Keyvan Nayyeri

My 2 cents,

First: "make it easy to develop":

I think it is not bad to have a low bar...for technology... and have a large user/devlopment base...

Didn't we all start like that?

It's not really fair to compare to the other communities. How manny good php developers are out there? I know a lot of them who still do functional programming with no reuse of code ( = not at all DRY). In ruby a lot of developers still implement dal code in the wrong places. I mean every community/framework/platform have a lot of hobbiest. They are an important drive.

The difference in wages has probably a more ecenomic reason than anything else... For instance I can imagine that here in begium the same thing is happening. (we are actually recruiting for 3 open positions) There is a shortage for developers, so the wages to lure people go higher. The poeple who are the easiest to persuade are people who aren't working for a long time or are just coming from school = the inexperienced. Poeple who have an established position in a company know that stability and a good working environment are equally as important and stay in their company... Additionally in this time of financial crisis not a lot of big companies have the tendency to raise wages.

Anyway, just my take on the subject...

I like it complicated. If it was all drag and drop, I wouldn't be so special now, would I?

In fact, on re-reading the last part of your post, I emphatically disagree with your assertion that we show less talent and innovation than other communities. In my experience, this is just not the case at all.

In the past 3.5 years of blogging, I haven’t had such best pick up collections in the end of the year, but now that everybody is writing one, why shouldn’t I write my own?! Collecting this list, I could realize some interesting facts that completely changed

Everyone starts as an amateur. Making it easier for more people to begin coding and to actually get positive feedback ("Hey, look what I made") is a good thing. The more people that can get over the initial 'Damn this is hard' stage, the better. Passion for producing something tangible is why I left the biology field with a PhD to do something I really loved - coding. I am still a noob and have attempted to immerse myself in the culture, but there is a LOT of arrogance within the .NET community, as there is in other communities. Trying to learn and forge ahead as the the rapid and varied releases are sprayed out of the MS camp is ridiculous for an expert, but imagine (please try) that you are starting out and looking to contribute to both your own personal development and skillset as well as giving back to the community. It is ridiculously hard. Inexperienced people get jobs and write bad code for several reasons, including bad hiring decisions, lack of mentoring or support from the "enlightened" group within their community, as well as just a lack of experience in handling coding difficulties that gets better with experience. Please show some understanding in this matter - we do understand that people like you have contributed heartily and that without the mad skillz that you and those of your level of enlightenment, we would all be walking around in the dark without a flashlight. But everyone starts out small and builds on their failures and successes....there is just more of us now. And all you genius people will look even better now. There is arrogance in science, but nothing like I have seen from the IT world...the impersonalization of the Internet has worked its way into how IT people interact face-to-face, and that is NOT a good thing. It's like the Daily WTF - pointing out perceived stupidity rather than guiding and helping others learn from their misconceptions or lack of experience. Have a safe and happy New Year, my apologies for getting on my soapbox, but I have seen these types of posts from you before and am offended each time.

yes, this is the era of drag and drop develpers

Because I didn't learn programming from a university and started as an amateur I suffered from this problem a lot.

I found that every thing I want to do is possible by just draging and dropping some controls and a huge amount of code is generated behind the scenes.

The solution was to make every thing by hand to practice and know why and how the code is doing things.

I agree with you in the point that making developing easier had worsened the situation of professional developer and had enhanced amateur situation.

But Microsoft is a company, and the primary goals of a company are economical, so I don't think Mircosoft cares about that.

anyway,I think talent still exists but among professional(mostly old) developers not amateurs.

I suggest you add this post to your top ten, we are still in 2008 :)

Keyvan,

Thanks for the reply, and I intended no malice, just wanted to express a point a view from the other side of the learning curve. I think a large part of the problem is that there is a ton of development (or possible development - you know how it goes with the MS marketing machine) being done with .NET. It has an infinitely higher profile than all other languages combined, and with the free tools and relative ease of dev environment set up, it is the easiest and most accessible with which to start (you ever try to get Eclipse configured properly....ouch). As the economy nosedives and MS and the MS community pump out various "enhancements" and frameworks, managers are making the poor decision in having inexperienced (i.e. cheaper) coders do the work normally allotted to Senior level folks, and with less Senior level people around to run code reviews and to mentor and guide Junior and new developers, their are no checks in place to keep the crap from going into production.

