[Tfug] OT - WAS Re: Cyber War -oh noes | Now H1B Visa Rant

[Bexley Hall]

Hi, Jim,

--- On Sat, 1/10/09, Jim Secan <jim at nwra.com> wrote:

> Not being up on the latest "buzz" I wasn't sure what SOA is, so
> I wiki'd it.  Sounds like Same Old Anarchy to me.  A "standard"
> that is so fragmented by vendors that it might as well not exist.
> 
> The core ideas, when you dig down through the technobabble,
> are back to things that have been around for decades - code reuse,
> scope control, network agents, ad nauseum.  I don't know why
> programmers should be terrified of this, it's one more thing
> to learn, and charge your stupified bosses to have you learn,
> and then move on to the Next Hot Thing (Web 3.0?) when that
> shows up.  Never-ending employment.

I think "programmers" are like most people -- they don't *want*
to HAVE to learn new things.  "What's wrong with what I already
know?"  :>   Wrong field for that mentality, IMO.

Doing embedded systems I can tend to ignore much of the
alphabet soup that plagues desk jockeys.  But, I trade that
for having to learn about new processors, toolchains
(since there is little standardization, there) and
"application domains" (the latter is a blessing, though,
since otherwise writing code is quite boring -- the same
old problems over and over again in different guises)

> Sounds to me like more attempts to get around the problem
> that there is more software needed than there are competent
> and talented programmers to handle.  At least at slave 
> wages.  Business won't acknowledge the fact that not
> everyone can program, and a good programmer is worth his/her
> weight in Doritos and Jolt.  Heck, universities can't
> even figure that one out.  This seems like more attempts
> to make a simple problem more obscure
> so no one is surprised when failure comes out the back end.
> 
> Or am I just getting testy in my old age?

<grin>

I think it is yet another attempt by Business to try to
take some of the "skill" out of what is still, essentially,
an *art* (developing *good* software systems).  Consider
it the equivalent of replacing generic cash registers with
those POS terminals McDonald's uses -- with *pictures* of
each of the items so the "attendant" (a downgraded "cashier")
need not be particularly skilled to use it effectively.  :<

I think all of these aproaches, in the end, are doomed to
failure because they *assume* -- i.e., it is *inherent* in
their approach/technique -- that the users of those tools
are skilled in the underlying principles; AND that the tools
work *right*.  :<  E.g., why C programmers tend to have
problems dealing with "addresses" vs. "values", etc.  Or,
understanding the inherent differences between out-of-band
and in-band, etc.  Or, "well defined interfaces" that
*aren't*...

<shrug>  Its as if the creators/formulators of these things
assume the world (and its practitioners) are perfect.  :-/