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Programming breakthroughs we need

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Re: Programming breakthroughs we need

#431

Post by 082349872349872 »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #269

So much right in that. In the old days we had compilers linkers and loaders. They all did the wrong thing. Compilers did text translation to semantics and generated code. The linker combined code from several sources and produced a loadable image. The loader checked for compatibility and relocated an instance to an address. Instead, the compiler should have stopped at semantics. The linker should combine semantic mod…

Or, one step up: The linker should combine semantic modules into an abstract set of cloud-deployable images. The loader should instantiate those images in the target cloud, with all their edges configured so the graph nodes connect properly.

(physically connecting logical graph nodes having been exactly why the linker/loader were messing with offset relocation on single machines)

Re: Programming breakthroughs we need

#432

Post by 082349872349872 »

mpweiher wrote: post #233

This resonates deeply with me (and my research project). 1. Glue code and boilerplate waste Yes, yes and yes! Glue code is the dark matter of software [1] My hypothesis is that the reason we have to write so much glue code, and that it's always sufficiently different is that we don't have the right architectural abstractions. Specifically, our programming languages only support (essentially) procedural abstraction (p…

> The problem is not the text, it's the wrong abstractions that our text expresses.

Genau! ...with any luck, '->' will prove to be as useful as '|' has been?

Re: Programming breakthroughs we need

#433

Post by KronisLV »

andsoitis wrote: post #416
mikewarot wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And this doesn't require expensive, licensed software, like Delphi 30 years ago. Delphi wasn't expensive for most of it's life, until they got greedy, and lost the market. Lazarus is the modern open source replacement, it's mostly compatible with Delphi, and $1400 cheaper. ;-)

I programmed in Delphi for years and have done some toy things with Lazarus, so I'm painfully aware of the quality and reliability difference. It is quite bizarre how us programmers, who make hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, are unwilling to pay $1,400 that will make us more productive.

> It is quite bizarre how us programmers, who make hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, are unwilling to pay $1,400 that will make us more productive.

Not all of us. Here in Latvia that amount would be around a half of one's salary, quite likely more than that.

The further you move in the direction of poorer countries, the less the argument of "developers are expensive, everything else is cheap" actually holds.

I don't doubt that in some places a single decent AWS EC2 instance would be a developer's salary.

Re: Programming breakthroughs we need

#434

Post by selfmodruntime »

swatcoder wrote: post #37
smallstepforman wrote: post #25

I’ve been programming for over 30 years, and never been as productive as before. Need to load and decode a jpeg/png, I grab stb_image.h. Need to decode an ogg file, libogg. Need to decompress, libz. Need to decode video, libavformat. Need physics, libbullet. Need truetype fonts, freetype. Need a GUI, Qt. Need SSL, libssl. My day becomes selecting libraries, integrating them, and testing integration. My business code…

That’s funny because I feel like my day became cleaning up those kinds of projects as their countless dependencies rot. It feels anything but productive.

The alternative is shipping your own, which most of the time is a) a bad idea since you don't have domain specific knowledge and b) the customer is not paying for you to reimplement the 10th jpeg parsing function.

Re: Programming breakthroughs we need

#435

Post by selfmodruntime »

hsn915 wrote: post #387
smallstepforman wrote: post #25

I’ve been programming for over 30 years, and never been as productive as before. Need to load and decode a jpeg/png, I grab stb_image.h. Need to decode an ogg file, libogg. Need to decompress, libz. Need to decode video, libavformat. Need physics, libbullet. Need truetype fonts, freetype. Need a GUI, Qt. Need SSL, libssl. My day becomes selecting libraries, integrating them, and testing integration. My business code…

> My day becomes selecting libraries, integrating them, and testing integration. This is why I hate modern programming. When was the last time you had a job where you could actually learn how to actually program something? The prolifiration of libraries means that all your bosses and managers would extremely frown upon anyone handrolling a solution instead of using an existing library. Which means the more time you s…

> The prolifiration of libraries means that all your bosses and managers would extremely frown upon anyone handrolling a solution instead of using an existing library.

They are right, even if you do not agree. Handrolling is incredibly cost ineffective, yet another source of bugs and can be seen as a bad idea when it comes to security.

Huge third party libraries like LibOgg are maintained by gigantic industry players. Chances are, they are more knowledgeable in that specific domain than you are and they can focus more developer time on what is just a small part in your business application.

Re: Programming breakthroughs we need

#436

Post by nabeards »

fleddr wrote: post #342

I believe already some 2 decades ago Bill Gates said that the biggest failure in software is the lack of productivity gains in software development. Just to cherry pick a dramatized example. In the late 90s, one of my first programming experiences was in Delphi. It's a very visual way to program. You drag and drop a UI together from standardized elements. You could data bind things like input fields to a data source.…

Reminds of my time doing WebObjects development, and I fully agree that it seems like the frameworks I use today ( ReactJS, FeathersJS) aren’t (yet?) as simple to visually develop.

