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The State of the Art is Terrible

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Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#81

Post by nl »

walkon wrote: post #64
grepper34 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Need a webserver and database setup? Easy, a few clicks on Heroku and I'm good to go. That's a different path entirely, though not necessarily a bad one. The full stack isn't under your control on Heroku.

The full stack isn't under your control on Heroku.

Oh, so you have the ability, time and motivation to rewrite your firmware, operating system, network stack, database and web server and implement it on a CPU you designed yourself?

No? Then the full stack isn't under your control either. Get over it.

That's a different path entirely

You know what? It's not a different path at all. The convenience of Heroku is no different in principle to using closed source hardware.

Look, I'm a freedom-zero[1] type of person. I run Ubuntu - not OSX - and I admin my own servers. BUT the chains of convenience of apt-get are much closer to the chains of convenience of something like Heroku than many would like to admit.

[1] http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/05/14/freedom-0

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#82

Post by sliverstorm »

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…

I am no fan of x86; however, as I understand it, it's really not as bad as it seems. Modern CISC CPU's have turned into RISC-CISC hybrids; they have a CISC frontend/interpreter that drives a RISC backend. As a result, you get most of the best of both worlds.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#83

Post by zyb09 »

absconditus wrote: post #61
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…

How would what you did be impossible a few years ago? The specific services and products that you listed might not have been available, but they are hardly required for something so simple. Any competent Perl developer could have done the same thing in a couple days a decade ago.

Of course a competent Perl developer could have, after all that is his domain, but he'd still needs to come up with scalable hosting somewhere and why exactly would he want to do that in the first place?. As someone who's primary field isn't web development its amazing what one can put together in a weekend these days - if I had, say, a J2ME app a decade ago and wanted to do the same thing, I don't think I'd even try.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#84

Post by _delirium »

coffee wrote: post #74
walkon wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Need a webserver and database setup? Easy, a few clicks on Heroku and I'm good to go. That's a different path entirely, though not necessarily a bad one. The full stack isn't under your control on Heroku.

Hey, that's a good point! To get more control one should move to AWS. But wait, I don't control the network card on the server with AWS. Hmmm... I know! I'll get a colo. Now I can purchase and build my own machine and have control over the network card. But wait, I don't control the backup power system. Hmmm.... I know! I'll rent a building, get an internet backbone piped into it, buy some generators, and control the…

In practice, the biggest loss-of-control problem I have with Heroku is that it dictates my choice of programming language. Of course, choosing a Linux server also dictates some choices, like making it hard to run Windows-only software. But for me at least, the Linux-apps-only restriction feels less constraining than the Heroku-approved-languages-only restriction. I tend to experiment with new languages semi-frequently, and also have a bunch of code in languages that Heroku doesn't support (mainly Lisp).

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#85

Post by alnayyir »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #70

I'd like to buy Zack a drink, because all of this is obvious to those poor shmucks among us that handle the support end of things (also known as the "shit end"). I've been saying a lot of the same things for years. I'm tired of it now; I'm starting to give up, because it's obvious there isn't a programmer out there that gives a damn. You can try telling them that there's something wrong with software -- something fun…

>allowed_users

You can pay someone to implement this, as well as any other missing AD features, then open source it so no-one has to implement it again.

The original devs that did much of the reverse-engineering work on Samba have since moved on to much more rewarding work. That work will essentially never be done again, nor be improved upon until financial incentives are introduced. Much of the work on Samba since has been bug fixes and pushing your food around on your plate.

We are not your servants, we are people. Give value, get value. Open source is not your custom-fit panacea.

>"So build your own version."..."Why are you reinventing the wheel? That's already been done."

Probably two different groups of the people, the latter group is likely harried contributors to a project you're asking for help from who doesn't have the benefit of the context for the work you're doing. It's a common thing in mailing lists and IRC.

>So Western Digital's backup software interferes with Outlook in funny ways?

We're dipping into two different pools of shitware for examples of bad software now.

>So everybody's decided to abandon sane software versioning altogether and make the support end of things even more nuts?

It's gotten more standard in some respects, thanks to SemVer. I can't speak for companies that have decided to treat it like a high score, much like the Linux distributions of the late 90s and early 00s.

>Software used to be fun.

Still fun for me, after ~15 years of coding, 5 of them professionally. Sounds like you're just grumpy and unwilling to invest in swatting any of the gnats flying in your face.

