Thankful For Memory Managed Languages

I’m thankful my software career started when memory managed languages were first available and then dominant. Or at least dominant in the areas of software that I work in–web application development.

I learned BASIC, WordPerfect macros, and Logo before I went off to college. But my first real programming experience was with Pascal in a class taught by Mr. Underwood (who passed away in 2021). I learned for loops, print debugging and how to compile programs. Pascal supports pointers but I don’t recall doing any pointer manipulations–it was a 101 class after all. I took one more CS class where we were taught C++ but I dropped it.

But my real software education came in the WCTS; I was a student computer lab proctor. Between that and some summer internships, I learned Perl, web development and how to deal with cranky customers (aka students) when the printer didn’t work.

I also learned how to install Linux (Slackware, off of something like 16 3.5-inch disks) on a used computer with a 40MB hard drive, how to buy hardware off eBay, and not to run while (true) fork in a C program. That last one: not good.

I was also able to learn enough Java through a summer internship that I did an honors thesis in my senior year of college. I used Java RMI to build a parallelizable computation system. It did a heck of a job of calculating cosines.

My first job out of school was slinging perl, then Java, for web applications at a consultancy in Boulder. I learned a ton there, including how to grind (one week I billed 96 hours), why you shouldn’t use stored procedures for a web app, how to decompile a Java application with jad to work around a bug, and how to work on a team.

One throughline for all that was getting the work done as fast as possible. That meant using languages and frameworks that optimized for developer productivity rather than pure performance. Which meant using memory managed languages. Which are, as Joel Spolsky wrote, similar to an automatic transmission in terms of letting you just go.

I have only the faintest glimmer of the pain of writing software using a language that requires memory management. Sure, it pops up from time to time, usually when I am trying to figure out a compile error when building an Apache module or Ruby gem. I google for an incantation, blindly set environment variables or modify the makefile, and hope it compiles. But I don’t have to truly understand malloc or free.

I’m so thankful that I learned to program when I didn’t have to focus on the complexities of memory management.

It’s hard enough to manage the data model, understand language idiosyncrasies, make sure you account for edge cases, understand the domain and the requirements, and deliver a maintainable solution without having to worry about core dumps and buffer overflows.