"Uncle" Bob Martin - "The Future of Programming"

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Channel: Expert Talks Mobile

Views: 953,576

Rating: 4.7534571 out of 5

Keywords: Uncle Bob, Programming, Computer History, ObjC, iOS, Swift, Agile, Software Regulation, Apple, Clean Code

Id: ecIWPzGEbFc

Length: 78min 21sec (4701 seconds)

Published: Wed May 18 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/SeerUD]

Anyone willing to give a TL;DW?

[u/Praflio]

80 minutes

Haha, nope.

[u/cmthornton]

Overall, I'd say the talk is OK.

My understanding of this talk seems to be wildly different from many others. Maybe it is an age difference. Maybe it's because I've read and listened to some of Martin's other work. I don't know.

The history on hardware, number of computers/programmers over time, etc. is not meant to be a fluff history lesson or presentation filler. The lesson is if you can write software today then you can read and write software written by someone in the 1940s and that person can read and write yours. Software today is fundamentally the same thing today as it was back then, only the syntax has changed. The other history lesson is we (as an industry) generally keep making the same mistakes and we're on course to repeat history again: (1) software is still the same stuff it always has been and we keep messing around with new languages. To this day we're still claiming this is productive but this can't be true indefinitely and Martin definitely thinks we've crossed that point; (2) early programmers had an agile-like method, this was lost when these older professionals retired in the '80s and '90s, then in 2001 we got agile, but the wrong people (business people, not programmers) joined and hijacked the movement; (3) we will get an agile-like process again, most likely through forced regulation unless the industry comes together to self-regulate like the medical, legal, and other professions.

Also, Martin's point about younger programmers seems to be lost. Yes, he says as a whole they lack professionalism and discipline. He also says younger people are being taken advantage of and they lack the professionalism and discipline as a whole to see it. Additionally, the number of programmers doubles every 5 years, so within 5 years young programmers will be part of the old guard. Become a leader, try do something about these problems.

He mentions a lack of women and diversity, total time spent in this video talking about the lack of women is <5 mins. This topic seems to trigger many people (esp. the youtube comments). Martin is treating the lack of women currently in the field as an open problem---meaning, he says it's a problem and he has no immediate solution for it---but he talks about his experiences. He states that (1) the number of women used to be close to 50/50; and (2) the other sciences don't have the same problem as computer science does. How did we get to what we have now?

Timestamps/contents:

• 0:10 Jiminy Christmas
• 0:22 Gauging his audience's background (iOS devs, Objective C, ...)
• 0:50 Objective-C history; parallel history with C++; C lineage
• 7:00 Obj-C unfortunately resurrected (Apple/Jobs/NeXT/back to Apple)
• 8:54 Gender Experiment; Gender differences in his early career vs mid and late career
• 11:12 History - Turing; Annotated Turing; Turing inventions (subroutines, macros, variables); early hardware (relays, vacuum tubes, memory delay lines)
• 22:17 Turing's report about his work, claims:
  1. "we will need mathematicians of ability" - referring to training Mathematicians how to code
  2. "a good deal of this kind of work will need to be done" - referring to the act of coding itself
  3. "our difficulties will be in the maintenance of appropriate discipline so that we don't lose sight of what we are doing" - referring to the need to maintain the code we've already written
• 24:22 number of computers/programmers in the 1940s, 1950s
• 25:16 the memory problem; magnetic-core memory
• 28:03 languages; Fortran; turnaround time of a program in the days of computer operators
• 33:10 Lisp; IBM 70x computers; number of computers/programmers 1960s
• 35:00 Programmer's from 1950s were scientists, engineers, mathematicians---generally older, mature adults; (1965-ish) transistor replaces vacuum tube; IBM 1401 machine/decimal computer
• 37:04 Number of computers/programmers increasing significantly; Not enough scientists, engineers, mathematicians so programmer's were best/brightest from various fields---programmers were still generally older, mature adults
• 39:11 1960s: IBM 360s; Simula-67 / object orientation; structured programming; C, Unix
• 41:45 1970s: DEC PDP-8s; number of computers/programmers; programmers trained in computer science, electrical engineering - almost all young, almost all male
• 44:30 1980s: names of all the women Bob probably ever worked with; graph of the percentage of women (0-50%) over time in years (1970s to 2010s) in all science fields vs computer science; business needed programmers, programmers were young men---made up for their lack of discipline with energy (long hours, hyper focused) and they are cheap labor
• 47:31 Programmers being young---not knowing how to manage projects, responsibilities, or time---started to need management and processes to meet business's needs; older generations used agile-like processes---work cycles ("sprints") of 6 weeks; writing tests in the morning, getting them passing in the afternoon
• 49:33 Younger generation disciplined via the waterfall method; number of programmers doubles every 5 years; software is perpetually a new, young, and inexperienced industry
• 52:20 Hardware/demographic changes; physical space of transistors in your phone vs as if it were vacuum tubes
• 55:39 "The future of programming" is more of the same because the software is what hasn't changed throughout history; you can read/write old code; dead programmer's could probably read/write new code; the syntax has changed, but the concepts are still the same
• 57:44 Learned, and learning, what not to do; lost professionalism/discipline in the field
• 59:34 1995: professionals retiring; career programmers hitting 40s+; agile manifesto; agile is about discipline, professionalism, craftsmanship; business doesn't understand refactoring, testing, etc---programmers as professionals need to own that risks; wrong people got certified for scrum/agile
• 1:09:46 What must change: we must define what it means to be a programmer; we need leaders---software runs everything, people don't understand us, we don't understand our discipline; programmers knowingly wrote code that cheated emissions tests, a large disaster is inevitable, regulation will come---best to self-regulate before it's forced

[u/[deleted]]

If we don't study the mistakes of the future we're doomed to repeat them for the first time :(

[u/ScottBaiosPenis]

im so over the "women in tech" thing...i cant think of a field MORE welcoming to women than tech...people make it sound like your sending a woman into a construction site or something where suddenly the room is filled with wolf whistles and crass come-ons, it is the total opposite of that...any time there is a woman programmer either the devs are scared to death of her or falling all over themselves to fedora tip/m'lady her

[u/Rizens]

Absolutely awful talk , nothing is correlated to anything.

Start to rant about too many languages ( doesn't even follow up about this nor the state of JS ) then there is too few women in IT (all aboard the diversity train please !) then talk about agile , but he doesn't even get to the point of "The future of programming" .

I expected Serverless , AI assisted code editor , AI Driven design , Reactive Micro-Services , none of that is present just an old guy talking about what he had in his mind and being super proud of himself for that.

That was insulting to watch.

[u/TimmyTesticles]

This guy was definitely getting paid by the hour

[u/ultramahalay]

If Robert Martin were to read the comments here, his reaction would probably be:

These "boys" of programming /smh

[u/davegeurts]

I enjoyed it, thanks for posting! Very entertaining and his view of the history of computing was fun to listen to.

If you want to see proof that there is an actual problem in CS and women compared to women doing other scientific jobs watch the video at minute 46.