That or you should take up buddhism, seriously. I'm an atheist but there's some benefit to learning when you should and should not care about things.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#86

Post by mikecsh »

grepper34 wrote: post #62
mhewett wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Totally agree, I still remember the pain I had almost a decade ago install something as simple as a Borland C++ IDE. What a nightmare that was for a newb like me, zero resources online to dig through. Today, you want setup and IDE or get iPad development going? There are TON's of resources with thousands of examples. Hitting an error when setting it up? Copy, paste that error into Google. 9.9 times out of 10 you get…

I don't think the point of the article is to say "oh, life is so hard to set stuff up nowadays".

Rather, the point is that it is easier and more pragmatic to rush ahead with an imperfect technology stack and achieve great things than it is to spend the time and effort to reach "a better place".

I love how far technology has come, I love writing iOS software and appreciate the resources at my fingertips via Google. However I have a similar range of experience as the article's author, and I completely agree that while great things are being done with technology as it is today, it's very sad that we have limited ourselves to only reach where we are now rather than where we may have been.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#87

Post by delroth »

zackmorris wrote: post #13
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…

You are right that it's hard to compete with x86 but it's for a weird reason (beyond the economic might of behemoths like Intel). x86 has good density, so it can do more in a few bytes than sparser instruction sets like RISC. In the late 90s when computers starting being memory bandwidth limited, PowerPC lost out even though it was perhaps a more "modern" architecture. I've often wondered if someone would generalize…

PowerPC lost? It is currently being used in the Xbox 360, PS3, Wii and (in the future) WiiU.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#88

Post by zobzu »

As much as I dislike the whole intro "ive seen it all" listing a do of common stuff, its difficult not to agree on the whole.

The state of software is sad.

I liked that one "Heck, my Mac Plus in 1987 with HyperCard was more approachable than anything today." which is very true, too.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#89

Post by thaumaturgy »

alnayyir wrote: post #85
thaumaturgy wrote: post #70

I'd like to buy Zack a drink, because all of this is obvious to those poor shmucks among us that handle the support end of things (also known as the "shit end"). I've been saying a lot of the same things for years. I'm tired of it now; I'm starting to give up, because it's obvious there isn't a programmer out there that gives a damn. You can try telling them that there's something wrong with software -- something fun…

>allowed_users You can pay someone to implement this, as well as any other missing AD features, then open source it so no-one has to implement it again. The original devs that did much of the reverse-engineering work on Samba have since moved on to much more rewarding work. That work will essentially never be done again, nor be improved upon until financial incentives are introduced. Much of the work on Samba since h…

Thank you (seriously) for demonstrating the part where I said, "but they'd rather tell you why you're wrong rather than really listen to why you're frustrated."

> ...as well as any other missing AD features...

This isn't exactly a feature, it's a core part of AD permissions. Samba 4 was developed for the purpose of taking on server roles in an AD environment.

> We are not your servants, we are people. Give value, get value. Open source is not your custom-fit panacea.

OK, I hear that a lot. And it's a fair criticism. Now, here's the other half of it: support people are not your janitors. Quit expecting us to spend hours digging through arcane documentation, followed by further hours troubleshooting things that you left half-finished, and then turn around and tell us to write it our own damn selves. Because, seriously, there just aren't enough hours in the day. I'd love to contribute more to open source, but first I have to get enough revenue in my business to support that, and before I can do that, I have to figure out how to fix my clients' technical issues without raping their pocketbooks. The harder my job gets, the less likely I am to contribute.

For example, I might be writing a Jooma migration tool right now to fix the stupid 1.5->1.7 issues, and I'd be happy to release it and even support it for as long as people need it, but first I have to figure out what the hell is wrong with the wireless drivers in Linux on the new laptop...

> We're dipping into two different pools of shitware for examples of bad software now.

Yeah, that was the point: examples of bad software cross all disciplines, all companies, all environments. If it was just one company that consistently produced crap software, it would be easy to say that there's probably something broken at that company. But when there are so many companies, and so many freelancers, and so many open source developers producing crap software -- there's probably some issue with software development itself.

> That or you should take up buddhism, seriously.

Eh, I appreciate that, really, but I don't want to stop caring. I want it to be better.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#90

Post by calebmpeterson »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #78
mhewett wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Youngster? Gee, thanks! I remember writing my first program on a Commodore Pet with 4K of RAM. Used peek and poke statements to draw the game field on the screen and loaded and saved the whole thing on a cassette tape. The problem here is that you can argue this either way, so let me clarify. When we do systems analysis, we first focus on "happy path" scenarios. You want something, there's no exceptions, you push a b…

But many folks do not live in that world.

I would venture that anyone who works in a large corporation is not in this world. Which is a loss; large established corporations have some of the most interesting problem spaces...

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