In light of all these recent rants it would probably be interesting to track what Alan Kay and his team are doing at www.vpri.org. I am looking forward to see what they'll come up with.
The State of the Art is Terrible
161–170 of 242 posts
Re: The State of the Art is Terrible
#162The thing that the author of this rant and every other rant like it don't understand is that computer science is hard . While tools like functional programming may indeed deliver on the promise of a 60% code reduction, they have a correspondingly higher barrier to learning. Evolving algorithms? Automatic programming? These problems become theoretically intractable so quickly it's not even funny (I currently do resear…
> He wants compilers to just insert the semicolon for him? I'm glad mechanical engineers of the world don't have the same attitude about nails and screws!
Yes! I guess we could learn a lot from other engineering disciplines.
Re: The State of the Art is Terrible
#163I'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…
> I remember when it seemed like I could just open something up and start hacking on it without having to hold tens of thousands of lines of code in my head, spread over dozens of files.
Here's me telling you what's wrong instead of listening: what you're missing here is that we're doing vastly more than we were back then. If you want a pixelized bunch of text that does a simplistic task or two I'm sure you could do now in even less lines and more readable than you could back then.
But no one wants that from us anymore. You can't make a living doing that. You, yourself were complaining about Samba not implementing a specific feature. I bet their code is already too big to meet your "software is fun" metric.
Re: The State of the Art is Terrible
#164Though 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 resonate with Zack's rant, we have apparently chewed much of the same bugs. A quick answer to your @singular's questions: 1) Existing code - this trumps writing everything from scratch. 2) I don't agree, I believe the compuation is straightforward, my belief is that what you perceive as 'progress' is mostly just 'go really really fast.' I showed a Microsoft engineer at the Vintage computer festival installing an RD…
> I don't agree, I believe the compuation is straightforward
That is, until you do them in parallel...
Re: The State of the Art is Terrible
#165Though 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…
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?
What about IBM's Cell (the one used in PlayStation 3)? Or GPU related technologies, like nVidia CUDA?
Re: The State of the Art is Terrible
#166Earlier 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.
What? That's so wrong it's not even funny any more. If you look at the advances in efficiency (on all fronts - energy consumption, manufacturing, maintenance, ...), comfort, safety and basically all facets of personal transportation, it's nothing short of amazing. Today you can buy a new car for 4 months middle class wages and it'll be miles beyond anything you could buy just 25 years ago. (ok maybe not counting some things like leather seats, but apart from a few exceptions like that).
Re: The State of the Art is Terrible
#167Where there's muck, there's brass.
Re: The State of the Art is Terrible
#168I'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…
This may be another flame war, but I don't use IDEs specifically to prevent me from writing the kind of code that I don't want to work on.
Re: The State of the Art is Terrible
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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.
You're No-True-Scotsman'ing a subject/concept that was dead on arrival.
Stop pretending the 10,000 hours thing is a "real thing" or somehow fact.
It's not. Fucking stop it. It's the fantasy of a bad writer who makes up shit based on pure anecdote.
And to use your own bullshit against you, he never said it was deliberate practice in the book, he explicitly used the example of the Beatles, whose "10,000 hours" was them jamming in public and fiddling around privately, not hammering at chord progressions.
The 10,000 hours meme is bullshit. Stop propagating it.
Re: The State of the Art is Terrible
#170Computing is in a bad shape partly because of momentum, and the momentum exists because of the nature of capitalism.
The momentum means we can never stop to make sure the software is as carefully written at it needs to be, and we can never stop to think of the big picture (all the other software we need to operate with).
And because of capitalism's inherent competitive nature, there is no concerted movement towards a unified goal in computing; competition leads to fragmentation, not unification. So we have a profileration of operating systems, redundant software reinventing wheels etc.
Open source is interesting in that regard. It's sort of the solution to a lot of the mess -- in theory, by making the source public, nobody should ever need to solve a problem more than once, and a specific piece of problem-solving code should evolve over time into the perfect solution -- but it's screwed by the competitive nature of people. (People don't just compete among themselves with their egos. They also compete against the status quo; what I like to call the "not invented by me" syndrome which drives people to create new stuff even though what they really ought to have done is to improve the old stuff, thus expanding the pile of legacy software even further.)
Why do we have both Python and Ruby? They are incredibly similar to each other. They are so similar it's silly. Sure, one's got whitespace-sensitive syntax, the other has runtime-extensible OO. But those are superficial differences, and nobody can objectively say that Python is better than Ruby, or vice versa. Do we really need both? And yet Matz and Guido are never going to join forces to work together on a common goal to create a single, superior technology.
Open source ought to work less like capitalism. People need to work together into creating the best, safest, most robust software imaginable.