Re: Programming breakthroughs we need

#437

Post by eternityforest »

mst wrote: post #274
eternityforest wrote: post #252

Glue code is used to piece together libraries. I think it's a sign you used the right libraries and aren't reinventing. It's boring, but glue code essentially describes why your project is not the same as every other apo using those libraries. Boilerplate is a thing that happens when libraries don't have sane defaults. It's one of the more unpleasant things about Docker et al. I wish we had a dev climate where someth…

What do you have in mind when you talk about LSB for Docker?

A lot of why we have containers is to stop dependency hell, but having a stable platform to built on is another way to achieve that without containers at all.

Of course it seems like the other reason we use them is to bundle multiple services together, but I'm not exactly a microservice fan to begin with.

In any case, I don't see why we couldn't have an OS that makes debian packages into containers, sharing things that are needed by multiple containers as appropriate while allowing overrides.

Android apps have a pretty nice model. If Android were a bit more open and had a few modifications to better support that use case, it seems like Dart/Android would make a pretty nice backend, assuming the ecosystem was there.

Android proved the benefits of an extremely opinionated inside the box kind of system, making APKs run on Linux and Windows seems like it would have a ton of uses.

Re: Programming breakthroughs we need

#438

Post by hsn915 »

selfmodruntime wrote: post #435
hsn915 wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My day becomes selecting libraries, integrating them, and testing integration. This is why I hate modern programming. When was the last time you had a job where you could actually learn how to actually program something? The prolifiration of libraries means that all your bosses and managers would extremely frown upon anyone handrolling a solution instead of using an existing library. Which means the more time you s…

> The prolifiration of libraries means that all your bosses and managers would extremely frown upon anyone handrolling a solution instead of using an existing library. They are right, even if you do not agree. Handrolling is incredibly cost ineffective, yet another source of bugs and can be seen as a bad idea when it comes to security. Huge third party libraries like LibOgg are maintained by gigantic industry players…

How many of the people who are working on any given library actually are domain expert on the subject matter as you imagine?

This might have been true 20 years ago. But now the cultural shift affects even the people who work on the lower levels.

A sort of famous example is how slow Visual Studio has gotten compared to 20 years ago (when it was running on slower hardware even!) where it was nearly instant.

The refterm saga has demonstrated that people employed by Microsoft and paid very high salaries to work on a terminal emulator have no idea how to make a half decent terminal renderer.

> handrolling is incredibly cost ineffective, yet another source of bugs and can be seen as a bad idea when it comes to security.

Without context this statement is blatantly false.

Many libraries are full of bugs and security problems.

Re: Programming breakthroughs we need

#439

Post by samsquire »

_gabe_ wrote: post #385
CodeMage wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm just an old curmudgeon, but it seems to me there's way too much emphasis on speed of development in general. Time to market seems to be more important than quality, robustness, security, performance, or any other concern. Another thing that rubs me wrong is the recurring notion that we need to get rid of the text as a representation of code. I've yet to meet a mathematician who wants to get completely rid o…

> Another thing that rubs me wrong is the recurring notion that we need to get rid of the text as a representation of code. I completely agree with this notion. However, I feel like we're sorely missing out on some form of visual exploration. I feel like the majority of my time is spent trying to understand the flow of execution of a program I'm trying to maintain that was written by other teams that are long gone. I…

Yes, like crocodile clips for a circuit board, I can insert a probe into a circuit and see what's on the wire.

When your callstack is 50 methods deep and there's 20 layers involved and marshalling and it's difficult to see what is going on.

I want to mark two pieces of code and see the data structures passing through them, similar to a debugger but more like a log file or trace like Jaegar or Kibana. But the actual POJO or JSON objects themselves.

Re: Programming breakthroughs we need

#440

Post by magic_hamster »

bluejellybean wrote: post #403
fleddr wrote: post #342

I believe already some 2 decades ago Bill Gates said that the biggest failure in software is the lack of productivity gains in software development. Just to cherry pick a dramatized example. In the late 90s, one of my first programming experiences was in Delphi. It's a very visual way to program. You drag and drop a UI together from standardized elements. You could data bind things like input fields to a data source.…

The web, and much of programming really, feels so far behind the curve of what's possible as a programmer. Take a dive into shader design in something like unreal engine 5, it sounds exactly like what you're describing in Delphi, mind you, I say this as someone who has never programmed in that language. The ability to drag and drop functions, compose higher levels of abstractions, and really all of the fun programmin…

In game engines, and especially in UE where things like Blueprints exist, the low level stuff is just conveniently hidden or abstracted away. But the long textual code that makes the button work, eventually exists somewhere in there. At least when you write it yourself, you know who to blame (and probably where to look) when it doesn't work.
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