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The State of the Art is Terrible

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Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#121

Post by quanticle »

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…

At least you have documentation. In the bad-old-days before ubiquitous online documentation, you'd have to sort through whatever crap the vendor saw fit to give you. If you were very lucky, there was a mailing list you could post on, if you were very very lucky, your post to the list would actually get a response.

No, software installation today is an absolute breeze compared to what it used to be, no matter which platform you're on. On Windows, DLL hell is largely a solved problem. You can just double-click the Installshield EXE and take a coffee break. On Linux, you can invoke the package manager for your system and have an even more seamless experience. Heck, even programming tools offer their own package management systems now. Want to install django? Pip install django. Want to install rails? gem install rails. It's definitely easier than unzipping files, setting configuration settings, finding (and, in some cases, installing) dependencies, and then crossing your fingers and typing make.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#122

Post by keeperofdakeys »

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…

We still have x86 because we don't like to change things. We like to be able to run windows 95 apps on a modern desktop, just like how we wanted to be able to use our original B&W TVs when colour and widescreen were introduced (although, since analogue signals are dying out, this will soon not be possible; hopefully interlacing will dieout soon too). We like backwards compatibility, upgrading our chips while still retaining compatibility.

Also, x86 isn't as bad as it is made out to be either, even if most of that is just how well our compilers can optimise x86 code.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#123

Post by dools »

I think the source of your frustration here is idealism. You're assuming, first of all, that things should be "better" and second of all that things could be better.

Software and technology in general is like a gigantic thriving petri dish. The natural world is terribly inefficient, too (I need how many sperm to germinate one lousy egg?!)

The simple fact is that I'm able to read your rant, think about it and reply whilst sitting in a cafe on a mobile phone. That is awesome progress.

The problems we deal with as engineers are the reason we get paid to do it. Compare this to the practice of music: the art is in the beauty of the song. The engineering is in getting 5 stoners on stage simultaneously and managing to get paid by the ephemeral promoter at the end of it. I'd rather wrangle with a broken FreeBSD port dependency in the comfort of my office listening to music of my choosing (streamed over the internet, and made by people using computers) than starve because of crop failure.

In every life we have some trouble, but when you worry you make it double.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#124

Post by dupe123 »

I don't really get the point of this article. Felt like he was just saying that everyone today is a moron. I find this attitude annoying. Get off your high horse. Yeah, there's bad programmers and some people are oblivious. In any profession, there are people that are going to suck at it. There's also people that are simply brilliant and are amazing programmers.

Then to act like the entire software stack is broken is silly to me. Sure there's inefficiencies. In any large complicated system, you can expect there to be room for improvement. And anytime you introduce layers of abstraction, inefficiency is bound to happen. But guess what? Not everybody has time to write code in assembly. The fact of the matter is, the software ecosystem has become so complex that people are forced to specialize in more and more specific subsets of it.

And all this jazz about "Oh boo hoo.. software hasn't solved world hunger and doesn't wipe my ass for me when I use the bathroom". Geez man. Calm down. These problems your talking about like figuring out AI are incredibly hard. Its going to take a long, long time for them to be tackled fully. Software and computers have only been around for the blink of an eye in human existence.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#126

Post by keeperofdakeys »

megablast wrote: post #75
pawosty wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 -…

You are kidding, right? Cars have hardly changed at all, still the same petrol powered devices with are a hard shell. Sure the car companies were forced to add in some extra safety mechanisms, but this does not mean much.

How often do cars break down now compared to 30, 50 or 80 years ago? I am pretty sure most of the early drivers were quite good mechanics, these days? Not so much. I'm sure Mr. Ford would find modern cars very foreign.

A chair, clothing and even houses haven't changed much over the years either. Most designs only change bits at a time, slowly morphing into unrecognisable things.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#127

Post by wladimir »

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.

I can so relate to that...

But then I think of other actual jobs that exist nowadays, and I conclude being a software dev might be the least worse.

Software is eating the world, after all.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#128

Post by perlgeek »

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.

if "a couple" > 2, then hardly. Perl is only 22 years old.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#129

Post by nodata »

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…

The alternative used to be: report a bug. Put it in bugzilla.

I've reported thousands of bugs. Maybe 30-50% of them used to be fixed. Nowadays I'd be pushing it to say 5%.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#130

Post by gfodor »

gruseom wrote: post #105
gfodor wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 agre…

I think you're missing the bigger picture here. It's not about a specific application, it's about the notion that the way we write software is fundamentally broken. All of these projects agree that each problem domain can potentially see orders of magnitude reduction in both LOC and bugs if custom languages are designed that fit the domain more appropriately than a one-size-fits-all approach that's been the status quo.
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