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Bad Code Is Now “Bad”?

October 16, 2007 in "Rant" by Kyle Brady [Shortened URL]
Tags: Code, Energy, Google, Technology

I’m sorry, I was under the impression that programmers had come to a general conclusion in the ’70s that “bad” code was unacceptable, and the sign of either someone of inferior skills, or of low intelligence. Apparently, I was wrong, and “bad” code has now been deemed “bad”…

If you read the article, you’ll find a very thorough discussion of bad code, modern application architecture, and people’s experience levels. Believe it or not, I agree with (and actually liked) the larger part of the work. Here’s a breakdown, from my perspective:

Web 2.0

While “Web 2.0″ is interesting, and useful to a certain extent (and I run a company involved in a “Web 2.0″ project…), the ratio of intelligence and programming skills to lack thereof is astounding. And not in a good way.

Will Code for Food
Maybe you should hire him, he’s probably awesome.

Personally, I have the programming knowledge and “awareness” of someone many years my senior; however, this is most often not the case. Digg’s faceman, Kevin Rose, is a likable guy (supposedly), and he’s generally given credit for “running” and “creating” Digg. Does no-one else in the world understand that Kevin has little to no programming experience, and he outsources all his ideas? This is a repetition of a theme throughout Silicon Valley.

The flipside of Digg’s situation is when you have a large handful of developers who collectively have the programming IQ of a small child.

Stupid Pages
“Yeah man, I code!”

Why?

Why am I harping on “Web 2.0″? As was mentioned in the article I linked to, depending on the web application you come across, it can be several layers of abstraction away from actual programming… each of which requires processing power, and by association is slow and waste energy.

Look at another of Rose’s creations, Pownce. Seriously? “Made with Django” screams “we didn’t write most of the code, and instead used a library that sits above another language”. And, if you actually use it, you find that they use AJAX in places that make no sense. For example, if you link to a video or a picture, it embeds it. But only at runtime, and is Javascript based. WHY? I just wrote something about a weekago that is similar, and it was done in PHP… it takes about 98% of the loadtime of using the Javascript version.

Failure
And I bet Leah Culver doesn’t even run…

Waste

Ever heard of “Flex“? It’s, in principle, a way for people who are lazy to design fully fledged applications without really designing the whole thing. I don’t know about the rest of the programming community, but this seems to me like using FrontPage to build a website… not only is it stupid but it’s a huge waste of time and ends up with a result that either is supremely terrible or without originality.

Think of the sites you visit. Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Gmail, etc… most of the most used and most famous applications / sites are created from scratch, without using any sort of quadruple-bypass layer of abstraction. Google isn’t “Powered by Django” and Yahoo isn’t “Designed in Flex”… and they never will be.

Don’t Waste Life
Maybe those people writing “web OSes” should consider this…

If you’re thinking of creating something, stop. Think about it. Do you have the ability? If you do, that’s great. But don’t be a stupid waste of human life and build the web application equivalent of a C#.NET program.

Not only does it waste electricity, slow everything down, and just suck in general… but it makes the rest of us look bad too.