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Programming is Terrible

programmingisterrible.com

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Re: Programming is Terrible

#61

Post by stonemetal »

nnq wrote: post #50
kabdib wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many classes of products that require what I like to call "fractal attention to detail." These include most consumer goods (which are usually cost and performance constrained), man-rated stuff that has to work (aerospace, medical), and products with stringent security requirements (game consoles, smart cards). By fractal I mean that you can have good abstractions, but you can't afford black boxes, and desig…

Why can't you have black box abstractions in things that "have to work"?? And even "has to work" can be relative, as if you can prove that something will work for a p value small enough to guarantee risk of failure is small enough in the next 100 years for a device/system that will at most stay in use for 10 it good enough... And if you're not constrained by power use or computing power, you can also use redundant su…

And when all 5 crash because of an identical null pointer? In a library you didn't write? That is why no black box.

Re: Programming is Terrible

#63

Post by parnas »

moocow01 wrote: post #24

Programming is honestly a very tricky sector of work to understand how to make progress in the practice of it from here on out. You have essentially an almost infinite number of ways to get to an endpoint with very few real constraints... this is good and bad. We have lots of creative freedom within the constraints of code to achieve a certain piece of functionality. For example, authentication - Ive seen it done som…

weren't we supposed to kick this problem over to enterprise architecture??

Re: Programming is Terrible

#64

Post by rayiner »

joesb wrote: post #44
rayiner wrote: post #10

This blawg has much potential. Love the post about marginal expected value.

On the other hand, many if not most businesses run just fine getting only 20-40% profit. Some business even run on being able to get only 2-5% profit for each investment, but re-invest tens of times per month. Why must software project have 500% profit before it makes sense to kick-off.

Software projects need more than a 10% margin for the same reason constructing a skyscraper does. Some types of investments are inherently less predictable than other types.

Re: Programming is Terrible

#66

Post by shasta »

nnq wrote: post #50
kabdib wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many classes of products that require what I like to call "fractal attention to detail." These include most consumer goods (which are usually cost and performance constrained), man-rated stuff that has to work (aerospace, medical), and products with stringent security requirements (game consoles, smart cards). By fractal I mean that you can have good abstractions, but you can't afford black boxes, and desig…

Why can't you have black box abstractions in things that "have to work"?? And even "has to work" can be relative, as if you can prove that something will work for a p value small enough to guarantee risk of failure is small enough in the next 100 years for a device/system that will at most stay in use for 10 it good enough... And if you're not constrained by power use or computing power, you can also use redundant su…

Black box abstractions that allocate memory are a problem. Presently, if you want to prove you will not run out of memory, you do it by not allocating memory or using a special purpose allocator.

Re: Programming is Terrible

#69

Post by Tarential »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #32
kenjackson wrote: post #22

This guy gets it wrong in his last post on reliability (but the other posts seem reasonable). Reliability is hard because we continue to move the goalpost. I can write a pretty reliable program to compute sin/cos tables or to sort a phonebook or to do some basic projectile trajectory. But those aren't even table stakes anymore. Today a first year undergrad student might be expected to write a program that in 1970 the…

That last point rings quite true with my experiences. I've been writing PHP and some other languages off and on for about 10 years now. Looking at current jobs listings it's difficult to find things that I am particularly well suited for, even in web programming. Since I was using PHP well before the current crop of mature frameworks and CMS the majority of my experience is in trial and error development of my own da…

I had to log in just to reply to this because it very well could be me writing this post. I taught myself PHP in grade 7 (around fifteen years ago, it must have been near the v3 release) and sold websites in high school. I hand built everything on web servers I compiled from source.

Then I made the terrible mistake of taking a long break from professional programming through university (I worked as a tech writer instead, the money was good). When I came back two years ago I found that I had to learn a whole new set of tools. Javascript was now the norm instead of a disabled annoyance. Browsers supported incredible display features using stylesheets which made my table-and-images based designs obsolete. All the sites were built using some sort of CMS.

I spent a year learning front end design, WordPress, Magento, Joomla, and Drupal theme design. Then I went back to my old do-it-yourself ways and wrote my own CMS [0]. Suffice to say that it wasn't necessary. I learned a lot about back end programming and MVC related design patterns while creating it, but the most valuable piece of knowledge I gained was "Don't reinvent and try to sell the wheel when other people are offering it for free." It should have been obvious, but it seems I'm much smarter in hindsight than I was in planning.

I'm still learning today. Now it's the Ruby on Rails world and a whole plethora of new technologies come into play. I'm using Haml, SCSS and CoffeeScript on top of the RoR / PostgreSQL back end. My first web app will be ready for release soon. After that it's on to learning Haskell and RethinkDB.

The irony of all this is back when I stopped programming I thought I had a pretty good grasp on everything I needed to know. I figured I'd step right back into web development and continue on the way it had been when I left it. I wouldn't have let my skills atrophy if I had known how important it was to stay up to date. I think after two years I'm finally catching up, and I don't intend to let them get rusty again.

TL;DR: Don't get cozy because you think you know everything now. Even if you do, the state of the art changes quickly.

[0] http://saintcms.com

Re: Programming is Terrible

#70

Post by kabdib »

nnq wrote: post #50
kabdib wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many classes of products that require what I like to call "fractal attention to detail." These include most consumer goods (which are usually cost and performance constrained), man-rated stuff that has to work (aerospace, medical), and products with stringent security requirements (game consoles, smart cards). By fractal I mean that you can have good abstractions, but you can't afford black boxes, and desig…

Why can't you have black box abstractions in things that "have to work"?? And even "has to work" can be relative, as if you can prove that something will work for a p value small enough to guarantee risk of failure is small enough in the next 100 years for a device/system that will at most stay in use for 10 it good enough... And if you're not constrained by power use or computing power, you can also use redundant su…

There are things you can't swarm. Security, for instance; a breach is a breach. Put the hardware you're trying to secure in the hands of the consumer -- the nominal attacker -- and this becomes Really Hard.

Swarms work great for server farms, or bespoke projects where cost is not an issue (e.g., that spacecraft, where you can afford multiple implementations of the system).

I can't see anyone throwing a swarm at a consumer product. Why would you waste the money? The pressure is to go to the edge and make it more reliable, and cheaper.

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