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The State of the Art is Terrible

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Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#141

Post by bartwe »

cpeterso wrote: post #133
nodata wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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%.

But do you still report bugs? I've gone to report GNOME or Ubuntu bugs, only to find that the problem already has a bug report from 5 years ago. The bugs are still open and unfixed, with a poor sap adding a "me too" comment every few months.

There is a YC startup in there somewhere :) Kickstarter for bugfix contributions.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#142

Post by tonyedgecombe »

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…

"Device drivers are the spawn of the devil to me and completely unnecessary (thank you Microsoft)."

We sort of had this before Windows. When you bought a printer you had to make sure it had an Epson FX mode to support Wordstar, Diablo 630 to print you invoices and IBM Proprinter to print your mainframe reports. It was a bloody mess.

The Windows printer driver model isn't great and MS appear to recognise this, but things were a lot harder when every application did it's own thing.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#143

Post by loup-vaillant »

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…

Wait a minute, are you talking about people who spent 10,000 hours really trying to get better at their craft, and not just doing their work? It's like natural languages, where you can be immersed 20 years in a country and talk no better than you did 2 months after your arrival.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#144

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]

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#145

Post by rmjb »

ojbyrne wrote: post #115
blackhole wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's how programming started for a lot of us. Start playing with transistors, then discover 555s, 741s and discrete logic. Eventually discover micro controllers and start coding in assembly and the C. 10 years down, find yourself managing a large team of developers and you absolutely hate it :)

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#146

Post by david927 »

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…

Just to add to the list: we at Kayia are also attempting the same level of change as VPRI.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#147

Post by Confusion »

robotresearcher wrote: post #138
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 I am amazed once again at some people's ability to take free stuff and complain that it isn't making them money fast enough. Just take a few seconds to think about the value we all get out of the deep and broad Free Software stacks.…

The problem is that writing the code yourself is nice, while tracing/solving bugs in the code of others and fixing docs sucks. Too many free software authors do the nice work and rely on others to do the dirty work. They write code, release it and claim victory, while their code is only barely usable. The problem is that something barely usable is better than something nonexistent, so it gets used and we are stuck with a suboptimal solution. In this respect, free software development constantly gets stuck in a local maximum.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#149

Post by ramchip »

angelbob wrote: post #112
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

He said "Before even my time" for the drums bit.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#150

Post by pgeorgi »

sounds wrote: post #118
msutherl wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"git's content addressing" existed earlier than git: hg and monotone do it.

And long before those, plan9's venti.

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