Are we dumbing down programming?

Her resume looked great. She was coming to us as a high end (price) developer. But as I listened to her describe an abstract class in response to my asking her about abstraction, I had to wonder; have we made it too easy to be a programmer?

It's true that abstraction is the most intangible concept of OOP. During my phone screens of candidates, though, I find myself wishing I had tipped them off. I will be asking about OOP. Go look up "object oriented programming" on wikipedia.

I generally blame our universities for this failure. OOP is largely conceptual, and should be introduced and reinforced by any Computer Science department worth their accreditation. Once in the workplace, software engineers rarely get the proper mentoring on solid coding habits.

We really can't lay blame entirely on universities and trade schools. No, much of the problem lies with the technologies we use to build applications. High on the list of offenders are Visual Basic, Visual Studio, Java, and .Net. Throw in HTML, XHTML, XML, and all the mark-up language derivatives. Then add in any of the web development tools like Cold Fusion and Flash. Of course the scripting languages, JavaScript, VBScript, and Perl virtually prevent solid coding practices.

My obsession with OOP stems from a very specific business need. I have to support ten software products with a very modest staff. The most basic way to accomplish this is by reducing the amount of code. An obvious way to reduce code is reusing code. Unfortunately I inherited a situation based on copy-and-paste code. After three years of fighting copy-and-paste habits, we still support multiple versions of code that perform the same task.

Many developers confuse using objects with OOP. Dropping a control onto a form does not constitute object oriented programming. In fact, there will be nothing reusable in the result. In addition, the automatically generated code written by the action of dropping the control is almost certainly unreadable. But then, many developers today don't even realize code is being generated.

So our tools have dumbed down programming skills. Especially for those developers who rely on the designers and tools built into their development environments (IDE). For me, I'd like to find an engineer or two who would love to create the next Visual Studio, instead of dragging controls from a toolbar like some pre-programmed automaton.