411–420 of 469 posts
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If the computer solves problems and we know what it's doing, that's software engineering If the computer solves problems and we don't know what it's doing, that's AI If the computer doesn't solve problems and we don't know what it's doing, that's Friday afternoon
Good one. I will remember that next time it's Friday.
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2001 High School Graduate - People told me everything would be outsourced to India and it wasn't worth getting started in programming.
> People told me everything would be outsourced to India I'm not sure that this ever amounted to more than a urban legend. When you actually looked into the supposed outsourcing "trend", all you heard about was TheDailyWTF-grade horror stories.
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Both of these hits home. Working at Sun in the late 90's, Java was a big thing, and while Sun was clearly way too early in their push for a universal virtual machine that could run anything, at the time people were complaining that Java could never be used for real software because of it not being natively compiled and using a GC. Well, now everyone are using Javascript and Python, and no one seems to be complaining.…
> Well, now everyone are using Javascript and Python, and no one seems to be complaining. Read more Hacker News and you'll see complaints about both languages.
Overall, I got everything wrong. Technically, commercially and socially: wrong, wrong and wrong. I thought things would develop along lines that were of interest to me or which appealed to my personal aesthetic of computing (textual). And that viewpoint turned out to be the most myopic possible in terms of predicting what would actually happen. If I predict something then almost certainly it will not occur.
Not a prediction of the future, but rather something I've found quite funny over the years: watching so many things keep repeating themselves in a never-ending cycle. My two favorite have been... 1. Compiled (native) vs. interpreted (bytecode/VMs). It's this forever cycle of "performance required" that shifts to "portability required", which lacks performance, and gradually shifts back, and repeat. 2. Local processin…
> Compiled (native) vs. interpreted (bytecode/VMs) The debate today is mostly AoT vs JIT compilers, I don't see anyone bring up VMs unless they're talking about how slow Python is. I also don't see anyone bringing up "portability" anymore - compilers support all the architectures people care about, while libraries and APIs are designed to be platform agnostic as far as they can be while developers recognize there is…
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> components which could interoperate via a binary contract COM still underlies an abhorrent amount of the Windows architecture.
In the 90's COM didn't make a lot of sense to me because I never needed it. Then, around 2001, I needed it to solve some problems and I finally invested the time to figure it out. It's actually pretty neat as long as it isn't in your web browser (ActiveX). Around that time I too thought I was seeing the future - component-based development that's language and platform agnostic.
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Reading too much science is actually common with anti-vaxxers and other such people, they love quoting renegade doctors and having absolute faith in arxiv papers they misread or quoted out of context. Most published research is false even if it's peer-reviewed, and it may be better to leave it to people who read it full time and understand it's an ongoing conversation.
Hah, so maybe the Catholic Church was wiser than we knew by restricting their libraries to initiated scholars, there’s always talk of how the layman will misinterpret the mystical texts, better protect them from self harm.
Not that the liberal "trust the experts" worked, since Fauci's policy was to only say things that made him sound trustworthy, whether or not they were true. (and he admits this)
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2001 High School Graduate - People told me everything would be outsourced to India and it wasn't worth getting started in programming.
I graduated high school in 1988, and made the same assumption. I don't think anybody explicitly said it to me, but it seemed obvious. They're plenty smart and they're sufficiently good at English (often, flawless). I still don't entirely understand why it turns out to be so hard to outsource. I get some of it, but it seems like something that we should have figured out by now. I'll be interested to see what the post-…
* It's difficult for Western businesses to time shift, and there are usually caps on work visas.
* Perhaps until recently, most Western programmers genuinely enjoy the work. What I've heard from Indians is that many Indian programmers are more interested in building a career than in the work itself. Intrinstic vs. extrinsic motivation. I think this may be declining as a factor as software eats the rest of the US economy and brain drains talented people from other fields, though.
* Cultural differences--it turns out that English fluency is necessary but not sufficient to seamlessly slot into an Anglosphere company.
* One way out of this conundrum could be for new software companies to start in India and outcompete Western companies (at which point culture differences and time shift wouldn't matter), except I get the sense there are barriers to that.
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Well, we couldn't get out to it to even see what was there, which, by then had IRC, gopher, archie, and so on. Usenet. It was all locked away and we were curious. We randomized the exchange listing, split up the results, and then proceeded to war-dial the entire exchange until we found a forgotten (and unprotected) modem line in the math department, which then hosted all of computer science. From there out to what we…
"Telnet gates" being early form of a static proxy funneled through separate hardware? If so, I could see how they would valuable for ,say, the Kevin Mitnicks of the era.
What many people thought was that the shift to object-oriented development, object oriented RPC systems (CORBA, "JavaBeans", some stuff in J2EE, OLE, etc) and CASE/modeling tools (UML, Rational Rose etc.) would turn the market into more of an automated component oriented system, with a marketplace of ready made components and more reliable systems with a faster time to market etc. Lots and lots of books sold about OO…
There is this Jobs interview when he also discusses how there will be a marketplace for objects and people will buy and sell objects instead of software. In one sense it failed because all it ever saves you is the typing. You still have to learn the whole model, sometimes it is like learning a programming language from scratch. On the other hand, it may have succeeded. Objects don't exist in isolation but as a librar…