Note: The firstname/lastname structure existed 3 years before I was even at the company. How's that for business realities?

I disagree. A LOT of programmers don't work for software shops. Non software-shop employers don't care about whether your code is elegant, or architecturally sound, or following best practices etc.

You can be arrogant and tell people to get new jobs all you want, the reality is that there is a lot of money to be made writing software for random widget manufacturer -- and they don't give a crap how you make their business thrive as long as you do.

I have been maintaining the same code base for over 10 years.

At 3PM today I was kind of down. All of the things on my plate were way too big to do before 5. I figured I'd look for simple things in the Issue Tracker to work on.

"Add a nickname field, and migrate first names with (nickname) information into nickname field."

I could do that in 2 hours...But unfortunately...

About 30% of the field guys at my company are known by their nickname. Every payroll stub, every invoice, every bit of info currently concatenates first and last names. There are probably over 300 (being conservative) places in the code that concatenate first and last name. And even if I added the nickname to this concatenation, I'd have to make sure that the SQL queries pulled this field (SELECT * is evil)

And abandoning nicknames? HAHAHA, no freaking way. There would be a company-wide revolt. Even our clients would complain that they didn't know who "Jimmy Johnson" was, ("Ohhh...Jimmy 'Big-Dog' Johnson!")

So a 1 hour task turns into two weeks. And this is one of 138 things on my to-do list.

So, how do we maintain a passion for programming?

In my opinion, you just have to sneak in every ounce of innovation. You can spend the rest of your life fixing crap that they forced you to hack in the first place. You just have to sneak in the fun stuff.

From the perspective of the average user, a fax machine is not bad technology. They buy it, plug in two wires, type a number and go.

If they are going to do the same thing with a PC, they have to buy a PC, buy a scanner, make sure they have the appropriate scanning software, make sure they're scanning the a file format the recipient expects, ensure their PC has an Internet connection, make sure the attachment isn't too large to email, get the recipient to read out their email address in the phonetic alphabet to ensure they get it right, and I'm leaving out about 20 or so other things.

I dislike the arrogant tone of this post. Just because a technology is superior on technical merit does not mean that it necessarily gets the job done for the average Joe. You try talking users through all of the complexities of scanning, document management etc. You'll buy a fax machine in two days.

I have been coming to Slashdot for a looong time. In the "old days," something like this wouldn't have been considered remotely relevant to the site. And if somebody actually posted it, 80% of the comments would be complaining that it shouldn't have been green-lit.

Now? Posts like this look just like every other political pissing-match forum. There is a reason I don't go to Reddit.

Grapes are Sour.

I quit college because of math. I had taken a ton of CS courses, almost enough to graduate, yet still had year upon year of math to go.

I have been writing software for a living now for about 16 years. I don't recall EVER using any mathematics beyond arithmetic. (Even when I was writing 3D software, the freaking API handled the math for me)

CS is taught by math a-holes because that's the closest thing that existed in academia when these new-fangled gadgets arrived. Now? It's a joke to even pretend that these bearded math lovers should be teaching anybody.

16 year old kids writing mods for Minecraft know more about computing than those guys.

BTW, if you're not writing a windowed app, and are only interested in the canvas, you might want to look at SDL. You didn't specify exactly what you were working on.

Soo...if you're writing a windowed "productivity" app, use QT.

If you're writing a custom-graphics heavy app like a game or maybe some sort of visualization tool, use SDL.
 

I am very leery of APIs. It takes a lot to sell me. I started using QT just before the move to QT4, and instantly fell in love. At this point, unless I'm writing a game, I won't even touch C++ without using QT.

QT is the most consistent, well-documented, and intuitive API I have ever used.