All that being said the biggest contributor by orders of magnitude to bad programs is bad managers and bad project leaders.

Good points, but you’re still missing the real biggest problem: fucking customers. “Yeah, we’d like you to write some software to implement a business process that we don’t even understand ourselves and which changes more rapidly than our understanding of it does. We’re going to give you a bunch of contradictory requirements that we’re going to keep changing at random for no apparent reason and with no regard for any knock-on effects. Oh, and we’d like to complete the project in half the time you said it would take, and the go-live date is set in stone because Marketing have already distributed a bunch of literature…”

Bastards. 😉

I made applications and websites for years for people like BT, Reuters, Lloyds Bank, Marks & Spencers et al. and it turned something which I love, programming, into an annoying, painful torture. I am not going to do it again unless it fulfills one requirement: it must be a good project that helps people and is worth doing for it’s own sake, commercial considerations be damned. I’m not going to help these people ever again, and if I could help to undermine them then so much the better.

I must say, the title of your post really caught my eye since it’s something I’ve been saying for years.

I’m not sure how much money I require to pass this on. Waiting for offers from Microsoft, Sun, all the big guns.

F# is really nice because you get all the power of a functional language, but you can write in pretty much any style you like. Functional, imperative, object-oriented. It’s strongly typed, but it has built in generics and type inference, so you can use it like a dynamic scripting language for rapid prototyping. Then, when it comes to writing a final product, you can flesh out your program and give it a properly rigorous and formal structure. And it’s .Net, so you have that whole class library to work with right off the bat, whether your coding under Windows or on MacOS or Linux using Mono, the open source version of .Net. I really sound like I am trying to sell it to you don’t I? Believe me, I am usually pretty hard to please!

If you are interested in taking a look at it, the introductory videos by Dom Symes a a pretty good place to start: http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/C9-Lectures-Dr-Don-Syme-Introduction-to-F-1-of-3

Are you a Python programmer? You sound like you might be. Gotta love Python.

‘… and when it finally “clicked”, being moved to tears by the beauty of the code.’

See, many language designers would see that as a fatal flaw (obscurity of code) rather than something wonderful. In the end people use whatever language they want (even though it is ill-suited to the task) and you’ll always get some people defending a particular language. One of the worst languages I’ve seen is ADA – it’s so bad that the designers later tweaked things to put very severe limits on what any one module can do – and now the horrible mishmash is touted as being ‘reliable’, ‘maintainable’, and ‘encouraging correct coding’.

http://www.castsoftware.com/resources/resource/email-campaigns/cast-report-on-application-software-health?GAD=HPB