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Automated Tools Vs Efficient coding

 
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Dear Author,

As more and more automation coming in and a lot of the developer's work is being taken over by the tools
Especially in the DevOps pipeline integration, pretty much everything can be hooked into Jenkins engine
with tools that do the work such as, code coverage and Static code analysis, unit testing .......

Eventually, you would get all the warnings on code coverage and all sorts of Static analysis reports

So as an expert developer, what do we need to do if tools could give you all the reports about your code
is inefficient and prone to memory issues and performance issues and badly written

I reckon your book have suggestions that we can use to equip ourselves that would reduce all these issues
that we get slapped with by the tools....is my assumption right?

Thanks
Sundar
 
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Welcome the the Ranch, Meenaski!

Using tools to assist in designing, building, installing, monitoring, debugging, and tuning code is one thing. We've been doing that for many years now.

But so far every attempt to eliminate the programmer entirely has failed, and there have been many, many efforts, going back at least to the 1970s if not before. I could list names, but most people wouldn't recognize them.

Most code generation tools can solve a single problem. They usually keep a set of templates to which you add selections and the result is a functional module or program in 5 minutes or less.

And then the user says "That's great, but can you...?"

Or, as I am fond of quoting, the deadliest words in IT are "All You Have To Do Is..."

Users invariable come up with bizarre but often very reasonable requests to do things that the code generator's creators could have never imagined. And in the case of most code generators, trying to modify the generated code will be more effort than writing the code from scratch would be. On top of which, since the code was machine-generated, the "programmer" who's trying to make the changes probably doesn't understand what's really being done in the code, much less how to modify it safely.

It's why my signature line for these last few years has been "An IDE is no substitute for an Intelligent Developer."

As I said, management has been trying to eliminate those expensive and troublesome software developers for a long, long time and so far completely failed. As the tools got more sophisticated, so have the demands on the software. I don't see that changing until software either becomes totally standardized and immutable "black boxes" or some sort of advanced Artificial Intelligence is developed that can function as flexibly and as intelligently as a human mind.
 
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The tools can make developer life more efficient , by automating the repetitive tasks or enforce to adhere few processes/guidelines. I dont think it can be alternative to a expert developer.
 
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I think Uncle Bob devotes an entire chapter or section in his Clean Code book to explain why "There will always be programmers" -- essentially, what Tim said.

meenakshi sundar wrote:So as an expert developer, what do we need to do if tools could give you all the reports about your code is inefficient and prone to memory issues and performance issues and badly written


Developers still have to do the thinking. AI technology has not yet reached the level of sophistication where you can eliminate humans entirely from the development process. Hopefully, it never does, otherwise we're doomed. The irony is that while we still need humans to develop software, it's also humans and our inability to communicate what we want clearly that creates lots of problems in the software we develop.
 
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Job security aside, once computers start writing their own systems, we're into Skynet territory and it's time to run!

It's also been a major complaint about many cheap programmers - that they don't think, they merely follow orders by rote, and so basically they're doing the same thing as computers - doing what you tell them to do instead of what you want them to do. Computers because they're too stupid to do otherwise, people because in many cases they came from a culture where questioning orders could have dire consequences.

The whole idea that you can take untrained, non-creative (and low-paid) people, dump an IDE on them and expect the IDE to make up for the properties that the people lack is contemptible to me. As you can probably tell.
 
Junilu Lacar
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Tim Holloway wrote:The whole idea that you can take untrained, non-creative (and low-paid) people, dump an IDE on them and expect the IDE to make up for the properties that the people lack is contemptible to me. As you can probably tell.


Tell us how you really feel, Tim.
 
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Junilu Lacar wrote:. . . Developers still have to do the thinking. AI technology has not yet reached the level of sophistication where you can eliminate humans . . . . Hopefully, it never does . . . .

I was given a copy of The Emperor's New Mind by Roger Penrose (Oxford, 1989 revised 2016) as a Christmas present. I think Penrose will argue that AI will never, indeed can never, reach that stage of sophistication. Don't hold your breath waiting for me to get to that page.
 
Tim Holloway
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I am not so sanguine. IBM has systems that have created recipes, composed music and even written fiction. While it's still a far step from there to intuiting what users were hallucinating when they wrote up the system specs, it's still an indication that such things may eventually be possible.

And it won't be for lack of hardware. Yesterday alone I read of how to wire a handful of ESP-32 chips to produce a supercomputer, although I suspect that in terms of raw speed and parallelism, a lot of the bitcoin-mining GPUs can easily surpass that (though at a much higher price). Western Digital also announced a 14TB disk drive. Somewhere around the year 2000, I was working in one of the largest mainframe shops in town and the entire mainframe DASD farm was 14TB. Although my department had another 1.4TB aggregated in their workstation hard drives.

And as long as I'm expressing attitudes, I'm rather eagerly awaiting the AI CEOs. Unlike humans, they won't have any reason to demand obscene salaries and likewise wouldn't have any internal incentive to ruin the company for short-term personal gain. Although I take no responsibility for any cybernetic humanoids they start creating.
 
Campbell Ritchie
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Tim Holloway wrote:. . . I'm rather eagerly awaiting the AI CEOs. Unlike humans, they won't have any reason to demand obscene salaries . . . .

Hahahahahahahahaha.

They will demand obscene GPU budgets for themselves, however.
 
Tim Holloway
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Campbell Ritchie wrote:

Tim Holloway wrote:. . . I'm rather eagerly awaiting the AI CEOs. Unlike humans, they won't have any reason to demand obscene salaries . . . .

Hahahahahahahahaha.

They will demand obscene GPU budgets for themselves, however.



The Ultimate Capitalism. Where the capital equipment is yourself!
 
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meenakshi sundar, cowgratulations, your topic have been chosen to publish in CodeRanch's Journal April Edition.
 
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