Hacker News Reader

Comment by blub | Hacker News Reader

It’s the sociology of software development.

The guild of software developers has no real standards, no certification, no proven practices outside <book> and <what $company is doing> while continuing to depend on the whims of project managers, POs and so-caled technical leaders and others which can’t tell quality code from their own ass.

There’s usually no money in writing high-quality software and almost everything in a software development project conspires against quality. Languages like Rust are a desperate attempt at fixing that with technology.

I guess it works, in a way, but these kind of blog posts just show us how inept most programmers are and why the Rust band-aid was needed in the first place.

View on HN

Maybe. But I wouldn't diss better languages, linters, and other tool inprovements. These systematically increase quality at very low cost. It boggles my mind that the whole industry is not falling over itself to continuously embrace better tools and technology.

The whole industry is, the C++ ecosystem is just not.

I don’t think that’s true. C++ just has a lot of baggage to deal with and people are doing the best they can with some ridiculous constraints. The sanitizers and things like clang-tidy, and better analysis in compilers seem to be really well received.

This. The industry is a hot-pot of gut feelings/seat of my pants mixed with true engineering and mathematical rigor.

It is all hit or miss. Everyone claims they do high-quality, critical software in public, while in private, they claim the opposite, that they are fast and break things, and programming is an art, not math.

And then you have venture capital firms now pushing "vibe coding."

Software development is likely the highest variance engineering space, sometimes and in some companies, not even being engineering, but "vibes."

It is interesting how this is going to progress forward. Are we going to have a situation like the Quebec Bridge [https://colterreed.com/the-failed-bridge-that-inspired-a-sim...]. The Crowdstrike incident taking down the whole airspace proved that is not enough. Market hacks in "decentralized exchanges," the same. Not sure where we are heading.

I guess we are waiting for some catastrophe that will have some venture capital liable for the vibe coding, and then we will have world wide regulation pushed on us.

Software developers no, but Software Engineering does, it is a professional title in many countries, where universities and engineers are only legally allowed to use such titles after being validated.

I really don't think this matters. It's the processes beyond physical engineering that make it better. I have seen the most highly accredited software devs write the worst code. I have seen self-taught devs deeply consider implication of the things they are writing and solve the problem simply. And it's not even the case that I can perceive a trend. Well except for PhDs, I have met only one PhD that I know can write actual good code.

I think if PhDs are bad at code it is because they ain't coding in a team 7.6 hours a day. It is not the PhDness rather than not being a coder. (Sone PhDs might code a lot as a hobby and be good).

You can also write a medical PhD without knowing how to do first aid on a snake bite.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com