Journal FortKnox's Journal: Coders vs. Developers 13
People always ask why I hate the title "hacker" or "coder". I always correct them to say "I am a professional developer, or software engineer".
What's the difference? MosesJones explains in this comment my thoughts.
What's the difference? MosesJones explains in this comment my thoughts.
Yeah right. (Score:2)
Re:Yeah right. (Score:2)
I think I could stand just 3 'coders' or 3 'hackers,' but not 16.
diff between developer or programmer (Score:3, Funny)
Re:diff between developer or programmer (Score:3, Funny)
I read that as 30 kilograms.. which was pretty amusing. Not sure if that was what you meant or not, if so, excellent post
Re:diff between developer or programmer (Score:2)
Re:diff between developer or programmer (Score:2)
Damnit I need to sleep more sometimes. Money never crossed my mind.
My opinion on the difference is a coder is something any monkey with a book can do. A developer is someone who designs, with elegance and art.
If you are going to say this... (Score:2)
...you better have some reasoning to back it up.
Slash (note: not "Slashcode". I don't know why people keep using that name, but the website [slashcode.com] is named the way it is due to DNS collisions.I do think that there could be more to it: working ACLs, and a proper web/CLI based permissions editors would also go a long way to helping it out, however much of the code is now very modular and easy to extend.
To say something "needs a rewrite", especially coming from a developer and not a coder is a serious acusation, and I would really like the reasons behind your feelings on this.
This doesn't mean that the Slash team will be officially looking into things like this, and I haven't been reading Slashcode in a long time, but saying this and then not providing something to back it up is rarely the way to make things happen. Got beef? Air it out and maybe folks will listen.
Personally, I think the Slash code is some of the easiest Open Source Perl code I have dealt with, and I've seen a lot of bad Perl code out there. But that was "bad" from a maintance/readability standpoint, most this code did work, and it did it's job well, but extending any of it would be a nightmare. So I'm really curious as to why you think Slash is one of them.
Re:If you are going to say this... (Score:1)
Re:If you are going to say this... (Score:2)
Here here. The "complete rewrite" school seems to keep forgetting NETSCAPE. They went that route, and look where it got them. Exactly.
No, the best one can hope for is to add modularity to a legacy system in incremental steps. This idea of code base "revolution" is so far away from software engineering that it takes many stamps just to get a postcard from one world to the other.
If you want to make code easy to maintain, write it in ADA. Wait... what did I just say?!
Re:If you are going to say this... (Score:2)
If you are going to say this...
Some options:
- slash really needs to be rewritten from scratch
- slash really needs rewriting from scratch
- someone should really rewrite slash from scratch
- slash is really in need of rewritting from scratch
-- MarkusQP.S. The above is meant as a friendly jibe. If it doesn't strike you that way, please return the unused portion for a full refund.
I just sent the link over to my boss... (Score:2)
We work in a small company, but we are suffering right now due to these exact points made. We have a company where the software was written by a kid just out of high school, it was done in Tomcat in windows.
Granted, the kid was pretty clever, we have litterally JSP pages with 7k lines of code in it. There was no classes used in the whole project, and now we have a litteral mess.
I have worked on another project w/over 500k lines of total code and it was all very well organized into MVC type system. We now have 1 engineer maintaining that system, and because it was done that way.. that company is profitable. The company I am at right now, we have 5 programmers and we can't seem to get jack-shit done.
I have finally thrown my hands in the air, and stopped working on the web project. I have began a project based around web-services and we have a strong customer interest, but it's based on a clean codebase. Our hope is to eventually gut-out the JSP and move to a MVC on the web application, but, either way it's going to cost a LOT of man hours to do so. If it was done right the first time, we wouldn't have this mess.
I have never been in a situation where such bad code has actually made me consider finding another place to work. Thanksfully they are flexible in letting us fix it.
Cheers
Re:I just sent the link over to my boss... (Score:2)
If I see one lick of code in a JSP, I roll my eyes in disgust. Taglibs are java's answer to making readable jsps. I am currently working on a major insurance intraweb interface to a very complex accounting database. We have no code in our JSP's and the HTML-monkeys -love it-. To be able to modify the look of a dynamic webpage in dreamweaver (dreamweaver has a plug-in that will recognize all struts' taglibs) totally blows their minds.
Makes a great impression on the managers, too.
BTW - the first release of the software is being maintained by 2 developers. I'm talking a several million line piece of code being maintained by two developers.
Ah, the joy of a good design...
Re:I just sent the link over to my boss... (Score:2)
Have you taken a look at Velocity? Definately an interesting tool. Biggest drawback is the lack of taglib support inside of the templates, but we have found it very simple to teach them the basics of collections. all the programming you have to work with is itterating collections for output. (Though, arguably not as elegent as taglib, who knows)...
I agree, I was telling one of the guys how sad it is that some of the previous programmers will never likely never know how good it feels to sleep at night knowing your chiz is going to work, and work well.