Dinosaur Manifesto

By James Bredijk

January 7, 2002

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I am a language junkie. When I first started out, I bought the "On To..." titles by Winston, then a wide variety of "Learning..." from O'Reilly, and finally the "Handbook of Programming Languages," Finkel's "Advanced Programming Language Design," and several others. Of course, what good is a language without a compiler? So I'm well stocked in "Compiler" titles too. And let's not forget hardware and software architecture — it's all related. Amazon.com just loves me. It's all very fascinating and enlightening (if sometimes dry).

But I have learned that we as a programming community don't need better languages, and we don't need better tools. We need better programmers. I have spent some time trolling eBay for old computer textbooks from the '60s and '70s — and I'm embarrassed to say that I've glommed about a dozen of them. I've even read some of the "Macintosh Assembly Language Programming" texts from the early & mid '80s. What they did was very impressive. Who could live with a GUI inside of 128K today?

What designers and programmers were able to do with the very limited RAM, disk space, and bus throughput (not to mention anemic clock cycle counts) in the "old days" is amazing. The all-too-common "code bloat" and "inefficient" coding practices of today are not to be blamed on Generation X: Well, not completely. If we didn't have all of the excessive hardware resources that we do today, programmers would still be squeezing every bit out of every clock cycle. I have a "slow" Mac G4: G4/400 512 MB, 60-GB hard drive. Why should I care about conserving system resources?

I'm not blaming progress — progress is a good thing. Making programming "so easy, even a regular person can do it" should be our biggest concern. Hobbyists are fine and good people, and they deserve to do everything that they want. But professionals should be skilled and qualified.

The rapid growth of the IT industry has required many companies to hire under- or barely qualified candidates to fill IT positions.

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