Via this Slashdot post I came across an excellent blog rant – Whatever happened to programming (and the follow-up). Subject in focus – modern programming, and how boring it have become (mostly).
Today, I mostly paste libraries together. So do you, most likely, if you work in software. Doesn’t that seem anticlimactic? We did all those courses on LR grammars and concurrent software and referentially transparent functional languages. We messed about with Prolog, Lisp and APL. We studied invariants and formal preconditions and operating system theory. Now how much of that do we use?
Of course, when a subject like that is brought up, it’s pretty much guaranteed that the web will respond with numerous discussions on if and how much of it is true, how did we get here, and how we can get out, and anything else remotely or not at all related. And that’s just what happened. You can read Slashdot or Reddit comments or Google for more. But I think, if you do programming for living, you’d probably agree with the main point of the article. And even if you won’t, it’s still fun to read. Like this bit for example:
Especially, I have learned that anything that has “Enterprise” in its name is so incredibly boring that the people who use it had to shove the name of the Star Trek ship into its title just to keep themselves awake.
On the serious note though, working with mainly two programming languages – Perl and PHP, I see that there is indeed a difference to the “being boring” degree. PHP is way more boring than Perl. Surprisingly even with Perl being so well known for its CPAN – a huge archive of modules and libraries to use. I guess it has something to do with There Is More Than One Way To Do It – motto of Perl.