Computerworld -
"You lot aren't programmers. You're just coders."
His name was Hugh and he was an IBM salesman. That pithy quote, his first name and his shiny double-breasted suit are about all I can remember of him. I was fresh-faced and two months or so into a job at IBM, a firm I thought embodied the pinnacle of computing prowess. In the middle of a PL/1 course, the bosses had decided to inject some "reality" by having a senior member of the company's sales force deliver a lecture. He was good, I'll give him that. A full four years before Alec Baldwin's great performance as the hard-nosed "motivator" Blake in the film Glengarry Glen Ross, Hugh was there laying it on the line to some spotty kids straight out of school. Unlike Blake, Hugh had no need to ask me derisively what I drove: I was 17 and didn't have a license.
"What's this?" he said, holding up a picture of what I thought was a freezer. Blank looks from everyone in the room. None of us had ever seen an AS/400 before. We didn't know it, but this nondescript hunk of metal was about to swell Hugh's pockets with gargantuan commissions for the next 10 years. A point he was all too keen on reminding us of -- when he wasn't dissing our profession, that is:
"Computers have so much memory, you can do whatever you like. There's no skill to it anymore."
In those days, 10 megs of RAM was considered opulent, but he was right. The generation before me was probably the last for whom memory management in application development was as crucial as one's algorithms. Using an integer to hold a Boolean value wasn't just lazy; it could end up trashing your stack. Keeping your code tight and lean was a source of pride as well as a procedural necessity. It had the desirable side effect of enforcing discipline and keeping the size of your executables down too.
Over the past 15 years, though, we've seen Hugh's maxim taken to ridiculous levels. I'm talking about bloatware. It's basically software with two main features: a whopping, disk-munching footprint, and a ratio of features to features-actually-used-by-normal-people that's well over 2:1. It probably passes your typical end user by -- until the crashes and hangs come, that is. Code gorged with unneeded options equals more scope for bugs, which equals more problems: It's the bane of all our lives, and programmers the world over, including ex-coders like me, put up with it.
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