Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

queue.acm.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 353 posts

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#21

Post by jng »

As someone who grew up as a programmer with assembly language, C, and C++, learning the good practices needed to make a 1 million lines of code C++ application work and be maintainable:

I've been equally disgusted by the evolution of programming in the last few years. HTML - which is, to a first approximation, always invalid. JS - which needs jQuery to make it mostly-but-not-completely cross-compatible among browsers. CSS, which hides so many hacks on top of each other, and which even needs a reset to be compatible. And now - distributed systems with pieces in PHP, Python, Objective C, Dalvik-Java, etc... and sustained by awesome-but-hackish fixes like Varnish and FastCGI and Nginx. where everything seems to be put togetther with duct tape.

But I'm slowly getting to the next stage, and having to admit - no, actually, admitting - that if it's spread like fire, there must be something to it, no matter if it hurts our taste so much.

And if you look well into it, it's very similar to biological evolution. Our own genetic codes and body plans are full of ancient pieces that are not needed any more (or at all, male nipples anyone), but it seems that it was more economical to "patch" things than to fix things properly. Or at least, it didn't hinder the current designs enough that they wouldn't succeed over the alternatives evolution probably also tried.

And now Google translates text statistically, without even trying to understand things.

One fear I have is that we will be able to create a working AI in a few years... and due to the way we do it, we may even not understand how it works.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#22

Post by bguthrie »

This article confused and dismayed me.

Since 2001, we've started in on the XP/Agile movement, which, think what you will of it, test-drives and version-controls relentlessly, and fosters a constant dialog about what quality is and how to achieve it.

Furthermore, some marvelous tools have been written in the last decade; I can hardly see how the author can complain about version-control systems, as Git and Mercurial--both miles better than what was available in 2001--are not least among them.

Other quality-enhancing things that have happened since 2001: continuous integration, build pipelines, Selenium and friends, behavior-driven development, REST architecture triumphant over the cathedral-like SOAP and XMLRPC, JSON over XML, lightweight messaging, the adoption of small, focused open-source tool over "quality-focused" large vendor bullshit-enterprise tools.

To the extent that UNIX sucks now, which it doesn't, it's because the hackers who work on it now have lagged the industry--not the other way around. So go find some other group of kids to shoo off your lawn.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#23

Post by cs702 »

phkamp wrote: post #17
cs702 wrote: post #12

Yes, the bazaar is like evolution: messy, inefficient, and slow. Lots of bad ideas are tried; a lot of them stick around for as long as they provide more value than they subtract; and progress takes a long time. Just as the human body has components that are useless today (e.g., the coccyx), evolving software ecosystems always carry a lot useless baggage. That's how evolution works. But Evolution copes better than in…

... but evolution will also quite happily run you over a cliff which you have been avoided if intelligence were applied. Not to mention the fact that the bazaar is never going to put a man on the moon. And yes, I wrote that piece.

phkamp: "never" is a looong time. Who knows what the Bazaar can achieve through 'dumb' trial and error over the coming decades and centuries?

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#24

Post by phkamp »

chwahoo wrote: post #15

This article reads like an old timer feeling left behind by the current rate of progress who thinks that the problem is really that the rest of the world is doing it all wrong. He's probably right that lots of software could be designed better, but I think he's wrong that that's of paramount importance. We need lots of software these days and we simply don't have the resources to built it to Kamp's standards. Also, w…

I wonder if you bothered to check who wrote that article, before you started speculating about things you could have found out with a few google searches ?

You seem to assume that cathedrals are "slow-moving, centralized, big up-front" designs, where did you get that idea ?

Ever looked into how USA put a man on the moon ?

Maybe you should. Also: Read Brooks book, if you can.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#25

Post by phkamp »

bguthrie wrote: post #22

This article confused and dismayed me. Since 2001, we've started in on the XP/Agile movement, which, think what you will of it, test-drives and version-controls relentlessly, and fosters a constant dialog about what quality is and how to achieve it. Furthermore, some marvelous tools have been written in the last decade; I can hardly see how the author can complain about version-control systems, as Git and Mercurial--…

You mean: "In 2001 we reinvented XP/Agile because we couldn't be bothered to read the old literature to see if somebody else had done something like that before" ?

