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Cold Showers

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Re: Cold Showers

#261

Post by jamal-kumar »

nemothekid wrote: post #224
jamal-kumar wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if my company is pretty much all engineers? We don't let pencil pushers with MBAs anywhere near what we're doing, and it's going great. I know this isn't the most usual configuration but if undervaluing my skills and trying to bottom dollar on them is going to be their rules, then I'm just going to do my own thing, and they're just going to have to scrape the bottom of the barrel for talent. I hope the zeitgeist…

> What if my company is pretty much all engineers? I don't know how that changes the equation. No one is undervaluing your skills; it's would you rather spend your time driving to a colo center to replace a RAID array or working on $product. With AWS you are outsourcing an IT team, not just processors and how you approach pricing should reflect that.

I'm just really glad not to work in a company under these delusions

Re: Cold Showers

#262

Post by jamal-kumar »

oogali wrote: post #239
nemothekid wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What if my company is pretty much all engineers? I don't know how that changes the equation. No one is undervaluing your skills; it's would you rather spend your time driving to a colo center to replace a RAID array or working on $product. With AWS you are outsourcing an IT team, not just processors and how you approach pricing should reflect that.

I hear this bad argument often (“replacing hard drives”) and I don’t understand why. It’s as if we’re mentally stuck in a bad hacking movie from 1999. If you’re doing colocation to save money, you’ve also figured out that going to the datacenter sucks and it’s a terrible place to do work. You’re not building your own servers from scratch, you’re generally purchasing them from a vendor who offers a warranty and option…

Almost as if redundant colo servers on VRRP or CARP costs less like damn

Re: Cold Showers

#263

Post by tene »

jacobsenscott wrote: post #115
sumy23 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s basically self-evident that static analysis reduces bugs. It’s trivial to construct an example of where type information would catch a bug. Unless there is some reason that including type information increases bugs, the existence of a single example where type information catches a bug would prove that overall type information reduces total bug count.

It is not evident to me. Having used both statically typed and dynamically typed languages my experience is that I can't remember ever seeing a bug in our fairly large rails app that a type system would catch. Nobody's passing strings where hashes are expected, or Widget instances where User instances are expected. The thing to pass to the function is nearly always self evident. If you did it would immediately be cau…

Have you ever had crashes caused by unexpected use of nil/null/undefined? Using the return value from a function without checking for errors?

Re: Cold Showers

#264

Post by tene »

imiric wrote: post #120
jacobsenscott wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not evident to me. Having used both statically typed and dynamically typed languages my experience is that I can't remember ever seeing a bug in our fairly large rails app that a type system would catch. Nobody's passing strings where hashes are expected, or Widget instances where User instances are expected. The thing to pass to the function is nearly always self evident. If you did it would immediately be cau…

> If you did it would immediately be caught when a test runs anyway. That's the point though. With dynamic typing you would only (hopefully) catch this with manually written tests. With static typing you get that feedback for free at build time.

With static types, every function signature implicitly comes with built-in tests for free.

Re: Cold Showers

#265

Post by therealdrag0 »

yen223 wrote: post #212
josephcsible wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Whenever the object definition changes in another piece of the software stack the statically typed parts will crash You appear to completely misunderstand what static typing means. Runtime crashes due to type mismatches are exactly what static typing prevents .

You can't typecheck across system boundaries - that's the OP's point. (Well you could, but then you'll be introducing a whole set of problems if the other system has a static type system that behaves differently from your application's static type system)

Every RPC call framework I’ve used supports optional fields so this is a nonissue.

Re: Cold Showers

#266

Post by KSteffensen »

zimbu668 wrote: post #254
VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha! Back in ~2014 or so my company was spending nearly $30,000/month on an EC2 "compute-optimized" cluster to transcode live video streams to multiple renditions. One of our engineers said hey, why don't we try to colo some real hardware? We did a test with a single bare-metal 8-core Xeon server and it completely destroyed the performance of the EC2 "compute-optimized" cluster! After that we colo'd 4 big Xeon serve…

So you saved, $28,400 a month. Did that make a material difference to the company? I often tell people above me I could save us $10k a month at AWS and generally the response is, "Yeaaaaaaah that's great, could you do XYZ instead to help us land an additional $1M in ARR?"

The people above you suck. That's a terrible attitude. Signalling that saving money or just generally improving systems doesn't matter will not build a culture of technical excellence and ambition.

Also, it's not peanuts. How many extra developers are $28400 per month?

Re: Cold Showers

#267

Post by therealdrag0 »

verve_rat wrote: post #133
chrisseaton wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am curious for why people say this I'm saying it because it's a fact. I'm not giving you an opinion - it's a falsifiable fact that you can verify for yourself - we have as an industry not been able to give any good evidence for static typing reducing bugs that has stood up to peer review. You're presenting arguments for why you think there should be evidence... but when people look there isn't actually any eviden…

It does seem to me that you are conflating lack of evidence with non-existence though. We haven't measured an effect but that doesn't mean that we can't reason about this in other ways. The lived experience of people that do this thing for a living can be an important resource. You could argue that we are getting in to soft social science here, but is there value in what the collective of trades people think about th…

Fwiw a similar pattern is seen in cooking, where lots of chefs have reasoned ideas of how things work based on tradition and lived hands on experience, yet are scientifically disproven.

Lived experience works to some extent, eliminating failures and making progress, like with your steal example, but that doesn’t mean it can pick optimal options from a list of options that all work to some reasonable extent; aka dynamic typing does also build software.

Re: Cold Showers

#268

Post by Too »

jacobsenscott wrote: post #235
semiquaver wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you search your exception tracker for NoMethodError in production, do any results come up?

Yes - in every case it is calling a method on a null reference. And no commonly used statically typed language helps here because they all allow null references. And languages that disallow nulls, if you are one of the 10 programmers on earth working in one of those languages, don't help you because you are dealing with real world data where inputs to your system can be null or not so you end up using some type syste…

Python (with mypy) has strict optional on as default and is the most widely used language, according to the latest stackoverflow ranking. Assuming you use mypy of course, which probably takes the usage rate down a factor of 100x but still.. ;)

It makes you actually have to consider scenarios where a variable can be none or not and try to push the validation up closer to where it entered the system.

Re: Cold Showers

#269

Post by tlamponi »

KSteffensen wrote: post #266
zimbu668 wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you saved, $28,400 a month. Did that make a material difference to the company? I often tell people above me I could save us $10k a month at AWS and generally the response is, "Yeaaaaaaah that's great, could you do XYZ instead to help us land an additional $1M in ARR?"

The people above you suck. That's a terrible attitude. Signalling that saving money or just generally improving systems doesn't matter will not build a culture of technical excellence and ambition. Also, it's not peanuts. How many extra developers are $28400 per month?

no idea of $ but say they'd get 5000€ a month (quite OK for most places europe), the company would need to pay out a bit more here (for some tax/social benefit things), 7000€ would be pretty realistic, so 4 developers could be hired.

This then means that while op wouldn't immediately add 1M ARR, the original dev and the new devs could soon add 5M ARR (stupid extrapolation, it won't be as much in practice, at least normally)

Re: Cold Showers

#270

Post by baby »

WalterBright wrote: post #222
baby wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Frisco for San Francisco wait what. I live in SF and everybody just says SF

I've heard SF, SanFran, Frisco, and Cisco.

interesting, I'm used to outsiders saying "sanfran" but never heard frisco and cisco
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