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Comment by ska | Hacker News Reader

   I take it to mean they've never actually worked on a truly hard problem in their lives.

I certainly have some empathy for this view. On the other hand, the right time to have addressed actually fixing some of these problems is 25 years ago. The second best time is today (to steal/abuse a phrase). Enterprise organizations sometimes punt these things down the road with half-assed solutions. It's cheaper today and tomorrow maybe it will be someone else's problem, right? All the while the overall issue becomes worse.

It sucks sometimes to be at the bottom of a deep hole you dug yourself into without a ladder, but at the end of the day, it's your hole.

And you are right that sometimes it's just a hard problem. But you can always make those worse.

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Sometimes, 25 years ago, a solution to the problem wasn't available. I worked on state-of-the-art systems from 25 years ago. We were writing homegrown streaming data protocols over raw sockets, parsed with lex and yacc. We didn't have ssh, we didn't have http, we didn't have xml (much less json). A world-class system from 25 years ago would be scrap today... how many bright young junior programmers today could update a lex/yacc parse stream, or handle socket programming or DOS HIMEM?

Improvement needs to be continuous. The ability to update individual parts of the system with minimal coupling is vital. But even keeping that as the system evolves is a challenge - and designing for it in advance leads to all sorts of unnecessary "just in case" abstractions in the code.

Keeping code alive and running for a generation is a whole different kind of challenge.

I agree on the continuous improvement - i wasn't suggesting you do this once and stop thinking about it.

But note, 25 years we didn't have the same solutions we might have today, but we had good solutions to lots of common problems. We certainly had solutions to "system is specified by a mixed bag of ASCII and inconsistent EBCDIC files, none alike, all specified 15 years ago. Which is at the heart of the problem OP posited. 25 years ago people were saying exactly the same thing about banking systems in COBOL that beat describes. Exactly. The batch processing OP discusses had already been out of vogue for a decade at least. We had good solutions for nearly all of these problems, what we didn't have was quick, cheap solutions.

Just for completeness: we had html. We'd had SGML for a decade (which begat HTML and later XML). We had reasonable streaming protocols. We were a lot worse at connecting heterogeneous systems controlled by different entities and interoperating, but we good at networking and building distributed systems at a smaller scale.

Keeping code alive and running for a generation is a very difficult problem, but keeping systems tidy, modular, and evolving is manageable, until you let them go too much.

And people are digging the same holes today. It's not technology that is the cause, it never was. It's cost and short term planning.

> how many bright young junior programmers today could update a lex/yacc parse stream, or handle socket programming or DOS HIMEM?

Almost all of them – if they're really "bright" anyways. Even given that a lot of the important context is missing, bright programmers can do this stuff.

that's disingenuous. anyone can do anything given enough to learn the skills. what OP is asking is how many of today's programmers have the skills already. the answer is very few.

Indeed. If someone suggested writing a custom stream parser for something as simple as scanned images today, I'd point them right back at the wide array of off-the-shelf, standardized solutions.

Sure, a good programmer can learn this stuff. But they shouldn't have to, not these days. There's far more to programming than any one person could ever learn. Choose your battles.

How many programmers could write a functional machine code?

The wrong question is being asked. Modern programming techniques work because they have successfully abstracted this complexity.

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