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The State of the Art is Terrible

zackarymorris.tumblr.com

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Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#171

Post by alnayyir »

billswift wrote: post #151
Confusion wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wi…

>The problem is that something barely usable is better than something nonexistent No necessarily. I think sometimes the existence of something, even if only barely usable, blocks the creation of something else that might be better.

OTOH, perfect can at times be the enemy of good.

You have to weigh the value of immediacy against permanently enshrined qualities and perform your own cost-benefit analysis.

This is called critical thinking, they introduce this around age 12 in most western societies. You don't have to pick a religion and stick with it, you can just make a judgment call on a case-by-case basis.

Works great for me, fyi.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#172

Post by hackermom »

"Most computers today, for all of their potential speed, are largely a mistake, based on the provenly unscalable Von Neumann architecture, controlled with one of the most shortsighted languages of all time, x86 assembly. They are almost unfathomably inefficient."

Well put, Sir.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#173

Post by brain5ide »

noonespecial wrote: post #134
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…

I remember when it was, when it seemed like most things just worked, even though they didn't look pretty. I remember spending hours moving around jumpers to set DMA and IRQ. Only to find out that the only free IRQ was #9 and bloody Packard Bells sometimes didn't have a frikkin' 9 because that batch of boards was $2 cheaper that month... I remember when it wasn't pretty and it took ridiculous efforts to make it work e…

Hardware improved. I believe the guy's talking about software.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#174

Post by alnayyir »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #110
jebblue wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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

It would result in more wealth and efficiency, not more jobs. Capitalism says nothing about jobs, only wealth.

We don't really (in western society) have a mechanism for transferring wealth beyond trade, labor, and government fiat. In the absence of busywork created by government fiat, we're going to have a hard time socially speaking midwifing an increasingly efficient world where redundant jobs get replaced with technology and processes.

This will continue the trend of increasing wealth stratification as whomever has control over the means of production will be subject to the will of others less and less, and be able to keep more of their profits.

Incidentally, this means it'll be fantastic to be a programmer, and terrible to be a laborer.

If a novel solution isn't found, the best many could hope for is a service job or medieval-style patronage of arts as production and maintenance of product pipelines requires fewer humans.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#175

Post by iochannel »

this is great news. b/c it means there's still (after how many yrs?) huge opportunity. think different.

code something simple (=terse) that follows common sense and just works and it's an island of consistent speed and reliability in a sea of crap and bloatware.

we need more djb-like coders, who do not mimick 1000's of other coding monkeys.

mcillroy said the hero is he who writes negative code. he's right. the world needs less not more code.

if you can't handle that, then you're just contributing to keeping the "state of the art" terrible. but then people just keep paying for this crap so that's why it won't disappear. the idiots are rewarded for their "productivity" in producing saleable crapware.

carry on.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#177

Post by iochannel »

this is great news. b/c it means there's still (after how many yrs?) huge opportunity. think different.

code something simple (=terse) that follows common sense and just works and it's an island of consistent speed and reliability in a sea of crap and bloatware.

we need more djb-like coders, who do not mimick 1000's of other coding monkeys.

mcillroy said the hero is he who writes negative code. he's right. the world needs less not more code.

if you can't handle that, then you're just contributing to keeping the "state of the art" terrible. but then people just keep paying for this crap so that's why it won't disappear. the idiots are rewarded for their "productivity" in producing saleable crapware.

carry on.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#178

Post by gpuk »

Kafka wrote: post #23
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…

I wish there was a video of "The Mother of All Demos" where you could actually read the text.

http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/1968Demo.html#complete

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#179

Post by 0x12 »

ramchip wrote: post #149
angelbob wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And it was blocks not bytes.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#180

Post by 0x12 »

alnayyir wrote: post #169
loup-vaillant wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The 10,000 hours meme (if it is that, it seems more of an observation to me) is not to be taken literal.

If you take it literal, then yes, it is nonsense, it is not that until the 9999th hour you are going to be bad at something and then suddenly, boom magic.

What it means - and what I've found to be very true - is that to get better at something you need to put in time and you need to practice your trade.

Nobody is born a 'great programmer', sure there are some differences in talent but I've seen guys go from bad to mediocre to good to excellent just by applying their trade and learning their lessons. Some of the kids I taught a decade ago that were struggling with basic concepts now run circles around me. That's proof enough to me that there is some truth in the 10,000 hour rule.

You can disagree with the writer all you want but in practice he does seem to have a point.

And for all your aggressive use of language you so far do not seem to have one. If you want to show that something is not true you have to provide counterexamples, not simply jump up and down using foul language telling people to stop.

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