Krista's Coding Corner


Offtopic: Maturing industry?

As I have said before, I’m not a programmer but an engineer for totally different field. The field I work with has matured and it doesn’t have that many lapses any more (some sure but nothing really really major). We kind of alike have all the right answers already (thou we may not use them...). We now know what absolutely won’t work, we know hundreds of different failed techniques and ideas - and some working ones. In Plato’s terms: our idea of our field and its solutions is known.

Programming then again seems to me as a really childish field. I’m able to watch it somewhat closely and it just amazes me what kind of a struggle it seems to be. Some things clearly are the same mistakes as my own field did in the ancient history (think for example the idea of mass production and tolerances* or the process where a client buys a turnkey/working product or the rule of never buying a prototype..).

It saddens me that the information human civilization has gathered is not used properly. Maybe the reason is that programming always seems to be really isolated field (thou it shouldn’t be) and people there are young with little or no experience of life.

Maybe we have lost the curiosity towards life itself. One field does not cover whole life -and it also shouldn’t. The best inventions in our era are made with co-operation and intersection with different disciplines. Programming, being young enthusiastic and agile, should be the first creating bridges to the other, maybe more conservative, sectors.

Do I know the answers for programming? No but maybe I will start researching them one day. The code of conduct that works somewhere mostly needs to be written a bit differently to gain full use somewhere else -even if the idea remains the same.

*revolutionary idea was that you don’t create unique parts that fit only to one certain device but you manufacture them in such a way that the parts can replace each other if needed (==will fit to any similar device of the same model). This was successfully used with gun manufacturing: there were no unique guns anymore as parts become interchangeable.

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