11–20 of 66 posts
Side note: Ousterhout was famous for being the author of Tcl/Tk, which was a popular language and GUI toolkit in the early days of Linux (before Qt and GTK came along). I wouldn't be surprised if many older Unixes are still running Tcl/Tk apps.
There’s a more pithy variant of this, which I use all the time: “You can’t fix what you don’t understand”.
Side note: Ousterhout was famous for being the author of Tcl/Tk, which was a popular language and GUI toolkit in the early days of Linux (before Qt and GTK came along). I wouldn't be surprised if many older Unixes are still running Tcl/Tk apps.
I took a class from John Ousterhout. Great guy. However, file this under "too honest": > For example, a few years ago I started working on my first large Web application I've spent most of my career learning the do's and don'ts of building large web applications... I assumed Professor Ousterhout had more experience in this sort of thing than I do!
I agree with this until you come across colleagues with the Jobsian 'reality distortion field'. Or even the social dynamics at play with the orange man that lives in the big white house.
We absolutely assign credibility to people with integrity and self-awareness. But, unfortunately, we also seem to have a capacity to be charisma vultures and will happily believe someone's bullshit if they are making us feel good in the present moment.
I appreciate the concept. And this has the fun of sounding morbid. But this is a bit like saying the most imoprant part of an ICE is a piston which is silly because a piston needs a confined space and a good fuel to operate. It doesn't work without all three (and more).
In this case a mechanism of genetic change is equally (or more important in a way) to evolution than death. Death is obviously very important though.
Stopped reading there. A great plague of modern software development is a complete disregard for performance or resource conservation.
Side note: Ousterhout was famous for being the author of Tcl/Tk, which was a popular language and GUI toolkit in the early days of Linux (before Qt and GTK came along). I wouldn't be surprised if many older Unixes are still running Tcl/Tk apps.
The Vienna based university, TU-Wien, still runs AOLserver and serves 40K users with it. OpenACS.org and dotLRN.org still use the same Tcl-based webserver today.
Gustaf Neumann shepherded the development of the use of OpenACS/dotLRN at TU-Wien, I think: http://nm.wu.ac.at/nm/neumann
>Programmers tend to worry too much and too soon about performance. Many college-level Computer Science classes focus on fancy algorithms to improve performance, but in real life performance rarely matters . Stopped reading there. A great plague of modern software development is a complete disregard for performance or resource conservation.
Application design and domain knowledge are more important than rote optimization. I think that is what Ousterhout is getting at.