Bernie Cosell on the Complexity of Modern Programming

So I don't envy modern programmers, and It's going to get worse. The simple things are getting packaged into libraries, leaving only the hard things. That stuff is getting so complicated, but the standards that people are expecting are stunning. One of the ones ^i^ey showed me stunned me. He was showing me Google Maps that will do I routes for you. One of the things you can Jo is you can grab a piece of the route with ^our mouse and drag that piece of the route somewhere else to tell Google that you want the route go there. Then it remaps the route so that it goes through where you just dragged the point. Now I fknow whaf s going on in there: a pile of JavaScript code for the mouse tracking. When you let go of the mouse it has to do an Ajax XML request to tell momma system that he just put this point on the route. The route then has to do incremental updates. Calculating the route. I can't even imagine how they do that code so well. i People complain that you get routed through people's backyards and stuff like that, but the optimal-route problems are one of the classic problems of computer science. How to take this arbitrary graph and find the shortest path through a graph, just stunning.

At one level I'm thinking, "This is way cool hat you can do that." The other level, the I programmer in me Is saying, "Jesus, I'm glad that this wasn't around when I was a programmer." I could never have written all this code to do this stuff. How do these guys do that? There must be a generation of jrogrammers way better than what I was ^hen I was a programmer. I'm glad 1 can jhave a little bit of repute as having once been a good programmer without having to actually demonstrate it anymore, because I don't think I i could.

Provides a great example of complexity in Google Maps functionality and being thankful that he no longer must contend with such increasing difficulty.