The State of the Art is Terrible • Hacker News Board

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#101

Post by randomdata » Tue, Oct 04, 2011, 2:51 AM UTC

deweller wrote: post #5

Wouldn't any accomplished professional look at their own industry and feel this way? I can't imagine any medical doctor who would look at state of the art in health care and say, "Our industry is perfect!" I think sometimes as developers, we need to cut ourselves a little slack. Sure we need to continue to move the state of the art forward. But sometimes we do get stuff done even in spite of our industry's imperfecti…

Last year I purchased a new tractor for my farm to replace an aging machine. I ended up with one from the same company, only thirteen years newer. The new tractor is definitely much more comfortable to operate and has a nicer appearance to onlookers, but when you start to look at the details, the thing is not all that much different than the one it replaced.

For example, the old tractor had a couple of problems that would crop up when it was cold. Nothing serious, but definitely annoying. The new tractor exhibits the exact same problems in an identical fashion. Thirteen solid years of engineering and the only thing that really changed was some improvements to the user experience.

And that sounds a lot like the software industry – a new interface on top of the same old technology. With that, I imagine you are right that virtually all industries have the same problem.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#102

Post by gruseom » Tue, Oct 04, 2011, 2:53 AM UTC

alanh wrote: post #73

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…

For those of you who, like me, had no idea what Burroughs was: An old American business equipment company. Roughly: American Arithmometer Company (1886) → The Burroughs Corporation (1904 rename) → (1986 merger) Unisys.

It's more than that. Burroughs was the mind-blowing innovator of the mainframe era. Look up the Burroughs B5000, which Alan Kay has been raving about for years as still in some ways more advanced than anything that has come since (or at least, anything popular). We had a few threads about it on HN a month or two ago; one of them was the article the GP is linking to. I highly recommend reading the whole thing.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#103

Post by zackmorris » Tue, Oct 04, 2011, 2:53 AM UTC

Hey everyone thanks for your comments, I have learned a lot today.

For all I complain about the state of technology, it's remarkable that I am using it to communicate with some of the most amazing people in the world. You just can't make this stuff up.

I think that maybe it's time to stop taking the pain and do something about it. The only part I've never been able to figure out is how to earn enough income and maintain the independence required to work on the really big problems. Heck, maybe that IS the problem.

This morning I was going to get up and fix another computer to sell on eBay because I am living month to month since quitting my job in November to make the leap into living the dream. I've called in almost every favor and in all honesty am within a few weeks of applying for jobs. Maybe I should have blogged about the process earlier!

I feel like if I can't hack it, then there must be others out there just like me. I just didn't expect this post to resonate quite like it did. I wonder how many of us feel like that friend we all know whose band hasn't quite made it yet so they couch surf. The waste of talent is staggering, and all around us.

If you are interested in this issue, I set up a google doc here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Oe0X0ML0LuS6rPNLLH9s_wCq...

I'm totally open to any suggestions and you can also contact me on twitter at @zackarymorris or any of the sites in my profile.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#104

Post by ams6110 » Tue, Oct 04, 2011, 2:55 AM UTC

michaelochurch wrote: post #97

alnayyir wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Eh, I appreciate that, really, but I don't want to stop caring. I want it to be better. Corpses write no code. shrugs > 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. Anything below the top, say, 2-5% of software is guaranteed to be shit because all the programmers below the top 2-5% are shit. There is no grand move…

Anything below the top, say, 2-5% of software is guaranteed to be shit because all the programmers below the top 2-5% are shit. There is no grand movement or methodology to be had here. It's a people problem. Disagree. I don't think 95-98% of programmers are idiots. However, a lot of programmers (even some very smart ones) are terrible architects and have no sense of the big picture. Moreover, a lot of projects start…

If you have 10,000 hours of practice in a particular software package or platform, congratulations, you are an expert at something that was obsolete five years ago. This is something that makes software development both a frustrating field and an interesting one. I always feel like I'm learning, but never feel I've really mastered anything.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#105

Post by gruseom » Tue, Oct 04, 2011, 2:58 AM UTC

gfodor wrote: post #58

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.