Another problem I am seeing is the developing niches - Winforms, WPF, ASP.NET, Silverlight, plus all their new and separate frameworks and new and improved dev paradigms (TDD, DDD, BDD, etc etc). People are being asked to work across these different platforms, which can lead to some pretty bad coding practices. Again, the economy may be partly at fault here as developers are being forced to learn new and often disparate technologies, and to wear various hats wthin their organizations. A lot of the other languages are relatively self contained - just think how much ground the .NET framework covers, it's crazy.

But the main gist of your argument is a point well taken, the problem is in management not understanding the difference between a Junior level and Senior level developer, other than the superficial salary savings, which is incredibly short-sighted. And the need for MS to oversimplify the already simple and not touch the complexities within the framework that really need the attention. Guess even the developers at the heart of the beast are being pushed to release oversimplifications and cater to the "time is money" coding philosophy instead of making truly substantive (to the Senior level developers) changes in order to kick out more and more releases. Hard to change that inertia since it is highly lucrative for them.

Enough from me - there is a ton of talent out there, in a lot of cases it just needs a proper amount of experience and guidance to fully develop its potential. Thanks for allowing and replying to my diatribe. Take care.

In my company, things are different. Most people in the team are experienced developers.

Just because using Microsoft technologies, we delivered more applications to users in shorter development time frames with more powerful features. That keeps the team size small and we have much less need to employ junior developers because most of the regular development jobs can be done quickly by drag and drop. Therefore we have plenty of time updating our skill set and put more effort on some challenging jobs.

Keyvan,

The team of people you work with are important to

your sucess as a developer. Whether you drag and drop or do MVC. I buy donuts at least once a week.

Why ? When he's eating a donut I talk about MVC

and pair programming. I must admit the drag and

droppers are skeptical about MVC.

What's the eta on your upcoming book ? Will Wrox

offer an early access program where one can purchase chapters in PDF format as they become available. Thanks and still learning.

Happy New Year !

Happy New Year.

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I respectfully disagree with the author. The need for programming talent has shifted from pure code to the duality of having to understand both code and business patterns.

Talent in this case makes obsolete the professional programmer in the traditional sense. It's not about being able to code by scratch that which has already been done; it's more about being smart about creating results. Too few professional programmers embrace libraries and modules that are tried and tested in favor of building from scratch, resulting in failure to deliver, flawed code, missed deadlines, and inadequate results.

The new and talented generation of programmers may be the ones who really know how to resuse code (once held by traditional programmers as the holy grail). Drag and drop is the ultimate reuse. Why not embrace the ability to produce results more quickly and robustly than with traditional programming?

If by talent you mean the ability to write self-modifying code and keep straight cryptic variable names, while building your own charting modules and database indexing schemes, then sure... talent is waning. But if your definition of talent is the ability to reuse code and produce business-class results, then I would say Mirosoft is driving greater talent.

The major problem with drag and drop code according to me is, the lack of understanding behind the code which is generated. I have seen many people using the drag and drop mechanism, and even if a small change is to be made, they are unable to do it from the code side, because of their lack of understanding.

I generally dont prefer drag and drop code alone, because that way you dont know what goes on behind the scene. I guess there has to be a balance there.

I know several "developers" who have been working in ASP.NET for over 2-3 years and still they dont have proper understanding of server-client relationship and still they keep on coding.

You can consider that as an advantage, but I guess in the long term its a disadvantage, because although the product maybe running, but it would have serious disadvantages.

Thus to sum it up, I give a heads up to ease of use to MS, but it would be really better, if developers develop a better understanding of the concepts before getting into this.

As much as we get closer to the final release of the first version of ASP.NET MVC by Microsoft, the number of community debates about the advantages of ASP.NET MVC over ASP.NET WebForms increases. In the past week we saw some reactions by the community