Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The State of the Art is Terrible

zackarymorris.tumblr.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 242 posts

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#111

Post by commieneko »

I gave up in the late '80s.

I still use computers, heck, the whole developed world uses computers now. But that's despite the way software/hardware have developed; a side effect of Moore Law making things faster and cheaper.

Unix is the big thing in 2011? Really? Nooo.... well shit!

Funny that the OP mentions Hypercard. When it came out a number of very smart people said, "Hey, that's kind of neat!"

And it was. It was little better than a toy at first, but I saw street people sit down with it and _an hour latter_ they were using it to solve problems, and were delighted. And let me tell you, in 1987 part of that hour was used to explain how to us a mouse, drag selections, double click, etc.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#112

Post by angelbob »

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…

Youngster? Gee, thanks! I remember writing my first program on a Commodore Pet with 4K of RAM

That thing he's talking about with non-sequential placement of bytes on the drum is well before that.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#113

Post by commieneko »

zobzu wrote: post #88

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.

I was doing some consulting work at a public library in 1987, and they had several public access Macs. I set up Hypercard on them and started showing people, staff, patrons, kids, winos, how to use it.

In 1987 _lots_ of people had never sat down before a computer in their lives. I could spend an hour with someone and have them doing useful things with Hypercard. It was extremely approachable. And I don't just mean doing word processing or drawing pictures, though they were doing that too. They were creating software that solved real problems from their real life.

I started out by giving out floppy disks for them to save their "stacks", for them from out of my own pocket. We finally had to start selling them at the circulation desk.

The biggest conceptual problems, then as now, were in teaching people how to deal with files in a file system, on multiple volumes/disks, and in making people think in terms of versions of documents (actually applications in this case) and in backing them up.

Data loss from exposing the disks to magnetic fields was also a major problem, at least we seem to have conquered that problem...

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#114

Post by angelbob »

tensor wrote: post #106
zackmorris wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 probl…

It cost money to license

Also the only decent-performance chips doing it were from Adobe, and they weren't cheap. At the time, this would have pretty much cut the low-end printer market to the ground. The high-end printer market, of course, pretty much all did PostScript if you asked them to.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#115

Post by ojbyrne »

blackhole wrote: post #94
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…

Every now and then I decide I don't like being a programmer anymore. And then I remember its the only thing I'm good at.

That's what hobbies are for - i.e. exploring other interests can make you more well-rounded, and occasionally give you marketable skills.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#117

Post by giardini »

And the code I wrote for IBM mainframes using CICS and VSAM _still_ _runs_ today, as does the code for Unisys mainframes written in TIP, COBOL and DMS. Maybe I'll go back to using that. Hell, it runs more reliably than anything that tried to replace it!8-))

But I really miss toggling instructions and data directly into memory on the PDP-11's control panel. Yeah, the state of the art is terrible indeed.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#118

Post by sounds »

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…

What about the progress being made by file systems? btrfs, for example, includes some amazing abilities.

And what about git's content addressing?

Progress comes in fits and starts, and not where we expect it.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#119

Post by jberryman »

zackmorris wrote: post #103

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 maint…

> I think that maybe it's time to stop taking the pain and do something about it.

There you go. I'm sure you'll find you're not alone.

Best of luck and stay positive :)

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#120

Post by [deleted] »

alnayyir wrote: post #99
michaelochurch wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>Disagree. I don't think 95-98% of programmers are idiots. I didn't say that. > It takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to become good at something, People need to stop re-hashing this. 10,000 hours of deliberate practice is likely but not necessarily going to make you an excellent programmer. I know plenty of programmers in their 40s and older who have that much time in or more that are frankly, garbage. Invest…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN