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A new career in software development: advice for non-youngsters
Lately I have been encountering non-young people looking to switch careers, into software development. My suggestions have centered around the ageism culture and how they can take advantage of fashions in software ecosystems to improve their job prospects.
I start by telling them the good news: the demand for software developers outstrips supply, followed by the bad news that software development culture is ageist.
One consequence of the preponderance of the young is that people are heavily influenced by fads and fashions, which come and go over less than a decade.
The perception of technology progresses through the stages of fashionable, established and legacy (management-speak for unfashionable).
Non-youngsters can leverage the influence of fashion’s impact on job applicants by focusing on what is unfashionable, the more unfashionable the less likely that youngsters will apply, e.g., maintaining Cobol and Fortran code (both seriously unfashionable).
The benefits of applying to work with unfashionable technology include more than a smaller job applicant pool:
- new technology (fashion is about the new) often experiences a period of rapid change, and keeping up with change requires time and effort. Does somebody with a family, or outside interests, really want to spend time keeping up with constant change at work? I suspect not,
- systems depending on unfashionable technology have been around long enough to prove their worth, the sunk cost has been paid, and they will continue to be used until something a lot more cost-effective turns up, i.e., there is more job security compared to systems based on fashionable technology that has yet to prove their worth.
There is lots of unfashionable software technology out there. Software can be considered unfashionable simply because of the language in which it is written; some of the more well known of such languages include: Fortran, Cobol, Pascal, and Basic (in a multitude of forms), with less well known languages including, MUMPS, and almost any mainframe related language.
Unless you want to be competing for a job with hordes of keen/cheaper youngsters, don’t touch Rust, Go, or anything being touted as the latest language.
Databases also have a fashion status. The unfashionable include: dBase, Clarion, and a whole host of 4GL systems.
Be careful with any database that is NoSQL related, it may be fashionable or an established product being marketed using the latest buzzwords.
Testing and QA have always been very unsexy areas to work in. These areas provide the opportunity for the mature applicants to shine by highlighting their stability and reliability; what company would want to entrust some young kid with deciding whether the software is ready to be released to paying customers?
More suggestions for non-young people looking to get into software development welcome.
Widely used programming languages: past, present, and future
Programming languages are like pop groups in that they have followers, fans and supporters; new ones are constantly being created and some eventually become widely popular, while those that were once popular slowly fade away or mutate into something else.
Creating a language is a relatively popular activity. Science fiction and fantasy authors have been doing it since before computers existed, e.g., the Elf language Quenya devised by Tolkien, and in the computer age Star Trek’s Klingon. Some very good how-to books have been written on the subject.
As soon as computers became available, people started inventing programming languages.
What have been the major factors influencing the growth to widespread use of a new programming languages (I’m ignoring languages that become widespread within application niches)?
Cobol and Fortran became widely used because there was widespread implementation support for them across computer manufacturers, and they did not have to compete with any existing widely used languages. Various niches had one or more languages that were widely used in that niche, e.g., Algol 60 in academia.
To become widely used during the mainframe/minicomputer age, a new language first had to be ported to the major computers of the day, whose products sometimes supported multiple, incompatible operating systems. No new languages became widely used, in the sense of across computer vendors. Some new languages were widely used by developers, because they were available on IBM computers; for several decades a large percentage of developers used IBM computers. Based on job adverts, RPG was widely used, but PL/1 not so. The use of RPG declined with the decline of IBM.
The introduction of microcomputers (originally 8-bit, then 16, then 32, and finally 64-bit) opened up an opportunity for new languages to become widely used in that niche (which would eventually grow to be the primary computing platform of its day). This opportunity occurred because compiler vendors for the major languages of the day did not want to cannibalize their existing market (i.e., selling compilers for a lot more than the price of a microcomputer) by selling a much lower priced product on microcomputers.
BASIC became available on practically all microcomputers, or rather some dialect of BASIC that was incompatible with all the other dialects. The availability of BASIC on a vendor’s computer promoted sales of the hardware, and it was not worthwhile for the major vendors to create a version of BASIC that reduced portability costs; the profit was in games.
The dominance of the Microsoft/Intel partnership removed the high cost of porting to lots of platforms (by driving them out of business), but created a major new obstacle to the wide adoption of new languages: Developer choice. There had always been lots of new languages floating around, but people only got to see the subset that were available on the particular hardware they targeted. Once the cpu/OS (essentially) became a monoculture most new languages had to compete for developer attention in one ecosystem.
Pascal was in widespread use for a few years on micros (in the form of Turbo Pascal) and university computers (the source of Wirth’s ETH compiler was freely available for porting), but eventually C won developer mindshare and became the most widely used language. In the early 1990s C++ compiler sales took off, but many developers were writing C with a few C++ constructs scattered about the code (e.g., use of new, rather than malloc/free).
Next, the Internet took off, and opened up an opportunity for new languages to become dominant. This opportunity occurred because Internet related software was being made freely available, and established compiler vendors were not interested in making their products freely available.
There were people willing to invest in creating a good-enough implementation of the language they had invented, and giving it away for free. Luck, plus being in the right place at the right time resulted in PHP and Javascript becoming widely used. Network effects prevent any other language becoming widely used. Compatible dialects of PHP and Javascript may migrate widespread usage to quite different languages over time, e.g., Facebook’s Hack.
Java rode to popularity on the coat-tails of the Internet, and when it looked like security issues would reduce it to niche status, it became the vendor supported language for one of the major smart-phone OSs.
Next, smart-phones took off, but the availability of Open Source compilers closed the opportunity window for new languages to become dominant through lack of interest from existing compiler vendors. Smart-phone vendors wanted to quickly attract developers, which meant throwing their weight behind a language that many developers were already familiar with; Apple went with Objective-C (which evolved to Swift), Google with Java (which evolved to Kotlin, because of the Oracle lawsuit).
Where does Python fit in this grand scheme? I don’t yet have an answer, or is my world-view wrong to treat Python usage as being as widespread as C/C++/Java?
New programming languages continue to be implemented; I don’t see this ever stopping. Most don’t attract more users than their implementer, but a few become fashionable amongst the young, who are always looking to attach themselves to something new and shiny.
Will a new programming language ever again become widely used?
Like human languages, programming languages experience strong networking effects. Widely used languages continue to be widely used because many companies depend on code written in it, and many developers who can use it can obtain jobs; what company wants to risk using a new language only to find they cannot hire staff who know it, and there are not many people willing to invest in becoming fluent in a language with no immediate job prospects.
Today’s widely used programmings languages succeeded in a niche that eventually grew larger than all the other computing ecosystems. The Internet and smart-phones are used by everybody on the planet, there are no bigger ecosystems to provide new languages with a possible route to widespread use. To be widely used a language first has to become fashionable, but from now on, new programming languages that don’t evolve from (i.e., be compatible with) current widely used languages are very unlikely to migrate from fashionable to widely used.
It has always been possible for a proficient developer to dedicate a year+ of effort to create a new language implementation. Adding the polish need to make it production ready used to take much longer, but these days tool chains such as LLVM supply a lot of the heavy lifting. The problem for almost all language creators/implementers is community building; they are terrible at dealing with other developers.
It’s no surprise that nearly all the new languages that become fashionable originate with language creators who work for a company that happens to feel a need for a new language. Examples include:
- Go created by Google for internal use, and attracted an outside fan base. Company languages are not new, with IBM’s PL/1 being the poster child (or is there a more modern poster child). At the moment Go is a trendy language, and this feeds a supply of young developers willing to invest in learning it. Once the trendiness wears off, Google will start to have problems recruiting developers, the reason: Being labelled as a Go developer limits job prospects when few other companies use the language. Talk to a manager who has tried to recruit developers to work on applications written in Fortran, Pascal and other once-widely used languages (and even wannabe widely used languages, such as Ada),
- Rust a vanity project from Mozilla, which they have now
abandonedcast adrift. Did Rust become fashionable because it arrived at the right time to become the not-Google language? I await a PhD thesis on the topic of the rise and fall of Rust, - Microsoft’s C# ceased being trendy some years ago. These days I don’t have much contact with developers working in the Microsoft ecosystem, so I don’t know anything about the state of the C# job market.
Every now and again a language creator has the social skills needed to start an active community. Zig caught my attention when I read that its creator, Andrew Kelley, had quit his job to work full-time on Zig. Two and a-half years later Zig has its own track at FOSEM’21.
Will Zig become the next fashionable language, as Rust/Go popularity fades? I’m rooting for Zig because of its name, there are relatively few languages whose name starts with Z; the start of the alphabet is over-represented with language names. It would be foolish to root for a language because of a belief that it has magical properties (e.g., powerful, readable, maintainable), but the young are foolish.
Will language choice converge to a few?
Will the number of commonly used programming languages converge to a few that remain commonly used for ever, will there be many relatively common languages in use, or will the (relatively) commonly used languages change over time?