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#26

Post by fluidcruft »

lmm wrote: post #2

Autoconf is an easy target for these kind of rants, but you know what? It does its job, and it does it very well. The ratio of autoconf to non-autoconf programs on my system is probably 10:1, but the ratio of build problems is something like 1:20. If anyone ever managed to write a genuinely better build system, the bazaar would let it rise to the top; the gradual rise of e.g. cmake is testament to this. Trying to imp…

Yeah, but cmake (with roots to GE corporate development and large government contracts) isn't exemplary of bazaar development. If anything it underscores the inferiority of the bazaar.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#27

Post by chwahoo »

phkamp wrote: post #24
chwahoo wrote: post #15

This article reads like an old timer feeling left behind by the current rate of progress who thinks that the problem is really that the rest of the world is doing it all wrong. He's probably right that lots of software could be designed better, but I think he's wrong that that's of paramount importance. We need lots of software these days and we simply don't have the resources to built it to Kamp's standards. Also, w…

I wonder if you bothered to check who wrote that article, before you started speculating about things you could have found out with a few google searches ? You seem to assume that cathedrals are "slow-moving, centralized, big up-front" designs, where did you get that idea ? Ever looked into how USA put a man on the moon ? Maybe you should. Also: Read Brooks book, if you can.

Why does it matter who you are? I've tried to respond to what you wrote.

Why do you think most of the software we build now is like putting a man on the moon? I think it's nothing like that.

Maybe I should read Brook's book (I've enjoyed MMM), but your article doesn't make a strong case for it.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#28

Post by tjr »

chwahoo wrote: post #15

This article reads like an old timer feeling left behind by the current rate of progress who thinks that the problem is really that the rest of the world is doing it all wrong. He's probably right that lots of software could be designed better, but I think he's wrong that that's of paramount importance. We need lots of software these days and we simply don't have the resources to built it to Kamp's standards. Also, w…

Some software is extensively designed up front, like embedded avionics programs. The resources are made available because folks like the FAA demand it.

Why don't we employ rigorous software engineering principles to, say, iOS games? It would be a waste. It could be done, but in practice, people just don't care as much if a game on their phone crashes as they do if an airplane they're riding in crashes.

There's a wide spectrum of software out there, needing varying levels of robustness. There's not a lot that can be said about software development as a whole along these lines; inadequate design for an online banking site might be excessive design for a llama costume competition voting site.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#29

Post by phkamp »

chwahoo wrote: post #27
phkamp wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if you bothered to check who wrote that article, before you started speculating about things you could have found out with a few google searches ? You seem to assume that cathedrals are "slow-moving, centralized, big up-front" designs, where did you get that idea ? Ever looked into how USA put a man on the moon ? Maybe you should. Also: Read Brooks book, if you can.

Why does it matter who you are? I've tried to respond to what you wrote. Why do you think most of the software we build now is like putting a man on the moon? I think it's nothing like that. Maybe I should read Brook's book (I've enjoyed MMM), but your article doesn't make a strong case for it.

Because no words are without context.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#30

Post by davidw »

Tichy wrote: post #19
phkamp wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... but evolution will also quite happily run you over a cliff which you have been avoided if intelligence were applied. Not to mention the fact that the bazaar is never going to put a man on the moon. And yes, I wrote that piece.

How is that a fact? "Open Source" space endeavors already exist. Also I know NASA is famous for their solid code, but personally I still question the amount of effort that goes into it. Just because their approach works (if you can afford it) doesn't prove that there couldn't be a more effective way. I suppose with infinite money you can make quite a lot of approaches work. You could have an army double check every l…

> I suppose with infinite money you can make quite a lot of approaches work. You could have an army double check every line of code. Instead of pair programming, why not have 10 programmers look over each others shoulders?

Bingo: it's all about the economics of various tradeoffs. If I have a company that puts together web sites for small companies in the area, and we have NASA style coding standards, we're going to completely price ourselves out of the market. If NASA applied "little web shop" coding standards to their projects, they'd be lucky to get anything up in the air before it exploded.

The important thing is to be on the curve though, not behind it, meaning to make the best of the tradeoffs the economics of what you're doing push you towards.

Post reply on HN