21–30 of 242 posts
People are going to look back at this as the 'golden age' of the web. Yes, things are a little screwy all over the place, but you can do ANYTHING you want now. NONE of the perfect software has been written. It's all waiting for improvement. You can do anything you want and profit from it. And people just complain that life isn't easy enough. Psh.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ya I'm beginning to feel out of the loop compared to my peers. But I've been down so deep in some things that I'm profoundly aware of how flawed they are. I need smarter tools and was looking to things like self modifying code as a way to help programmers explore problem spaces and then maybe we could freeze the solutions when they perform properly. I definitely agree that maintaining code is fully 90% of this job.
You obviously know a lot about computing, certainly more than I do on the whole, but I'd recommend leveling up on PL design. Self-modifying assembly code, in the bad old days, was not uncommon (as a performance optimization). It is, however, utterly unmaintainable. I would recommend the book Types and Programming Languages . Also, you should spend a year in a strongly and statically typed language. Start with Ocaml o…
It's always good to go back to the start and remember how much worse things have gotten since any arbitrary time in the past. Before complaining about this rant, go out and explore some of our history: [1] Sketchpad ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USyoT_Ha_bA ) [2] The Mother of All Demos ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfIgzSoTMOs ) [3] Hypercard ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-qth3mrbwc ) [4] Ward's Wiki ( htt…
"The printer was the first drum printer that I had ever seen. It would print 1500 lines per minute alphanumeric, and 1800 lines per minute when only numeric values were being printed. It cost $243,450. Its reliability was somewhat suspect. I walked through the room that it was kept in every day for a year, and the only time that I ever saw it working was at a trade show in Los Angeles. The main reason that I went to the show was that I heard that the printer was there and working. I suspect that the printer was a strong contributor to the demise of Toni Schumans' career with Burroughs. Doug Bolitho was giving a plant tour to a group of potential customers one day and he somehow had the printer printing something. Toni walked into the room and loudly exclaimed "My God it's working". She left Burroughs shortly after the incident."
It's an excerpt from an autobiography. The article as a whole originally came up because the author worked for a summer with Donald Knuth - as in, Donald Knuth of the Art of Computer Programming, the quintessential tome of accurate, elegant, academic, truth-on-a-whiteboard computer science. Presumably Knuth sometimes walked by the non-operative printer some days in the morning too. His job at the company was to write a compiler, and reportedly it was a very good one.
Success and failure in the state-of-the-art have always coexisted. I sit here - as an iPhone programmer, who has recently had to deal with annoying provisioning issues, LLVM and GCC compilation problems, and advertising networks - and I can look through the window of my office to see our printer, which is located behind the water cooler, available over a wireless network, and can accurately print a requested piece of paper the first time I send a print command from my laptop. I think it cost $200 from the office store - in 2011 dollars, before accounting for inflation.
[1] http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/B5000-AlgolRWaychoff.html#7
People are going to look back at this as the 'golden age' of the web. Yes, things are a little screwy all over the place, but you can do ANYTHING you want now. NONE of the perfect software has been written. It's all waiting for improvement. You can do anything you want and profit from it. And people just complain that life isn't easy enough. Psh.
My take-away was not about the lack of ease, but the lack of elegance. That we have foregone Truth for the fast buck.
It's always good to go back to the start and remember how much worse things have gotten since any arbitrary time in the past. Before complaining about this rant, go out and explore some of our history: [1] Sketchpad ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USyoT_Ha_bA ) [2] The Mother of All Demos ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfIgzSoTMOs ) [3] Hypercard ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-qth3mrbwc ) [4] Ward's Wiki ( htt…
Today's computing is built mostly on tools that were originally cheap hacks intended to be replaced. If you have not watched the videos above, for the sake of our future, please do.
Look here's a story: We just had our national holiday in Germany and therefore a long weekend. So I decided to code an update for an iPhone app I have. The app lets the user create funny pictures, so I thought it would be cool to have an online gallery with user-created pictures, where people could vote on the best ones and have a weekly top list. Now this is far from trivial though, suddenly I need online storage, a database for users and votes, and a webservice to handle all of that. So I looked around, found Node.js, MongoDB, Heroku and S3, signed up, started reading, learning and coding. 2 Days later and the first version is done and working. How much did I know about this before and how much does this stack cost me? Almost nothing.
So where's my point with this? First, this kind of story would be impossible just a few years ago. When you realize, how it's now possible for a small developer to reach potentially tens of thousands of users, without the need of a big budget or being in control of delivery channels. When you realize, how much powerful resources are now right at the fingertips of the average developer, how you just need to sit down, read and learn, and you are able to implement even the wildest ideas - then I can't help but think these times are great!
Coding is still hard and despite advancement in technology, it may not have gotten much easier. But many things that used to be straight out impossible, can now, with the right commitment, be archived from the comfort of your own four walls.
I disagree. Automation is happening every day. Your error is assuming that will lead to "people not having to work." It won't, and the reason for that is social and political, and has nothing to do with CS.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My take-away was not about the lack of ease, but the lack of elegance. That we have foregone Truth for the fast buck.
That was what I thought he was aiming for to but then he, out of nowhere, suddenly praised PHP. I'm 99% sure that I don't have to check out PHP again to see if it's really something about it that I've missed.
I love PHP, but I'm in programming like a shade-tree mechanic: I just want a large enough hammer to make something work, I don't care how pretty the end result is.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You obviously know a lot about computing, certainly more than I do on the whole, but I'd recommend leveling up on PL design. Self-modifying assembly code, in the bad old days, was not uncommon (as a performance optimization). It is, however, utterly unmaintainable. I would recommend the book Types and Programming Languages . Also, you should spend a year in a strongly and statically typed language. Start with Ocaml o…
Good advice. Regardless of language, I tend to write a lot of code in a functional manner, which throws off my business partner because he writes macro-style code (where the code is ever-evolving and is practically a media file). So he's about 10 times as prolific and I have a hard time demonstrating why my approach might be better until years down the road. On that note I bought O'Reilly's "Erlang Programming" by Ce…
I'm afraid I don't follow; what do you mean by this bit here?