Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Surrender (a little) to the Dark Side


When I was a freshman in college, I, like many, was bouncing back and forth on what my major should be. I was leaning heavily toward electrical engineering, but my long standing love of computers had me seriously considering Comp Sci as well. I decided to take a couple of introductory Comp Sci classes to see if I liked them. So I tried taking the Introduction to Programming course and lab during my first semester. While I imagine that today they use some cool and zippy language, back then they used Fortran, a programming language that only a mother language could love. The class was fine, but throughout the course, I began to have visions of myself growing old sitting in front of a room-sized mainframe typing in endless subroutines using indecipherable languages. As the old joke goes, "a computer without COBOL and Fortran is like a piece of chocolate cake without ketchup and mustard." That's a bit of an exaggeration, but let's face it, back then, being a computer professional was a lot different than it is today. So I chose a different path, but wound up in computers anyway. Fancy that.

Even though I chose to turn away from the "Dark Side" of development and became a DBA (i.e. Jedi Master), I've always regretted it a little bit. Why? Because programming is fun. But let's make a distinction here between programming and software development. Programming is cool, creative and useful. Software development is an everlasting grind of hateful user requirements, rigid coding standards and endless revisions because your functional wants that company logo to be moved three pixels to the left of where it is on the company website.

True story here. During my incredibly short stint as a sort-of web developer, I was assigned to revise the page on a company's website that had the pictures and biographies of the CEO and all his lackeys. The page was fine, but then I got a request that came from the CEO - his picture on the page needed to be bigger than everyone else's. Why? Well, he's the CEO, that's why – he's better than everyone else. So I did it and moved the page elements around to allow for the bigger picture. Soon after, I started getting requests to put in bigger pictures of the lackeys, as well. Why? Well, they're important too! So I did that. Then the CEO was pissed so he ordered an even BIGGER picture and a longer, more flowery bio. Then the lackeys... well you get the idea. It was the Cold War all over again. So I'm making a distinction here between writing actual programs that do something as opposed to a dog and pony show for a bunch of suits.

The IT world is so specialized anymore that we DBAs don't get to sling code on a regular basis, unless it's maybe PL/SQL or some shell scripts. A lot of DBAs are missing out on the fun. Maybe you've gotten the chance to debug some Perl or Python. That stuff is good too, but there's a whole world of cool, useful tools that have yet to be coded, because YOU haven't coded them.

We talked last time about GUIs and the bias against them. My main problem with GUIs is that they can only do what they're programmed to do. But what if you could make your own GUI that would do whatever you wanted? Well, "I could never do a GUI" you say. "There's all the drawing objects at the right pixel coordinates," etc, etc. Nope. I haven't had to do stuff like that since the days of my Commodore 64. Modern software is mostly based on libraries of code that some other poor shmuck has already done. You don't really need to "draw" a window – you just find out what the command is to say, "Hey – put a window on the screen." The libraries for windows, dialog boxes, dropdowns, etc, have probably already been written for your language of choice. If they haven't, well, you're probably writing in Fortran. Shame on you.

I'm not saying it's easy, but it's also not as hard as you think. A few years back, I stumbled on some example code on a website that let you make simple GUIs in Tcl/Tk. Tcl is a language, by the way. Tk is a set of extensions that lets you make pretty GUI-type stuff. I typed the commands into my Linux console and, voila – pretty windows and clicky boxes. A light clicked on somewhere in a my head and I figured out the general idea of how this worked. All you're really doing is making function calls. We DBAs know how to do this. If you do a SELECT AVG(SALARY) FROM EMP, you're just passing in the values from the SALARY column of the EMP table and the AVG function spits out the results. Using GUI libraries in some languages isn't that much more complicated. It's all pushing and pulling the data you want in and out of these functions/subroutines.

Awhile back I wrote a program in Perl that works as a GUI interface to Data Pump. Not a CGI that runs from a webpage (although that's cool too), but a real, bonefide, run-on-your-desktop GUI. Yes it took awhile – I don't have a degree in Comp Sci and all my experience in coding is self taught. It's probably moderately useful, but more than anything else it was COOL. It's hard to match the satisfaction of creating your own useful tool, whether it's a script or a GUI, that solves a problem. You're not gonna program the next sequel to Doom (that's a video game), but you can still do cool stuff. So don't sell yourself short – dive in and learn something new. Give in to the Dark Side a little. Yoda won't mind.

No comments:

Post a Comment