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The Software Crisis

wryl.tech

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Re: The Software Crisis

#181

Post by p_l »

KineticLensman wrote: post #150
js8 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A tangent, but Clarke was slightly wrong. Magic is not just indistinguishable, but it actually IS advanced technology. In fantasy worlds, wizards spend years studying arcane phenomena, refining them into somewhat easily and reliably usable spells and artifacts, which can be used by general public. (Don't believe depictions of magic in video games, they simplify all the annoying little details.) The above paragraph is…

Gandalf wasn’t a technologist. (Edit) and his magic wasn’t remotely Vancean

He wasn't a technologist by the standards of his family, but it's somewhat implied in Silmarillion that the magics of Valar are intertwined with their understanding and knowledge of the world.

Re: The Software Crisis

#182

Post by kyleperik »

Along the same lines is a general theory of mine that many people in this era generally underestimate the cost of coordination, and overestimate the efficiency gain of bulk processing.

Re: The Software Crisis

#183

Post by dgb23 »

brundolf wrote: post #98

This paints abstraction like an evil, but it's an unavoidable tool for any human-made software to reach certain capabilities Rich Hickey said something along the lines of "A novice juggler may be able to juggle two or three balls, but the best juggler in the world can only juggle maybe nine balls. There isn't an order of magnitude difference in human ability, we hit a ceiling quickly." If we are to surpass those limi…

In that talk he mainly proposes simplicity (decomposition) rather than abstraction.

We don’t necessarily need indirection to understand a whole, complex thing.

In order to deal with complexity, we need to disentangle it, so we can understand each part in isolation. Hiding complexity with indirection, puts distance between the us and thing we have to reason about.

Abstraction is good for users (devs or not), so they don’t have to care about the details, but it doesn’t make it easier for us to build it.

Re: The Software Crisis

#184

Post by pyth0 »

denton-scratch wrote: post #176
pyth0 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how, unless you start with the assumption that more software is inherently a bad thing.

I don't assume that; I simply observe that a toaster doesn't need software, that simple machines are more likely to be reliable than complex machines, and that the ability to run software makes a machine inherently more complex than (say) a clockwork timer. I have no opinion on how much is too much software. But perhaps if we are employing people to write software for toasters, then we have too many programmers.

The existence of code in otherwise "dumb" toasters is due to it being cheaper than the analog alternative, simple as. I'm not sure why we're talking about all of these things as though they only exist to keep programmers employed.

Re: The Software Crisis

#185

Post by williamcotton »

brabel wrote: post #171
williamcotton wrote: post #47

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…

> I’m curious to know if anyone knows of any similar tools or approaches to composable GUIs! I believe the emacs architecture is the answer. emacs is not just a CLI, it's not just a GUI, it's a wonderful (but archaic) matchup of both, where they integrate seamlessly. I am currently working on some ideas on this as well, my idea even looks superficially similar to yours, but I would say you should look into how this w…

I feel like your approach is not really very "composable"

It is as composable as a shell pipeline because all it does is make shell pipelines!

Re: The Software Crisis

#186

Post by wvenable »

denton-scratch wrote: post #164
wvenable wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is obviously subjective, but most people wouldn't look at any practical software and call it great. This what I think is insane. We interact with probably thousands of pieces of software every day (and I'm probably off by an order of magnitude) and none of it is great? What is the bar here? It's funny that something that was absolutely amazing yesterday is no longer even so much as great today. I can instantly…

> generate a pretty good poem about my cat I do not consider a text generator to be the pinnacle of "great software", regardless of how well the code was written. I don't think "meh" is the wrong word.

Exactly my point! A statistical text generator trained a vast majority of the available content on the Internet and is able to understand natural language commands to generate content on any available subject is bloody amazing.

Literally five minutes after this absolutely crazy-ass technology was released to the world, it's already the baseline.

Re: The Software Crisis

#187

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk »

joe_the_user wrote: post #94
wryl wrote: post #16

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 liked the way you showed the problem as ongoing in history. Indeed, the phrase "software crisis" is nice because it references the first point when the situation was articulated. That said, I think the reason the situation is not going to change is clearly economic. That's not saying that bad software is cheaper. But there's a strong incentive to cheap, bad practices because cutting corners allows one person/organi…

It's not just about cost it's about survival. If I fail the generate revenue in a reasonable timeframe, I can't put food on the table. If I have a healthy income, I'm happy to tinker on the the technology ad infinitum.

Re: The Software Crisis

#188

Post by KineticLensman »

p_l wrote: post #181
KineticLensman wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gandalf wasn’t a technologist. (Edit) and his magic wasn’t remotely Vancean

He wasn't a technologist by the standards of his family, but it's somewhat implied in Silmarillion that the magics of Valar are intertwined with their understanding and knowledge of the world.

Yes, but in the Legendarium, the Valar were innately ‘magical’ creatures created by a supreme being, not people who studied spells

Re: The Software Crisis

#189

Post by brabel »

williamcotton wrote: post #185
brabel wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’m curious to know if anyone knows of any similar tools or approaches to composable GUIs! I believe the emacs architecture is the answer. emacs is not just a CLI, it's not just a GUI, it's a wonderful (but archaic) matchup of both, where they integrate seamlessly. I am currently working on some ideas on this as well, my idea even looks superficially similar to yours, but I would say you should look into how this w…

I feel like your approach is not really very "composable" It is as composable as a shell pipeline because all it does is make shell pipelines!

I was thinking of the GUI itself: how can you compose GUI components?

Re: The Software Crisis

#190

Post by znkr »

weitendorf wrote: post #103
wryl wrote: post #16

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 personally don’t understand what you are arguing for. While I agree that problems can be too abstracted or that bad abstractions abound, I don’t think that’s a controversial opinion at all. You’ll also literally never fix this problem because millions of people produce software, and you’re bound to disagree with some of them, and they’ll never all be as skilled as you. So my only interpretation of this post is that…

Indeed, its tradeoffs all the way down
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