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The State of the Art is Terrible

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Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#51

Post by vosper »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #31

...Sure, your computer can perform 10 billion floating point operations per second. But most of the time it’s not doing anything at all. Just like you... This is a great rant. Nice emotional content, lots of technical details, the author qualifies his credentials, etc. Easily one of the better articles I've read in the past few weeks. One of the things he mentions is the pain of setup -- something I've painfully watc…

Great analogy - every time I go to a hotel I have to figure out the damn shower; I'd never realised there were so many different concepts and designs just around shower controls.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#52

Post by buff-a »

singular wrote: post #39
ChuckMcM wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I resonate with Zack's rant, we have apparently chewed much of the same bugs. A quick answer to your @singular's questions: 1) Existing code - this trumps writing everything from scratch. 2) I don't agree, I believe the compuation is straightforward, my belief is that what you perceive as 'progress' is mostly just 'go really really fast.' I showed a Microsoft engineer at the Vintage computer festival installing an RD…

1 - I agree that's a huge, massively important thing, but there are non-x86 processors in the world which find their niche (in ARM's case it's quite a huge niche), so surely if it is possible to develop a processor which is so much better than x86 then why don't they already exist? I am hardly very well informed on the processor market, so for all I know they do, though I'd be surprised. 2. Sure, I guess what I'm get…

so surely if it is possible to develop a processor which is so much better than x86 then why don't they already exist?

Suppose I invented a new chip that was awesome for gaming, spreadsheets, word processing, databases and power consumption.

Who would build PCs with it?

What OS would it run if someone built it?

Who would buy that?

Its not merely a "huge, massively important thing". Its the only thing.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#53

Post by zackmorris »

lukeschlather wrote: post #48
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,…

I wasn't sure where to chime in on these comments but this one resonated with me because I used postscript for a year at hp and it's a remarkable language. I think it's a shame that it's mostly unknown today and the opaque pdf standard has taken over.

The world has largely established that http is the way to query devices and control them. Device drivers are the spawn of the devil to me and completely unnecessary (thank you Microsoft). They may very well be the pinnacle of what I'm complaining about.

Printers could have a free wireless web interface where you upload any file type from tiff to doc and it "just works." I realize it's more complicated than that because of colorspaces and half toning and blah blah blah. But it shouldn't be.

And I shouldn't need any special software to save images from my scanner or take a snapshot with my webcam. I actually wrote a command line tool on the Mac to tell Quicktime to save a snapshot from the webcam as a file. That is pathetic and makes me want to hit myself over the head with a sledgehammer.

I don't think I've said anything earth shattering here but wake me up when any of this happens.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#54

Post by Zimahl »

wccrawford wrote: post #3

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.

This rant is just the technological way of saying 'damn kids, get off my lawn!'.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#55

Post by loup-vaillant »

Anyone who liked this article may like to know that Alan Kay and his team at the Viewpoint Research Institute are currently making a silver bullet. A real one. Of the kind that really really hurts the Complexity Werewolf. They may not kill it, but the scars are already visible.

Take a look at their work, most notably the last STEPS progress report. They can use 50 times less code than well written, useful C code (like TCP). Compare with redundant, useless, badly written C++.

The secret is quite simple: you can write your own programming languages, and good code looks like a formal spec (to the point of being one, ideally). If you can't write good code, then write the language that will let you. How ? Start here : http://www.tinlizzie.org/ometa/

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#56

Post by ori_b »

ajross wrote: post #14
singular wrote: post #11

Though I speak from a probably utterly uninformed + unqualified standpoint, this raises a few points for me:- 1. If x86 hardware is so terrible (and I have heard that the architecture really is bad many times), how come we don't have competing chips out there which are many, many times more efficient? I know ARM outperforms on the low-power front, but not in terms of perf to my knowledge. Do such chips exist? And if…

The x86 thing is just grousing by people who think aesthetics in the assembler are the definition of a clean architecture. Instruction decode for a modern x86 CPU is indeed a difficult problem when compared with cleaner architectures (though ARMv7 is hardly "clean" -- how many instruction sets does it support now? Five, I think?). Instruction decode, however, is one of the easiest problems to tackle on a CPU. It just…

It's amazing how much turd polish several billion in r&d will buy you.

X86 is amazing in spite of legacy and poor architectural choices.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#57

Post by mhewett »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #31

...Sure, your computer can perform 10 billion floating point operations per second. But most of the time it’s not doing anything at all. Just like you... This is a great rant. Nice emotional content, lots of technical details, the author qualifies his credentials, etc. Easily one of the better articles I've read in the past few weeks. One of the things he mentions is the pain of setup -- something I've painfully watc…

Ah, you youngsters. Trust me, it is FAR easier now to get started than any time in computing history. Before GitHub, you installed SVN or CVS on your own. Before that you accidentally overwrote your software once a month. Before Cloudant you installed MySQL on your own. Before that you wrote your own storage system. Before Amazon you bought a server and installed Linux on it. Before that you wrote customer databases using an Apple II with 48KB of memory and floppy drives with 120KB of space. Before even my time, programmers used the spin rate of storage drums to calculate where to place blocks of data so they could be read as fast as possible (hint: sequential block placement was not optimal). No whining - you've got it good. Go do great things.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#58

Post by gfodor »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #55

Anyone who liked this article may like to know that Alan Kay and his team at the Viewpoint Research Institute are currently making a silver bullet. A real one. Of the kind that really really hurts the Complexity Werewolf. They may not kill it, but the scars are already visible. Take a look at their work, most notably the last STEPS progress report. They can use 50 times less code than well written, useful C code (lik…

Other efforts similar in spirit but dramatically different in execution are Intentional Software and Jetbrains MPS. I really need to find a weekend to try to parse through VRI's work. Has anyone tried to make a digestable survey of the work they have done? I've glanced through their documentation but it seems quite sparse and their stuff is a moving target.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#59

Post by grepper34 »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #31

...Sure, your computer can perform 10 billion floating point operations per second. But most of the time it’s not doing anything at all. Just like you... This is a great rant. Nice emotional content, lots of technical details, the author qualifies his credentials, etc. Easily one of the better articles I've read in the past few weeks. One of the things he mentions is the pain of setup -- something I've painfully watc…

I'm not following you on the pain of setup. I'm finding it easier to setup things these days than I could 10 years ago.

- Need a webserver and database setup? Easy, a few clicks on Heroku and I'm good to go.

- Need to learn how to program something that you can then deploy to Heroku? Easy, just follow these 13 steps and you're on your way:

http://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/ex0.html

WTF is so painful about this?

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#60

Post by gfodor »

A good, if not great, rant. I think the one point I'd like to make is I think the iPad represents the first opportunity in a long time to really fundamentally re-think computing. Yes, it comes with a lot of legacy garbage, and it's shackled by Apple itself, but it's different enough that it might just be the thing we need to have some fresh thinking.

The tragedy will be if we are so blinded by the past that we do nothing more than project the status quo onto it. If we can get back to our roots and remember what computing is fundamentally about, extending the capability of humanity, I think we can expect to see some amazing things over the next decade.

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