I agree 99% with the point of the author. I would like to add my two cents how complexity and diversity of tools & ways costs software developpers :
Yesterday I attended a conference by a young but experienced Phd Java engineer about his experience in a research project using NodeJS (server side web programming in javascript).
Basically he explained he needed 6 months of project time to get up to speed with the language and the ways of the platform (asynchronous callbacks...) and that is with mentoring of a more experienced dev in JS. For me this learning curve and the mentoring time is a lot of $$$$ and opportunities for suboptimal work.
The profile of this dev, and is ability to perform a fine talk makes me thing his capabilities are not subpar. Do we really expect doctors, architects others high profile professions to work during many months suboptimally, requiring special mentoring, just to use new tools ? It seems to me that their initial training is supposed to be all what they need for a decade or more.
What would you think if your surgeon needed to work 6 months with a tutor because his hospital bought some new chirgurgical tool ? Basically were are shooting ourselves in both feets by using tools evolving too fast for us to master in any sensible way.
Turing told us all languages can do the work. Yet we are still inventing new ones. Maybe we should focus our attention on something else to improve our output.
Yesterday I attended a conference by a young but experienced Phd Java engineer about his experience in a research project using NodeJS (server side web programming in javascript).
Basically he explained he needed 6 months of project time to get up to speed with the language and the ways of the platform (asynchronous callbacks...) and that is with mentoring of a more experienced dev in JS. For me this learning curve and the mentoring time is a lot of $$$$ and opportunities for suboptimal work.
The profile of this dev, and is ability to perform a fine talk makes me thing his capabilities are not subpar. Do we really expect doctors, architects others high profile professions to work during many months suboptimally, requiring special mentoring, just to use new tools ? It seems to me that their initial training is supposed to be all what they need for a decade or more.
What would you think if your surgeon needed to work 6 months with a tutor because his hospital bought some new chirgurgical tool ? Basically were are shooting ourselves in both feets by using tools evolving too fast for us to master in any sensible way.
Turing told us all languages can do the work. Yet we are still inventing new ones. Maybe we should focus our attention on something else to improve our output.