More Trouble with Programming

The the second part of the interview with Bjarne Stroustrup can be found here. Several of his observations reported in this interview are worth noting.

When he was asked to comment on the "coolest" program, this is what he had to say:
"What is common to these examples of code is that they cleanly separate concerns in a program, allowing separate developments of parts. That simplifies understanding and eases maintenance. These basic language techniques allow separate "things" to be separately represented in code and combined only when needed."

When he was asked to comment about the desire to "dumb down" programming languages so that more people can develop program, his observation is spot on:
"I think that would be misguided. The idea of programming as a semiskilled task, practiced by people with a few months' training, is dangerous. We wouldn't tolerate plumbers or accountants that poorly educated. We don't have as an aim that architecture (of buildings) and engineering (of bridges and trains) should become more accessible to people with progressively less training. Indeed, one serious problem is that currently, too many software developers are undereducated and undertrained.

Obviously, we don't want our tools--including our programming languages--to be more complex than necessary. But one aim should be to make tools that will serve skilled professionals--not to lower the level of expressiveness to serve people who can hardly understand the problems, let alone express solutions. We can and do build tools that make simple tasks simple for more people, but let's not let most people loose on the infrastructure of our technical civilization or force the professionals to use only tools designed for amateurs."

I know of some manager's view of being a competent programmer is to know the tool's IDE. In the manager's view that's the amount of training they need.

He further remarked that,
"Most applications involve standards, operating systems, libraries, and tools that far exceed modern programming languages in complexity. What is difficult is the appreciation of the underlying techniques and their application to real-world problems.

... We need relatively complex language to deal with absolutely complex problems."

Not only many developers lacks proper training, many lack sound understanding of the underlying techniques or mechanism. This often produces very fragile solution and they lack the skill and knowledge to explain things when they do not work.

The rest of the interview is on his view about .Net and C#.

It's worth a read.