Where have all the programmers
gone?Where have all the programmers
gone?Tuesday, August 21, 2007 12:56 pm. I wandered the web, and I saw
Linus Torvalds lecture the geeks of Google (try googling for “linus
git google”)
about SCM and Torvalds’ very own precious
GIT,
which is fantastically better than all the other SCMs in the known star
systems. ... Torvalds was abrasive and the assembled geekery didn’t
seem to appreciate his style, which I saw as a sort of
arrested-development teenager ranking contest approach; he frequently
described various undesirable objects and
persons as “ugly and stupid”, obviously expecting to provoke
protest, without success. ... He even said something 
stupid
— he claimed a centralized SCM — as opposed to the
infinitely-preferable distributed flavor — had to have uniquely-named
branches; but none of the assembled geeks contradicted him, presumably
in terror1....
... And then I thought, “What is this thing called SCM?” and looked around and found around 5 million here. ... And in the Torvalds give-and-take it was revealed that Google might use something called “Perforce”, which is interesting....
...
The last decades of my pitiful career have been
spent almost alone, and of SCM I am woefully ignorant. But still I felt
I was missing something; if there was such a 
crescendo
of SCM and all the busy busy development implied ... where is it? ...
Even in my lonely attic, surely it should impinge....
And then I went to Google and asked for guidance, and it answered me with the beautiful charts shown here. ... I am assuming the Google queries track the usage of the information being googled-about; I know I routinely google for program language information. ... But if you believe something else — feel free!
...
In my obviously biased interpretation, however, the 
NET
situation does not look good, does it? And apparently C language
still seems to have a certain antique allure, no? ... And perhaps
you’re wondering where the USA is on the regional ranking chart;
but
apparently it just fell below the threshold....
So the answer to the question “Where have all the programmers gone?” is obviously “India”. ... And I encourage you to go to http://www.google.com/trends and try out your favorite language. ... Java, ajax, python, pick your poison — none appear to be on the march....
... But don’t tell anyone! Let’s keep this our little secret....
1. I see I’ve failed to mention additional random inspirations I encountered on my whimsical quest. ... First of all, the google video was in dark-o-vision; I had to turn my CRT’s brightness all the way up, or else Torvalds was just a dark wandering shadow. Which suggests all the screens at Google are set to “banner” mode (retail super-brightness). Or maybe the flat screens are all (have to be?) set bright? ... After the Torvalds experience, I wandered over to Microsoft’s “defyallchallenges” thing, which has a lovely animated graphic and showed me a dubious movie touting the wonders of their ajaxey asp stuff; and it was not in dark-o-vision. And benefited immensely from the adequate PC sound I had installed for Torvalds. ... However, I couldn’t download; site took forever to come-up, and then just froze, in Firefox at any rate. Aside from being a very poor recommendation of the product, it’s a stark demonstration of the futility of SAAS. ... Unless of course your internet always comes-up quick, like on TV....
