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Peter Naur's view of programming

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Re: Peter Naur's view of programming

#191

Post by jimmyvalmer »

btilly wrote: post #190
jimmyvalmer wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, you win. Also: our individual opinions become vanishingly insignificant relative to the aggregate opinion of the market, one that continues to pay for MS Equation Editor.

Also: our individual opinions become vanishingly insignificant relative to the aggregate opinion of the market, one that continues to pay for MS Equation Editor. Actually they don't. People preferred paying for products like https://www.dessci.com/en/products/mathtype/ which allowed people to type TeX into Microsoft documents than they did Equation Editor. Therefore Microsoft gave up on Equation Editor. They then cre…

Ah, I see the "Equation Editor" moniker is now defunct. I've long been in the LaTeX camp, so I've no idea what's transpired since 1990s when I last used a quasi-wysiwig entry called "Equation Editor."

How you managed to conclude LaTeX entry is now more popular than whatever quasi-wysiwig method MS Word currently supports is, I suppose, market information I'm not privy to.

Re: Peter Naur's view of programming

#192

Post by QuercusMax »

hathawsh wrote: post #155
QuercusMax wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately for me, I started developing really bad RSI around January of last year, and typing has been incredibly painful. In the past I would have discussed things using whiteboards, sitting down side-by-side with code, etc.; these are all very hard to do if typing causes pain. Interactive sessions are also very helpful, as there are so many assumptions and background material baked into things that often take a…

It sounds like you need a secretary--someone who can type fast and dress up your words for wider distribution in the company.

You're not wrong; I've actually thought about that.

Fortunately my RSI is starting to get better. Therapeutic massage and shoulder rehab exercises have made a big difference (I had a bike accident a few years back, and my shoulders were in pretty bad shape).

I stopped typing on my 2018 MacBook Pro's keyboard (which I think contributed to my problems), and exclusively use an ErgoDox. I've also been taking Magnesium as well as NSAIDs to reduce inflammation. Still a daily struggle, but I can type posts like this one without too much pain.

Re: Peter Naur's view of programming

#193

Post by atomicson »

btilly wrote: post #186
atomicson wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Old version? You have to understand that some applications need innovation based on new ideas. TeX is only popular in the academic and publishing world, not like a web browser. Can we write a complex equation in TeX as easy as we write in popular word applications like MS Word?

Can we write a complex equation in TeX as easy as we write in popular word applications like MS Word? Thank you for the most ludicrous comment that I've seen today. The popularity of TeX in academia is exactly because writing complex equations in popular word applications is painfully hard, and the typesetting is poor. By contrast writing them in TeX is easy and the typesetting defaults to excellent. Talk to anyone w…

I wrote one. My point is, we need a better way to write a complex equation as easy as we wrote some texts like in MS Word or LibreOffice. That's an innovation. At least some guys in Microsoft or LibreOffice guys already did. Hide the complexity. Maybe one day you could write a complex equation only by voice command. No one will touch TeX anymore.

Re: Peter Naur's view of programming

#194

Post by QuercusMax »

johbjo wrote: post #181
QuercusMax wrote: post #29

The point about theory-building requiring (or at least being accelerated by) interpersonal communication / teaching rings very true. In the middle of last year, my team went through a major re-org, and I'm now working with a whole bunch of new teammates. My project didn't get cancelled in the reorg; in fact, it's actually come to more prominence due to synergy in the projects we work on. Essentially my new teammates…

It sounds like the new teammates are too comfortable if their current learning rate is 2-4 years. That number could also be an overestimation, which reinforces the relative rank in the team. This points to another "field of tension": when the value of the company is in the minds of the programmers (not in the code), how should an organization handle rank such that all team members become stakeholders in the most effe…

My field, medical device software, has very long product cycles. It's not that my teammates are taking a long time to learn, it just takes time for a project to reach maturity.

Additionally, we've all been learning to collaborate in a new mode, with immense distractions. Prior to our reorg, we'd never actually worked together before. And we all had our own deadlines we were trying to meet. The last 11 months have been pretty awful, ya know?

Re: Peter Naur's view of programming

#195

Post by ontouchstart »

dang wrote: post #71

That's an egregiously baity title. That's not cool here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: The submitted title was "Your source code is worthless". I've changed it now.

Dang, your title definitely made me curious enough to click the link, had a quick glimpse of the article and went to download the original 14 page PDF the author provided

http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf

This is the power of web and http that opens the world to any curious mind. Your change of title made a book marketing page to a gate to new ideas to explore and discover.

Also out of curiosity I traced the HN list of the submissions of the original link, i.e., the author who is promoting his book:

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=cloogshicer

You can see that your change increased the attention to his marketing effort by a factor of 2!

Unfortunately this attention would hardly help him reach his audience, who are on the hiring side of the market and have completely different constraints than the engineering minded people dominated in HN.

Interesting conversation though.

Re: Peter Naur's view of programming

#196

Post by deepsun »

tester34 wrote: post #167
deepsun wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two more reasons Google doesn't touch others code: 1. They have monorepo with custom build infra, which makes integrating any third_party code pretty hard. 2. In google career culture, one gets promoted for development of something new, not integrating existing proved solutions.

>They have monorepo with custom build infra, which makes integrating any third_party code pretty hard. Why would it be significantly harder than creating new project?

One problem I know -- different versions. They actually do have a small amount of third_party libs, but due to "diamond dependency" problem, they are accepting only only one single version of that dependency. And updating that dependency is a huge undertaking (even for small security bugfixes), so those libs are usually outdated.

Kinda similar to OS kernel organization: monolith vs. microkernel.

Re: Peter Naur's view of programming

#197

Post by cloogshicer »

ontouchstart wrote: post #195
dang wrote: post #71

That's an egregiously baity title. That's not cool here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: The submitted title was "Your source code is worthless". I've changed it now.

Dang, your title definitely made me curious enough to click the link, had a quick glimpse of the article and went to download the original 14 page PDF the author provided http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf This is the power of web and http that opens the world to any curious mind. Your change of title made a book marketing page to a gate to new ideas to explore and discover. Also out of curiosity I traced the H…

I mainly submitted this here for the discussion. I really enjoy reading people's comments and I'm very curious if my hypotheses are correct.

Re: Peter Naur's view of programming

#198

Post by inadequatespace »

QuercusMax wrote: post #29

The point about theory-building requiring (or at least being accelerated by) interpersonal communication / teaching rings very true. In the middle of last year, my team went through a major re-org, and I'm now working with a whole bunch of new teammates. My project didn't get cancelled in the reorg; in fact, it's actually come to more prominence due to synergy in the projects we work on. Essentially my new teammates…

> All-remote work has definitely made a big (negative) impact in the velocity that ideas can be communicated.

This, along with the fact that employment half-life is long relatively to COVID (2 years average tenure), convinces me that this "remote permanent" hype is going to grind to a screeching halt in another year or so.

Yes, I'm putting my money where my mouth is (in SF Bay real estate, in this case).

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