<story><title>C Is Not a Low-level Language (2018)</title><url>https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3212479</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>commandlinefan</author><text>&amp;gt; The market has spoken.&lt;p&gt;The market “demands” cheap, turnkey, easily replaceable programmers who don’t really know what they’re doing, and justifies this with “I made a website last weekend, programming is easy, you’re just pretending its hard to keep out competition”.  Until software engineering is treated as actual professional engineering, time, money and resources will continue to be wasted frivolously.</text></item><item><author>topspin</author><text>Intel and HP attempted to deliver what this paper advocates.  They designed an entirely new processing element and compiler architecture that promised to deliver high performance with less complexity.  It was called EPIC and manifested as Itanium.  Billions of dollars and the best minds at the disposal of an industry wide consortium couldn&amp;#x27;t make it work; one year ago the last Itanium shipped.  The market has spoken.&lt;p&gt;You can run unmodified, compiled OS&amp;#x2F;360 code from the 1960s on a z15 machine built this year.  The market values the tools and code it has invested in &lt;i&gt;far&lt;/i&gt; more than any idealized computing model you care to speculate about.&lt;p&gt;The flaws in contemporary CPUs that device manufacturers perpetrated on their customers for almost 20 years are not the fault of C and its users.  They are the fault of reckless manufacturers that squandered their reputation in the name of performance and, ironically, helped perpetuate the lack of innovation in programming techniques called out in this paper.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>burlesona</author><text>Having previously worked in a “professionalized” field (architecture) before a career change to software engineering - please no.&lt;p&gt;Having a credentialing body that has to review and certify you just kills wages and innovation, and makes it take an outrageously long time to enter the field. But, more importantly, it will not prevent bad programmers from existing and shipping bad software.&lt;p&gt;Further, software engineering most assuredly &lt;i&gt;is&lt;/i&gt; treated as actual professional engineering in most of the industry. That there are many companies that don’t treat it that way just means there are a lot of poorly led or non-software companies out there, which is no different than any other field.</text></comment>
<story><title>C Is Not a Low-level Language (2018)</title><url>https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3212479</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>commandlinefan</author><text>&amp;gt; The market has spoken.&lt;p&gt;The market “demands” cheap, turnkey, easily replaceable programmers who don’t really know what they’re doing, and justifies this with “I made a website last weekend, programming is easy, you’re just pretending its hard to keep out competition”.  Until software engineering is treated as actual professional engineering, time, money and resources will continue to be wasted frivolously.</text></item><item><author>topspin</author><text>Intel and HP attempted to deliver what this paper advocates.  They designed an entirely new processing element and compiler architecture that promised to deliver high performance with less complexity.  It was called EPIC and manifested as Itanium.  Billions of dollars and the best minds at the disposal of an industry wide consortium couldn&amp;#x27;t make it work; one year ago the last Itanium shipped.  The market has spoken.&lt;p&gt;You can run unmodified, compiled OS&amp;#x2F;360 code from the 1960s on a z15 machine built this year.  The market values the tools and code it has invested in &lt;i&gt;far&lt;/i&gt; more than any idealized computing model you care to speculate about.&lt;p&gt;The flaws in contemporary CPUs that device manufacturers perpetrated on their customers for almost 20 years are not the fault of C and its users.  They are the fault of reckless manufacturers that squandered their reputation in the name of performance and, ironically, helped perpetuate the lack of innovation in programming techniques called out in this paper.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sdegutis</author><text>There is a growth process in any profession. Nobody starts out as an expert just like nobody starts out as an adult. Wages to such are not a waste, but money well spent on training. There are degrees of skill, and jobs to match each level. And at the end of the day, the best quality education comes through real life experience.</text></comment>