocate professionalizing programming. And I'm not sure why. Maybe it is because I've seen the results of people that don't know what they are doing creating monstrosities of code. Maybe it's because what I've learned that studying the history of programming would actually have prevented some monstrosities I made myself. Maybe it's because I've seen that 1 good programmer is worth 10 bad ones. Maybe it's because what we call programming has infiltrated into so much that is no longer just a convenient, ancillary thing. Or maybe I realized that a huge part of what makes the world run could be categorized as 'pushing papers' - and programs are what push the papers now.
On the other hand. If I can program anybody can. And it seems good that anybody can start programming. The tools are there if you have the will. It goes along with Punk rock and open-source software. And somehow the two seem related although they aren't. Anybody can play music, and anybody can write software. So I'm sort of torn between 2 extremes and strangely I agree with both of the extremes simultaneously.
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