Web apps aren't tech. They're “tech”
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Web apps aren't tech. They're “tech”
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Re: Web apps aren't tech. They're “tech”
#2[deleted]
Re: Web apps aren't tech. They're “tech”
#3I read that.
I still don't know what the title / that line is supposed to mean.
Re: Web apps aren't tech. They're “tech”
#4I read that. I still don't know what the title / that line is supposed to mean.
Much of what we call "tech" is 10 to 20 old technology. We still call an interactive website tech, but in reality, they're no more cutting edge now than CDs were in 2010.
The fact that it's not new technology is part of why there's so much competition and so much of the market is controlled by established players.
It used to be possible to reach a massive audience with a trivial iPhone app 10 years ago or with a plain text blog a few years before that.
New those spaces are crowded but there are new ones opening up.
Re: Web apps aren't tech. They're “tech”
#5if you studied computer science before 1960 you did maths and electronic engineering. If you studied computer science after 1970 you probably learned a subset speciality. All fields change and all work looks different 10 years later.
Web apps are sufficiently turing-complete that the arrogance of "thats not tech" is just wrong.
Carmack wouldn't write asm for a device now, in all cases. He might do Verilog for an FPGA but he might be doing something else.
Re: Web apps aren't tech. They're “tech”
#6if you studied computer science before 1960 you did maths and electronic engineering. If you studied computer science after 1970 you probably learned a subset speciality. All fields change and all work looks different 10 years later. Web apps are sufficiently turing-complete that the arrogance of "thats not tech" is just wrong. Carmack wouldn't write asm for a device now, in all cases. He might do Verilog for an FPGA…
So your claim is that anything turing-complete should forever be called "tech" and that any disagreement is arrogance?
That's a difficult position to engage with constructively.
Re: Web apps aren't tech. They're “tech”
#7if you studied computer science before 1960 you did maths and electronic engineering. If you studied computer science after 1970 you probably learned a subset speciality. All fields change and all work looks different 10 years later. Web apps are sufficiently turing-complete that the arrogance of "thats not tech" is just wrong. Carmack wouldn't write asm for a device now, in all cases. He might do Verilog for an FPGA…
So your claim is that anything turing-complete should forever be called "tech" and that any disagreement is arrogance? That's a difficult position to engage with constructively.
At some future date, assuming the GPT-3 adherents are right, nobody will "write code" because we will describe systems design goals to an intermediary which then writes the code.
Where is the tech then?
I do think there is tech and non-tech. But it gets very like pornography and the Meese commission: I know it when I see it.
What I find hard, is how many people writing for the REPL or compiled languages, dismiss what is done in CSS or in JS outside of webasm. or PHP. The arrogance is the exclusionary behaviour.
Carmack is very smart. Had he been born 40 years earlier he might well have been the one to work out how to optimise track to head delay on a drum memory, or hacked delay lines, or even have done something amazing in LSI before VLSI. But then some non-carmack doing bitblt optimisations to make games happen would have been wondering "am I a real tech or not"
(btw I think GPT-3 Adherents are smoking strong stuff. I don't expect anyone to write informally stated natural language of intent and have proscriptive, defined code come out the other side, but you know this is a strawman argument too)
I graduated in 82. Because I did not do the Mudge VLSI Course I was held in somewhat contempt by my peers who did. I did Pascal. I was held somewhat in contempt by the Fortran NAG library maintenance squad. We who ran the boxes, and wrote controllers for the plotter were a bit contemptuous of the ones coding for the BBC micro and I was completely distainful of the guy coding .BAT files. None of this is "good" behaviour because we were all doing "tech" But the guys in the engineering labs doing Hypersonic wind tunnels were sometimes a bit elitist about us in s/w ... Over in the school for the logical foundations in computer science they were already writing abstract meta-code which was as far removed from an instruction set as its possible to be: theories of computation, proof systems, you name it.
Physicists and Engineers have been arguing for centuries about the difference between their disciplines.
Re: Web apps aren't tech. They're “tech”
#8if you studied computer science before 1960 you did maths and electronic engineering. If you studied computer science after 1970 you probably learned a subset speciality. All fields change and all work looks different 10 years later. Web apps are sufficiently turing-complete that the arrogance of "thats not tech" is just wrong. Carmack wouldn't write asm for a device now, in all cases. He might do Verilog for an FPGA…
I think the author's point is that modern toolchains make spinning up a basic web app more like following a recipe, and as such is free of many (novel) technical challenges. As technology goes, it's still complex, but so is building a microwave oven and yet we don't call GE's white goods department a tech company. It's a challenge that's already been tackled and is well understood.
If your web app is doing something that's never been done before, which requires the application of scientific principles and so on, like... translating baby babbles into English, then it's still technology, but that would not be because it's a web app.
Re: Web apps aren't tech. They're “tech”
#9if you studied computer science before 1960 you did maths and electronic engineering. If you studied computer science after 1970 you probably learned a subset speciality. All fields change and all work looks different 10 years later. Web apps are sufficiently turing-complete that the arrogance of "thats not tech" is just wrong. Carmack wouldn't write asm for a device now, in all cases. He might do Verilog for an FPGA…
I think the author's point is that modern toolchains make spinning up a basic web app more like following a recipe, and as such is free of many (novel) technical challenges. As technology goes, it's still complex, but so is building a microwave oven and yet we don't call GE's white goods department a tech company. It's a challenge that's already been tackled and is well understood. If your web app is doing something…
There is a great spanish saying (I got this from historical fiction) "let no new thing arise"
Vonnegut wrote a course for eng. lit creative writing on the 7 canonical plotlines of all stories. ever. I thought "goodness whats the point in writing now" but it hasn't stopped people making good entertaining fiction
All code is variations over abstraction, synthesis, loops, decision forks, recursion (tail or not) and all data structures iterate back over lists and arrays, over trees and DAGs.
"never been done before" is pretty rare anywhere.
Re: Web apps aren't tech. They're “tech”
#10if you studied computer science before 1960 you did maths and electronic engineering. If you studied computer science after 1970 you probably learned a subset speciality. All fields change and all work looks different 10 years later. Web apps are sufficiently turing-complete that the arrogance of "thats not tech" is just wrong. Carmack wouldn't write asm for a device now, in all cases. He might do Verilog for an FPGA…
I think the author's point is that modern toolchains make spinning up a basic web app more like following a recipe, and as such is free of many (novel) technical challenges. As technology goes, it's still complex, but so is building a microwave oven and yet we don't call GE's white goods department a tech company. It's a challenge that's already been tackled and is well understood. If your web app is doing something…
Just because the barrier to entry is lower today doesn’t mean complexity is also lower.
An app doesn’t have to be cutting edge in order to clear some arbitrary bar of what constitutes “tech”.