Lucky you, I’m going to talk about computers again. This time, about programmers themselves and my candid observations surround this rather select group. My background is that although I have never programmed for a living, I have several advanced degrees in the subject, many from prestigious trade schools. (I disagree with the theory that programming can be learned purely academically. After I graduated with a university degree, I found I had to return to college to get the proper hands-on.)I would first like to dispel a myth. It is commonly thought that certain types, like whiz kids, hack into computers and create evil. That is completely false. The fact is the capability for evil is already purposely designed into all computer systems. This requires extra heavy work for it was always the programmer/designer’s intention to use computers for this nefarious purpose. Don’t blame computers for snooping, corruption and theft. No need to credit ordinary hackers with any brains they don’t actually have. They are manipulating a technology that is already there and ripe for abuse. Leave a hole in the fence and the boys will sneak through.
It was in university I detected a division in programmer’s temperaments. Some, like myself, were driven by the pure challenge. Others seemed to not really catch on, but learned enough to pass the finals, often stating how they hated the “exactitudes” of formal programming. The first group went on to create word processors, spreadsheets, databases, and a horde of useful applications. The second group became the gang that brought us chat lines, addictive games, identity theft and Facebook.
My focus today is the long-term effects of that second group who “learned enough”. I call these people “Crowd B”. They came to dominate programming by sheer weight of numbers. Whereas the few true innovators are well-known by name, the other 99% represent the dead weight that churns out masses of code which requires after-market fixing up. Most of their output arrives with a 20-chapter manual and lasts barely six months. I won’t mention MicroSoft.
I wonder if object-oriented programming in its current form (the operative restriction) would have made it in a world without these satisficers. (Satisficers are those who cannot solve a problem, they just make it go away long enough to land on their replacements. Think bank branch managers, lieutenant-colonels, ex-presidents and all of my relatives.) What brought this up is that I have again been asking for small pointers and assistance with my [biz-card] database.
[Author's note: this database was eventually never built. I could not get it to work and neither could anyone else. Long before I could fix the thing, a similar product appeared on the Internet. Angie's List.]
I asked around for help Instead of knowledge, I’m getting responses from people who don’t really quite know what’s going on. They passed the exams, but in doing so developed a suit of armor. Whereas I regularly translate theory into practice and teach people useful methods, Crowd B won’t touch other people’s code, always insisting on doing the whole project themselves. I’ve had occasion to examine the output of Crowd B. It sucks the big green hemorrhoid. They try to pretend it is professional to do things their way. No wonder they either insist on working alone or only in teams where blame can be shifted.
The point here is that it is not necessarily pure imagination that things are screwed up in the computer world. I find a lot of my older students say they hate computers, but it becomes clear in no time that they are really reacting to the dishonesty, double-talk and evasiveness that arrives at the same time as the sales pitch, and remains long after the computer has been junked. It is the programmers who are behind it all, if you ask me. And by implication, if you got this far, you asked me.
[Author's note: there is a paragraph gone missing here, so the following does not make much sense.]
What’s happening is I am setting up a test batch of scripts to emulate the generation of display screens. My research shows that there is one proper way to do this, but my computer will not recognize the command that allows the transfer of variable values. Anybody who has done the job right could easily tell me why that command won’t work. Yet I have not found anybody who knows the simple answer. Meaning they have not followed the rules and don’t know the proper way. Also meaning I will, as usual, have to find the solution myself.
Here is the offending line of code. [<%@ Language=VBScript %>]
[Author’s note: the “[ ]“ symbols are used to indicate that, when coding, you type exactly what is between the symbols. This avoids the ambiguity of quotation marks. I am the inventor of this system, which has yet to achieve the world fame it deserves, and a new category of Nobel Prize for “simplicity defined”.]
If you examine the code, you see that it is syntactically correct. Therefore, there is another snippet that probably has to appear before this line, or some feature that must be activated before it will trigger. Yep, I’m on my own.
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