Bumblebee Labs Blog - Latest Comments in Software misengineering

Re: Software misengineering

web design company — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 04:27:02 -0000

Really U expressed this above topic in a well defined manner..Thanks for this post.

Re: Software misengineering

Anon — Sun, 08 May 2011 10:48:12 -0000

i am not a great programmer, but i believe i am a decent programmer. but i am terrible in a test scenario. i cannot program when someone is looking over my shoulder.

the second thing is the same way iq tests work. many questions asked in programming tests have no real-world application. i rarely ever deal with strings, so i am terribly incompetent with strings.

i really think of myself as an engineer, as a problem solver, and programming is only one of the many skills, and it is not even a terribly important skill for me.

i should add that i have 1o years experience as an embedded software engineer and have been generally highly valued in all the places i have worked at. there have been better programmers, but rarely better all-round software engineers. i have single-handedly finished projects, often projects that no one is brave enough to take on.

Re: Software misengineering

Ramon — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 00:35:44 -0000

TLDR

Re: Software misengineering

Gregory Michael Travis — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 10:44:02 -0000

"Mask" is the operative word here. Software is very complicated, and we use abstraction to hide things, in the hopes that we can create more complicated things without screwing them up.

Programming is all about *hiding* stuff. There is so much that is invisible. While debugging a program, you are generally looking at a tiny tiny portion of it, like scanning a stadium with a flashlight.

Every programmer of a certain age knows that software was more stable years ago, because it was smaller. As it has gotten bigger, it's gotten less stable. We're still surprised by this because we are employing increasingly sophisticated tools and techniques, but apparently they can't possibly keep up with the problems caused by size.

Larger programs mean more things are hidden. Code rot is almost never discovered early. Programmers who cause code rot are almost never discovered early.

I can't account for the FizzBuzz effect at all, but it's been a while since I was in school so I really have no idea what goes on there; all I know is that it has got to be really different than it was when I was in school.