The State of the Art is Terrible • Hacker News Board

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#41

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Oct 03, 2011, 11:31 PM UTC

msutherl wrote: post #26

asolove wrote: post #4

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…

Yes. I was just talking to my prof./boss today who worked at Stanford, PARC and later Interval about moving some things to Dropbox, arguing that it's a better long-term solution since it's just the file-system and the system doesn't rely on any specific representation (such as a database) or syncing mechanism (can be swapped for rsync, git, AeroFS, etc.). Hearing this, he launched into a rant about distributed file-s…

[deleted]

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#42

Post by Miky » Mon, Oct 03, 2011, 11:32 PM UTC

acqq wrote: post #33

I suggest anybody interested to read: No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3068513 for a better idea why the state of art is actually much less terrible than it appears to idealists. "I believe the hard part of building software to be the specification, design, and testing of this conceptual construct, not the labor of representing it and testing the fide…

I'm a bit unconvinced, since specification, design, and testing could be fundamentally different and vastly improved from the way they are now, not just the area of syntax errors.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#43

Post by nerd_in_rage » Mon, Oct 03, 2011, 11:40 PM UTC

Good article. The app store stuff is spot on (coming from someone who's either directly or indirectly worked on over a dozen iOS apps.)

I tried talking a client through deploying his stuff to the app store. It took about a half hour to figure out what weird setting (overridden by his target settings) that he had different.

Does stuff really need to be this difficult? it's almost absurd.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#44

Post by nerd_in_rage » Mon, Oct 03, 2011, 11:48 PM UTC

Kafka wrote: post #25

tgrass wrote: post #21

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.

Yes, the PHP "language" sucks. But that isn't what matters: From a practical standpoint, it's good for getting things done.

The reason? Almost zero deployment complexity. You can take Joe Web Designer off the street, give him SFTP (or, more likely, FTP) credentials, and have him modifying your site in minutes.

Modify a file, click refresh.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#45

Post by Terry_B » Mon, Oct 03, 2011, 11:48 PM UTC

Yep and all of this because mostly business drives technology not ideological programmers.

And on the rare occasion the ideological programmers are in charge, you can't get them to agree.

Frustrating but that's the way the world works and I'm not sure where complaining gets you.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#46

Post by zackmorris » Mon, Oct 03, 2011, 11:51 PM UTC

nickknw wrote: post #30

zackmorris wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> macro-style code (where the code is ever-evolving and is practically a media file) I'm afraid I don't follow; what do you mean by this bit here?

Oh sorry, basically treating code as any other media file. "Game Scripting Mastery" by Varanese and LaMothe goes into a lot of detail about creating your own language and compiling it to I-code and then running the scripts in the game, the same way you would load images or sounds. My partner writes very expressive code with creative macros (he independently discovered iterators by defining a macro like SPRITE to mean sprite[count]). That might seem a little strange to a computer scientist, but look at what he did. He didn't have to explain how references or lists or anything else worked. If you understand arrays and #defines, then you can use iterators too. And he does things like that to me all of the time, writing one liners to replace my pages of "proper" code. The only problem is that he does it in c++ instead of javascript/python/lua so our games are in this constantly evolving state, so my top priority is adding a scripting library to our engine. Then again, that introduces the need to bind all of these functions and data. It will probably be a win though because we tend to work on large games.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#47

Post by pawosty » Mon, Oct 03, 2011, 11:51 PM UTC

ejames wrote: post #24

An excerpt from an article[1] I ran across a few weeks ago seems appropriate: "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…

I completely agree with this sentiment. Look where automobiles were 100 years ago - nothing like the vehicles we use today; vehicles that are designed to squeeze every last MPG out of a gallon of gas, or can keep us from dying in a major car accident.

Computing will improve. Computing will always improve. I think rants like this are helpful to point out where we definitely can improve, today, to bring on the future - such as making the iPhone dev and release process easier ;-)

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#48

Post by lukeschlather » Mon, Oct 03, 2011, 11:53 PM UTC

ejames wrote: post #24

An excerpt from an article[1] I ran across a few weeks ago seems appropriate: "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…

Counterpoint:

My office has a printer, yes, it's available over the wireless network. However, it cost... somewhere in the neighborhood of $10,000. I'm not entirely sure, we have a five year lease on the thing, and it costs something like $500/month to run. It's an okay printer, as long as you run Windows.

There is a postscript module for the printer, but it costs around $1000, so Mac/Linux machines are out of luck, and our vendor hasn't actually said when we can get such a postscript module installed. (And I get people in my office at least once a week asking how they can print from their MacBook.)

From a hardware perspective, we've come a long way. From a software perspective, it's a wonder that we're still using proprietary nonsense protocols for printing and scanning. And my organization is stuck with a 5 year lease. But even if we weren't stuck with a 5-year lease, it's a $10,000 printer that is incompatible with OS X.

That said, I think this article is over the top and mostly wrong. But it is a great jumping-off point to talk about the limitations of the jumble of incompatible technologies we find ourselves working with, and how we can make them better.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#49

Post by buff-a » Mon, Oct 03, 2011, 11:54 PM UTC

zyb09 wrote: post #27

Painting everything a little bit dark, aren't we? 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…

That you claim that this is far from trivial would seem to support his argument.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#50

Post by pnathan » Mon, Oct 03, 2011, 11:58 PM UTC

ejames wrote: post #24

An excerpt from an article[1] I ran across a few weeks ago seems appropriate: "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…

Why should - 50 years later - we still be astonished that our software works? Doesn't that alone say that we haven't advanced?