Software crisis: the next generation (2016)
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Software crisis: the next generation (2016)
1–10 of 66 posts
Re: Software crisis: the next generation (2016)
#2And then, hardware is crap too...
Re: Software crisis: the next generation (2016)
#3TFA mentions Google's Caja and Secure EcmaScript (SES). Does anybody know if that's still in development or under consideration by ECMA or others?
Re: Software crisis: the next generation (2016)
#4We have some formal verification, it's called typed systems. Very limited, I know. But some people are still praising dynamically typed languages for their "speed" and "lack of compiler errors".
Re: Software crisis: the next generation (2016)
#5> Anybody who’s seen the systems inside a major tech company knows this is true. Or a minor tech company. Or the insides of any product with a software component.
Anybody who's seen the sun rising east and setting west knows that this is true: the Sun rotates around the Earth.
The other, less-obvious alternative, is that software is NOT crap, we just like to complain a lot. And it's just so easy & fun to blame everything on the software we work with.
Most software that doesn't immediately die does its job fairly well. In fact, better than whatever alternative that existed before said software.
Re: Software crisis: the next generation (2016)
#6“The reason this stuff is crap is far more basic. It’s because better-than-crap costs a lot more, and crap is usually sufficient.
... ... ...
Every dollar put into making software less crappy can’t be spent on other things we might also want, the list of which is basically endless.“
Software is crap because humans on the whole have an extremely difficult time reasoning through all the possible logic flows.
Software is also crap because in order to design good software a lot of insight, experience and empathy is required, and as it turns out, people writing crap don’t have any of those prerequisites.
Finally, most software is crap because most people writing it don’t care about getting it 100% correct, since it turns out that getting the last 5% correctly functioning is exponentially difficult, and those people would rather collect a paycheck than feel proud and content about what they wrote.
All other industries manage to deliver complete, working products; we are the only industry which doesn’t; computers and software never work 100% correctly. What does that make us? It makes us jerk-offs, that’s what it makes us. I understand now why Keith Wesolowski ditched computers and went to work on a ranch. And damn it, he is right!
Re: Software crisis: the next generation (2016)
#7TFA mentions Google's Caja and Secure EcmaScript (SES). Does anybody know if that's still in development or under consideration by ECMA or others?
Caja is only getting security fixes for now, one of the GitHub issues from March 2017 states: "New features for Caja are pretty much on hold for the time being. However, if you'd like to write a patch to add this one we'd be happy to review and incorporate it."
Re: Software crisis: the next generation (2016)
#8We have some formal verification, it's called typed systems. Very limited, I know. But some people are still praising dynamically typed languages for their "speed" and "lack of compiler errors".
When you talk about static typing as providing some form of formal verification, you really can only talk about languages with advanced type systems like Haskell. Type systems like those in Java and C# give you very little formal verification (and I say this as someone who programs daily in C# for work and Python and Common Lisp for fun). What Java-like type systems give you is confidence in refactoring, which is not nothing, but it is not formal verification.
(I'll also say that type inference and generic types in C# give me about 80% of what dynamic types in Python give me. The main thing I miss is heterogeneous tuples, which in C# have to be of type Object, or defined as structs/classes, which is too verbose for the job.)
Re: Software crisis: the next generation (2016)
#9We have some formal verification, it's called typed systems. Very limited, I know. But some people are still praising dynamically typed languages for their "speed" and "lack of compiler errors".
Good to see the strict typing of C has saved it from most security issues.
i think it it is quite facetious to put it down to type systems.
Re: Software crisis: the next generation (2016)
#10> Anybody who’s seen the systems inside a major tech company knows this is true. Or a minor tech company. Or the insides of any product with a software component. Anybody who's seen the sun rising east and setting west knows that this is true: the Sun rotates around the Earth. The other, less-obvious alternative, is that software is NOT crap, we just like to complain a lot. And it's just so easy & fun to blame everyt…
I think the point of the article is something that does an 95% job for 10% the cost works for a lot of things, but somethings that trade off doesn't work.