Saturday, October 11, 2008

Are we all toddlers?

Apache Foundation was founded in June 1999.

Eclipse was announced in November 2001.

Hibernate was registered on SourceForge in November 2001.

Those are all indispensable cornerstones of my current professional life. At the time those cornerstones were built, I was finishing my studies at university.
This means during most of the time in which I was being prepared for my future professional life, the stage in which this professional life should take place was not even nearly defined!

This is like being a physics student in 1687, at the time when Isaac Newton published his PhilosophiƦ Naturalis Principia Mathematica...

You could argue, that it's only the tools that are moving so fast in our industry, the concepts are remaining the same. But I dont't think that is true. We are still in a phase where the concepts are constantly developed and evolved. They have to, for being able to satisfy the ever growing expectations and requirements:

http://www.realityloop.net/blog/Complexity_small.jpg

Programming today is not the same as 10 years ago! Most of us have been thought that computer science is about mathematics. We had been learning about algorithm and data structures etc...
Most of this is not really relevant today any more!
[Discaimer: maybe my perception is a bit distorted from suffeing too long in the trenches of enterprise development, but I think nobody can generally deny the change]


Compare this to the following statement from Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years:
Researchers (Bloom (1985), Bryan & Harter (1899), Hayes (1989), Simmon & Chase (1973)) have shown it takes about ten years to develop expertise in any of a wide variety of areas, including chess playing, music composition, telegraph operation, painting, piano playing, swimming, tennis, and research in neuropsychology and topology. There appear to be no real shortcuts.
0641224128a0ae0fd5bfa010.L.jpg


What does this mean for our industry? Are we all still toddlers, playing inside our little baby-fences?

1 comment:

  1. A Developer today MUST know algorithm, data struture etc. The framework are useful for normal activites, but if you want or must to change or to extend the behaviour you can't to code without knowledge.


    The problem today is more the lack of developers knowing the basis than the lack of developer using external tools.

    ReplyDelete

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