51–60 of 201 posts
Sure layers of abstraction is leaky and has their issues, but I don’t want to write a hipster language in a hipster editor. If you enjoy that, great.
Also, it’s easy to look at the past with rose tinted glasses. Modern softwares are bloated mess but still a million times more productive.
This article presupposes that this software crisis actually exists or is a significant problem. The crisis is all this these things: Projects running over-budget Projects running over-time Software was very inefficient Software was of low quality Software often did not meet requirements Projects were unmanageable and code difficult to maintain Software was never delivered Now take the word "software" out and how many…
The thing that is unique about software is the lack of physical constraints which serve as a natural forcing function or filter on quality. With a bridge, for example, at some level it must meet a minimum bar of structural integrity, quality of materials, etc. or it will fall over from its own weight. As a cook, there is a bare minimum I have to hit with the quality of my ingredients and skill of preparation in order…
This is kind of what I'm talking about. The absolute massive complexity within your device that you and billions of people to seamlessly make calls from anywhere in the world to anywhere in the world with devices made by all different companies using infrastructure made by all different companies and it all works so incredibly well that we mostly take it entirely for granted.
But yes, sometimes the phone doesn't stop vibrating.
This article presupposes that this software crisis actually exists or is a significant problem. The crisis is all this these things: Projects running over-budget Projects running over-time Software was very inefficient Software was of low quality Software often did not meet requirements Projects were unmanageable and code difficult to maintain Software was never delivered Now take the word "software" out and how many…
The thing that is unique about software is the lack of physical constraints which serve as a natural forcing function or filter on quality. With a bridge, for example, at some level it must meet a minimum bar of structural integrity, quality of materials, etc. or it will fall over from its own weight. As a cook, there is a bare minimum I have to hit with the quality of my ingredients and skill of preparation in order…
Shallow and composable is something we all experience when using UNIX tooling. GUIs are where this all falls apart as they are literal islands that don’t communicate with each other in a composable manner. I’ve been experimenting with some GUI-meets-shell-pipeline ideas with a tool I’ve been working on call guish. https://github.com/williamcotton/guish I’m curious to know if anyone knows of any similar tools or appro…
This is really, really cool! Definitely going to share this around, I love tools like this. They bring so much visibility into dark spaces.
The parser is off-the-shelf and seems robust. The AST-to-bash aspect is a bit messy. Wrapping arguments with spaces in them with either " or ' is somewhat of an unsolved problem. Like, it's hard to tell if someone wants to embed a bash variable and thus wants " or if they are using something like awk that uses $var itself and thus need '. We'll see how it goes!
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The perceived misery you describe I feel is self-inflicted. Many devs "below" me have become entirely disconnected from customer needs, instead only focusing on "interesting" dev problems. Why do developers only work on ticket-sized portions of the actual requirements? To put it succinctly: because they are simply too dumb. They cannot wrap their heads around it. They cannot grasp it. Do I sound frustrated? I am. It…
I think categorizing it as "Too dumb" is also doing disservice to many developers who are stuck in feature factories. After a while you realize business is happy with status quo so do your Jira tickets, take your paycheck and go home. My puny stock options are extremely unlikely to be impacted by my work output. My boss doesn't care about Tech Debt. Get this ticket done, get it done quick and move on. He figures he w…
I understand many do not have the energy to fight the status quo and some may not have the… eloquence to do so. I have worked very hard for many years to end up where I am. If others don't, I expect them to at least accept where they remain. Because they don't do "don't care". They are effectively sabotaging projects.
They certainly aren't unintelligent. They still act pretty dumb. Again, I must apologize for my polemics.
Hi! Author here. I think it's important to address certain aspects of this post that people tend to misunderstand, so I'll just list them here to save myself the effort. * I do not argue against abstractions, but against the unrestricted application of them. * I do not advocate for a reversion to more constrained platforms as a solution. * I do not advocate for users becoming "more technical" in a "suck it up" fashio…
I'm working on a series of articles at enlightenedprogramming.com to prove it out.
I'm also working "show you how" solutions because, absent data (and sometimes even with it), I still get people who believe that the industry has never been better, we're in some golden age and there is not a whole to improve on and it just boggles my mind.
However, we have a project management crisis, which is not only limited to software, where people in charge of planning are distanced from people in charge of the delivery. And we don't seem to be able to bridge the gap. Agile, Scrum, whatever are indicators of this gap where "gurus" take all of us as fools and we are not able to produce anything better ourselves.
Commoditization of software development is also contributing to this mess because people of all skill levels can find a way to partake in this activity with results of varying success. This is not good or bad, but just the nature of ease of entry into the field. Not much different than food business where we have both Michelin star restaurants as well as MacDonalds of the world both of which have consumers. But we don't say we have a restaurant crisis.
The ending: "Things can be better. I'll show you how." It's just an intro for clickbait.
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If only they had unveiled the single unifying abstraction of everything :(
Oh that's a solved problem since 1969. It's called "unix". Everything is a file which can be processed as a byte stream. Composition is a breeze- can't be any more general than that! (I kid, mostly :)).
- LISP: everything is a lambda.
- Tandem: everything is a database.
- QNX: everything is a message.
- IBM System/38: everything is a capability.