There are plenty of advantages to having one programming language that everybody uses for ever. English+local dialects seems to be heading towards becoming the World’s one native language, but the programming language world seems to be moving in the direction of diversification and perhaps even experiencing changing popularity of those in common use.
What are the forces that drive programing language usage?
Existing code. If a company wants to maintain and update its software products it needs to hire people to use the language they are written in. This is a force that maintains the status quo.
Existing programmer skills. When given the task of writing new software where language usage is not specified, developers are likely to pick a language they already know. In the case of group development the choice is made by group leaders. This is a force that maintains the status quo.
Fashion. Every field has fashions and programming language usage is no exception. Using a particular language can be seen as sexy, leading-edge, innovative, the next big-thing, etc. Given the opportunity some developers will chose to learn and write code in this language.
Desire to learn a new language. Some developers like to learn new things and this includes programming languages. Given the opportunity such developers will sometimes chose to learn and write code in a language they find interesting.
The cost of creating and implementing a new language continues to be within the reach of one individual who is willing to invest the considerable effort required. Hundreds, if not thousands of new languages have been created every year almost since computers were first invented. The only change here over the last 40 years is probably an increase in the number of new languages.
What has changed in the last 15 years is ease of transmission (e.g., a ubiquitous computing platform and the Internet) and the growth of the fashion industry (e.g., book publishers).
Computing is bathed in newness. New products, new chips, new gadgets, new software, new features, new and improved, the latest. What self respecting developer would want to be caught dead using a language invented before they were born?
Publishers need a continuous stream of new subjects that will drive customers to buy books. What better subject than a hot new programming language?
At the moment we seem to be living through a period of programming language usage divergence. Will this evolutionary trend continue or are we currently in the Cambrian explosion period of software engineering evolution?
What are the forces acting against the use of new languages? At the moment the only significant forces acting against the use of new languages are existing source and existing developer expertise. There are weaker forces, for instance, the worry that in the years to come it will be difficult to find developers to maintain existing software written in what has become an obscure language, but most software has a short lifetime and in many application domains this is not an issue. Whether the fashion for newness will eventually diminish enough to significantly slow the take-up of new languages remains to be seen.
The most worthwhile R coding guidelines I know
Since my post questioning whether native R usage exists (e.g., a common set of R coding patterns) several people have asked about coding/style guidelines for R. My approach to style/coding guidelines is economic, adhering to a guideline involves paying a cost now for some future benefit. Obviously to be worthwhile the benefit must be greater than the cost, there is also the issue of who pays the cost and who reaps the benefit (why would anybody pay the cost if somebody else reaps the benefit?). The following three topics are probably where the biggest benefits are to be had and only the third is specific to R (and given the state of my R knowledge may be wrong).
Comment your code. Investing 5-10 seconds per few lines of code now could save substantially more time at some future date. Effective commenting is a skill that has to be learned, start learning now. Think of commenting as sending a text message or tweet to the person you will be in 6 months time (i.e., the person who can hum the tune but has forgotten the details).
Consistently use variable names that mean something to you. This should be a sub 2-second decision that is probably going to save you no more than 5-10 seconds, but in many cases you reap the benefit soon after the investment, without having to wait many months. Names evoke associations in your mind, take advantage of this associative lookup to reduce the cognitive load of working with your code. Effective naming is a skill that has to be learned, start learning now. There are people who ignore the evidence that different people’s linguistic preferences and associations can be very different and insist that everybody adhere to one particular naming convention; ignore them.
Code organization and structure. Experience shows that there are ways of organizing and structuring +1,000 line programs that have a significant impact on the effort needed to actively work on the code, the more code there is the greater the impact. R programs tend to be short, say around 100 lines (I dare say much longer ones exist). Apart from recommending that code be broken up into separate functions, I cannot think of any organizational/structural issue that is worth recommending for 100 lines of code (if you don’t appreciate the advantage of using separate functions you need some hands on training, not words in a blog post).
Is that it, are there no other worthwhile recommendations? There might be, I just don’t have enough experience using R to know. Does anybody else have enough experience to know? I suspect not; where would they have gotten the information needed to do the cost/benefit analysis? Even in the rare case where a detailed analysis is made for a language the results are rather thin on the ground and somewhat inconclusive.
What is the reason behind those R style guides/coding guideline documents that have been written? The following are some possibilities:
and no, I don’t have any empirical data to backup my guidelines 🙁