191–198 of 198 posts
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It was a re-org, those engineering teams just moved to be under CAI or ED. The people are still there.
The people are still there, but there's no organizational impetus to always use them, plus they have other duties now. The team being disbanded means a loss in product tightness and quality control.
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I’ve been programming since 1965, read Dijkstra, Niklaus Wirth. And these days I break software at people’s request. There is in fact much less concern and emphasis on quality these days. It is also interesting to note that Knuth also does not do libraries
> I’ve been programming since 1965, read Dijkstra, Niklaus Wirth. Well sir, you have me by ten years, and believe me I respect that extra decade. That said, I think you're falling into the trap many of us greybeards tumble into as we get older: the things we cared about and focused on become, in our minds, the right and true perspective that has been lost or disregarded by younger practitioners. It's really not very…
None of what you seem to think about my rant represents what my position is. Read my other note in my thread about the NYT article concerning Knuth and Norvig’s commentary. There is a time today for total deep dive. There is skill involved to do this and wisdom when to do this.
There are folks who write with minimal libraries cf qmail.
What seems to be completely missing from today’s discourse about programming is something dijksata said about interrupts. Paraphrasing “If you don’t see the code on the page in front of you, you will make mistakes. “
Take a look at modern Java. Levels of abstraction in use require serious deep dive to truly know what is going on. There is a famous Node package issue where code that wasn’t even on your computer crashed a swath of applications.
Quality in the context of the article means the code is pleasing to read, doesn’t crash unexpectedly and doesn’t have side effects that you may only discover when Brian krebs emails you about your customer’s data ending up in some remote online flea market
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I agree with the core point of the article, but I agree with your points as well. The conclusion of the article is definitely wrong. I recently buddied up with someone who has a CS degree to try and make a desktop app, as a side project. I asked if he is familiar with MariaDB and whether or not he's used C++ ODBC. Our discussion quickly turned into choosing libraries / existing code. He uses Spring and Hibernate and…
You're right about a lot but I really want to argue against the idea "people don't care." They do care. They care when their phone dies after 2 years and they have to buy a new one because updates have rendered it unusable. They care when the phone/pc/laptop gets hot with only a few tabs open. Polls seem to show people generally care about climate change, and as little as PC's use in energy (relative to transportatio…
I started my career as a software engineer writing C, then C++ working on desktop software. Things made sense back then, and that was just 10 years ago.
I’ve tried contributing features to two Electron-based apps. I gave up on both. I just can’t make sense of it.
I’ve sat down countless times over the last decade telling myself I’m going to teach myself this damn frontend web stuff. I gave up every time. It’s ridiculous.
Young folks who have only been exposed to modern garbage have no idea how good it was before the web took over.
I often wonder how this came to be. How we went from well-documented, efficient, sound APIs and libraries to the monstrosity that we have now. I have nothing to offer though.
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> more than I like saving a few fractions of a percent of my hard drive space. Hard disk space is seldom the actual issue. Instead, it's bandwidth used (too expensive to download over a mobile connection, or maybe not even feasible to download over a low-quality connection), or memory requirements (can't reliably use slack + spreadsheet + photoshop at the same time), or power consumption (laptop out of battery in 1 h…
> bandwidth Why would I download a text editor every time I wanted to use it? Even VS Code is stored locally, ready to be used off-line. But let's not pick an Electron app for _everything_ we want to do: last time I checked, Notepad++ does all of what I listed, and more. > memory requirements Yes, this can be a problem and is a sure sign of bloat. Meanwhile, I think we're bad at picking our software: why do we just s…
>Why would I download a text editor every time I wanted to use it?
To give a serious answer: The web is literally that. And I suspect the success of the web is in a major way due to Windows' lack of streamlined package manager, as the installation ("loading") of a webpage is about a second, whereas the install time of an average Windows program involved potentially several minutes and clicking "next" several times.
Fast install times helps with discoverability - if you can click a link and "install" a browser in under a second, it becomes pretty trivial to try out ten browsers in under two minutes and encourages experimenting. Plus, you'll have reasonable expectation that you won't have to spend time cleaning up the cruft left by unwanted IDEs you don't plan to use.
Also, the install time issue also applies to updates. Web pages mostly don't have an "updating..." loading popup like e.g. Steam has every time there's an update.
Note: I am NOT advocating we all switch to web browsers. I AM advocating that we try to make our package managers a couple of orders of magnitude faster.
It is the reality of the software industry. Time-to-market is the only rule. and it dictates how we write software: Agile, Scrum, don't reinvent, deploy early, fix it later, technical debt.
There are many of us who care about quality of our work. But in performance reviews, the only thing that matters is how many features you shipped. You cannot demonstrate the quality of your work in your performance review. Or better yet, the fact that the software you wrote is going to be bug-free for next 10 years.
The referenced AppSignal post about 13,000 dependencies for a todo list is conflating dependencies required for the build tooling with dependencies that are actually bundled in to the web app. It's also hilarious that right after referencing the dependency problem in the JS ecosystem the OP then goes and advocates splitting up your library into a bunch of mini libraries. That's exactly how we got into this mess in th…
I agree with the core point of the article, but I agree with your points as well. The conclusion of the article is definitely wrong. I recently buddied up with someone who has a CS degree to try and make a desktop app, as a side project. I asked if he is familiar with MariaDB and whether or not he's used C++ ODBC. Our discussion quickly turned into choosing libraries / existing code. He uses Spring and Hibernate and…
meant by who ? Because I certainly keep slack open while I am compiling. And it seems to me that it is meant to be kept open in the background while you do other stuff.