Re:Developer inequality and the technical debt crisis
by greenyoda on Monday July 07, 2014 @07:56PM
(#8002293)
"In the old days there was a respected profession of application programming. There was a minority of elite system programmers who built infrastructure and tools that empowered the majority of application programmers. Our goal was to allow regular people without extensive training to easily and quickly build useful software."
There are lots of people writing software today (probably the vast majority) who are not "elite programmers". Here are just a few examples:
1. All over the academic world, you'll find grad students in physics, biochemistry, etc. hacking together research software in Python (using numpy/scipy), R, and many other languages.
2. All over the business world, you'll find non-programmers writing programs in VBA and other end-user oriented languages to slice and dice data from databases.
3. The average CRUD code that powers today's web startups usually doesn't require anywhere near an elite programmer to create. Think of all the articles on HN written by a "non-technical founder who learned to program in two months and created a site that makes thousands of dollars".
There are lots of people writing software today (probably the vast majority) who are not "elite programmers". Here are just a few examples:
1. All over the academic world, you'll find grad students in physics, biochemistry, etc. hacking together research software in Python (using numpy/scipy), R, and many other languages.
2. All over the business world, you'll find non-programmers writing programs in VBA and other end-user oriented languages to slice and dice data from databases.
3. The average CRUD code that powers today's web startups usually doesn't require anywhere near an elite programmer to create. Think of all the articles on HN written by a "non-technical founder who learned to program in two months and created a site that makes thousands of dollars".