I don't think they are similar in spirit. These other projects are missing the radical vision that is by far the most important and guiding thing behind Kay's group: to recreate all of personal computing in 20,000 lines of code. Operating system and applications. That is so profound that, if they succeed (a big if) it can't help but change the world. Simonyi and the Jetbrains people aren't in the same galaxy.

(I agree with you about it being kind of hard to follow what they're doing, though.)

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#106

Post by tensor » Tue, Oct 04, 2011, 3:04 AM UTC

zackmorris wrote: post #53

lukeschlather wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (th…

No other industry has the features you seem to want. You can't just put any tires on your car and have it just work. You can't just throw any gas in it.

As for printers, PS was proposed as a standard so that printers "just worked". It cost money to license, not every jumped on board, and so it didn't establish itself as the dominant brand. PDF is based on PS and people could certainly standardize around it. The problems are the same as with PS, however.

Your screenshot example. I assure you that you are not the first person to think of this feature. Apple does distribute Photo Booth with OS X after all. Is your complain then that they didn't cater to an the incredible minority with a command line tool to do this? I don't see this as a reasonable complaint. It's certainly not something to hit yourself over the head with.

None of this has anything to do with computers nor state-of-the art. Your complaints seem to be that society is not catering to your specific needs quite enough. Or that people are not working together quite enough. While I agree with you on the later point, it's not worth getting so worked up over. It's always been this way and likely always will.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#107

Post by agileqr » Tue, Oct 04, 2011, 3:06 AM UTC

michaelochurch wrote: post #97

alnayyir wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Eh, I appreciate that, really, but I don't want to stop caring. I want it to be better. Corpses write no code. shrugs > 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. Anything below the top, say, 2-5% of software is guaranteed to be shit because all the programmers below the top 2-5% are shit. There is no grand move…

Anything below the top, say, 2-5% of software is guaranteed to be shit because all the programmers below the top 2-5% are shit. There is no grand movement or methodology to be had here. It's a people problem. Disagree. I don't think 95-98% of programmers are idiots. However, a lot of programmers (even some very smart ones) are terrible architects and have no sense of the big picture. Moreover, a lot of projects start…

I'm glad you brought up the point about software architecture because it's something I constantly find myself explaining: the difference between good architecture that survives many many generations and forms of code re-use vs. code monkey output that is fit only for that individual programmer's or his client's one-time use. This is an especially important point to bring up when you encounter business people who wonder why we can't just outsource everything. Cheaply-outsourced code is too often the drudge code monkey output we would find deplorable.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#108

Post by munin » Tue, Oct 04, 2011, 3:10 AM UTC

this article seems like a more educated and experienced manner of asking "mr. babbage, if you put the wrong numbers in, will the right answers come out" ...

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#109

Post by geogra4 » Tue, Oct 04, 2011, 3:15 AM UTC

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…

Ward's Wiki is wonderful. It totally reminds me of the old days, when a website was nothing more than a collection of hypertext links.

The original rant really does make a good point about how accessible things once were. Gosh even being 24 I remember the days of screwing around with logo and qbasic and hacking serial ports with zterm. It's not that everything 'just worked' then (It didn't) but that if it didn't work you could still get something useful out of the machine. The layers of abstraction from the hardware have grown so much now that nothing makes sense.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#110

Post by thaumaturgy » Tue, Oct 04, 2011, 3:17 AM UTC

jebblue wrote: post #92

thaumaturgy wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. Unless I'm missing something, if software were perfect then there wouldn't be a need for support peopl…

Yeah, and I think that would be OK. I'm not certain about it, but I think that a lot of the time and energy that goes into support could go into development instead, and most people would be happier. For example, clients that are paying me to fix things might pay me instead to make new things for them that would better fit their needs.

I'm not under any illusion that it would work that way for everyone. But, I can't think of a single support-level person (whether consultant, phone, on-site, or otherwise) that's been doing it for more than a few years that's really happy with it. It can be exceptionally frustrating to be the go-between between users and fluky systems. So, at the very least, it would eliminate a necessary evil that makes a lot of people unhappy.

It might also result in fewer jobs to go around. But I don't think so.