are programmers "failures"?

[pier4r]

(03-23-2019 02:01 PM)Don Shepherd Wrote:  What I am really wondering is this: do modern programming languages make it more likely that a programmer will generate a correct program the first time? I suspect the answer is "somewhat, but not totally."

Trivial ones, sure. But that would be true even before nowadays programming languages.

Examples:
- pick a low level language and add 1 to a variable.
- pick whatever language one is familiar with and let him do something trivial that he did thousands of times, like printing a statement
- and similar examples.

For each non trivial solution, that was not coded over and over by the person writing the program, it is unlikely it will work at the first run. Maybe if the person iteratively expands the program, coding and testing smaller parts of it before. But even in that case one can consider the full program, and therefore the entire process of starting from a small part of the program to then code it completely, and likely there will be an error somewhere. Even just a typo.

It is a layer 8 problem, as in many other cases.


Plus I think that such "failure" metric can be applied to every job that is not menial. So at the end humanity would be a failure applying the same metric.