Software today is not engineering. Building the Empire State Building with three thousand people in a year is engineering. Programming today is more like the Egyptians piling blocks on each other and hoping it doesn’t fall over.

Software today is not engineering. Building the Empire State Building with three thousand people in a year is engineering. Programming today is more like the Egyptians piling blocks on each other and hoping it doesn’t fall over.

Paraphrasing Dr Alan Kay in his talk “Programming and Scaling”. I got the same sense of depression over the state of our industry when I read about Doug Engelbart’s amazing NLS system from ‘68 and the Hypertext Editing System in '67. Yes, we have millions and millions times faster computers today, but what we’re doing today is not news. They realized already in '68 that you want direct manipulation and collaborative computing.

Every day, I spend so much time building almost trivial functionality in thousands of lines of code, with brittle APIs that hook into other people’s brittle APIs, because that’s the code base we have, and every other code base seems to be roughly looks like that, too. I spend my weekends learning about C and C-like systems because that’s what I know; I don’t go around learning about compiler-compilers, I’m stuck in what my brain already “knows” that programming is like. I didn’t know twenty minutes ago that you could write a complete compositing 2d graphics environment with 26 compositing method in under 400 lines of code.

My very good friend Martin once told me how different it is to even think in Japanese and Chinese, how those thoughts can’t even be translated into English. Kay’s realization that the same holds true for programming is profound in a way I didn’t realize before.

Back in uni I unwittingly participated in an experiment. One of the teachers arranged two lab sessions with the exact same content, and put Java programmers in one and C++ programmers in the other. We were given some UML and were asked to implement it. The real task had actually been to see how fast we could build it (but were of course not told in beforehand that we were being timed); and while I was fastest in my group and it felt like the C++ came out pretty naturally, the result showed that it took me twice as long to write the code than it took on average for the Java coders.

Ever since then, I’ve been worried that even though I feel like I’m really fast with my tools, those very tools are holding me back, and I’m *really* just a tenth as fast as I could have been with another set of tools. I love ObjC, but it’s still C, it still got non-object types, there’s still manual memory management, everything is viciously verbose, and meta programming is still more limited than in some non-C languages.