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Shipping Culture Is Hurting Us

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Re: Shipping Culture Is Hurting Us

#51

Post by pcl »

cwyers wrote: post #40
kazinator wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The stupid thing about IEEE NaN is that it's not equal to itself! If variable x holds a NaN, then (x == x) is false. This violates: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_identity If (x == x) tests false, then it asserts that x is not itself, which is logically preposterous. ANSI Common Lisp has a bit of this problem in it too, but it's not required ; it is there for some weird historic implementations. That is to say,…

NaN literally means "not a number." Lots of things aren't numbers. The letter a is not a number. The square root of negative 1 is not a number (at least, not one representable in floating point math). a is not equal to the square root of negative 1.

In practice, NaN as a literal means that the outcome of a mathematical statement is not expressible. So, the letter 'a' is not equal to NaN (with either two or three = signs). NaN, in other words, has a special meaning.

Dismayingly, JavaScript's isNaN() function diverges from this special meaning, and does something close to what you said -- it tests to see if something is at least almost a number. So isNaN(13/0) and isNaN('foo') both evaluate to 'true', whereas isNaN('1') and isNaN(42) both evaluate to 'false'.

Re: Shipping Culture Is Hurting Us

#52

Post by hueving »

kazinator wrote: post #47
cwyers wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NaN literally means "not a number." Lots of things aren't numbers. The letter a is not a number. The square root of negative 1 is not a number (at least, not one representable in floating point math). a is not equal to the square root of negative 1.

I don't understand your point. This is not a number: char *p = "abc"; Yet, this yields true: p == p The square root of -1 is easily representable in floating math. You just need two floats to make a complex.

The point is that you can have very different things that are not a number. It's not safe to say that multiple things that are not a number are equal.

Re: Shipping Culture Is Hurting Us

#53

Post by narrator »

People use mongo and node because they want to get a site up really really fast and see if it gets traction. When they actually get somewhere they'll rewrite it in a better language.

If you want to set yourself up with really slick tooling and a great language you can code in Scala with Intellij. You can even avoid touching any ugly dynamically typed stuff by coding your JS in scala.js. If you're doing it better than the other guys then great, you can code rings around them. Maybe it's not worth all the extra complexity when just starting out though.

When you get to big corp size code bases static languages are more common. That's because to be able to navigate and maintain that big of a code base, a good IDE, a static typing compiler and refactoring tools are a huge help.

Re: Shipping Culture Is Hurting Us

#54

Post by soup10 »

nostrademons wrote: post #43
soup10 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Javascript has become the defacto browser programming language, even though it's objectively awful for complex software. The only reason it's achieved it's high status is because browser developers refused to cooperate and develop something better. Microsoft and Apple view software lockin as a competitive advantage and have actively undermined technologies they thought were threatening(java and flash amongst others).…

Grandparent's point is that any model of reality that doesn't acknowledge the fact that sometimes powerful actors will refuse to cooperate is a flawed model of reality. Who's the "we" in your comment and the original article? HN readers? The programming community at large? You and anyone else reading this article are free to write a compiler for a much better language than Javascript. There is no guarantee that Micro…

Tech corporations aren't dictators and developers are not powerless. There is various ways we(developers and users), can put pressure on them. Damaging their brand by raising awareness is certainly one of them.

Re: Shipping Culture Is Hurting Us

#55

Post by dasil003 »

soup10 wrote: post #38
saidajigumi wrote: post #24

This whole article makes me want to scream, if only because the author seems to have never heard of the concept of Path Dependence[1]. I could utter a similar rant, on how terrible it is that we're stuck with awful legacy dumb AC lightbulb sockets everywhere, and wouldn't it be nice if the entropy fairy just waved a magic wand and we all had 'net-connected DC smart sockets for our wonderful Future Bulbs. But that kin…

Javascript has become the defacto browser programming language, even though it's objectively awful for complex software. The only reason it's achieved it's high status is because browser developers refused to cooperate and develop something better. Microsoft and Apple view software lockin as a competitive advantage and have actively undermined technologies they thought were threatening(java and flash amongst others).…

> The explosion of Html5 and javascript was more of a 'nature will find a way' type development and can almost entirely be credited to Google and various web companies pushing it and making it better.

You say this with a pejorative tone, but the fact is I've yet to see a human-designed system that is as elegant or as robust as the systems evolved by nature.

Sure for relatively simple problems in isolation we can design extremely elegant solutions, but complex systems beyond the scale of one human mind become exponentially more difficult to properly design as communication overhead quickly overwhelms the capacity to reason about the entire system. Abstraction is our main tool to fight this, and it is powerful, but most abstractions are leaky, and there's always some essential and irreducible complexity that fights against encapsulation and modularity.

As long as I've been a web developer (20 years) there has been this constant drum beat of hand-wringing over the terribleness of the web and its "abuse" as an application platform, all the while its evolutionary traits as a simple, open platform which has achieved an ubiquity that no single vendor platform has ever approached. Think about it: web pages are accessible to people with any disability on almost any device in the world regardless of operating system. Yes, the win32 API is a more elegant substrate to program a GUI, but even with in the flower Microsoft's dominance it still paled in comparison to the ubiquity of the modern day web. Fixing the warts of the web is not the hard part, the hard part in designing a "better" platform is achieving adoption, that would require an act of god as there is no coalition powerful enough to make it happen through human volition alone.

Re: Shipping Culture Is Hurting Us

#57

Post by username223 »

angersock wrote: post #10

So, there's a great argument to be made about the negative impacts of "Shipping Culture". One could argue that it encourages underdesigning of ultimately complex systems. One could argue that it encourages excessive code and infratstructure reuse, to the point that even trivial projects pull in more than is needed and consume more resources than even remotely necessary. One could even argue that it creates in custome…

Yeah, the title and the article have very little to do with each other. Complaining about NaN semantics is especially irrelevant.

OTOH, it's funny you bring up Netscape. Yes, they shipped. Back in the Netscape 3-4 days of the Browser Wars, every new version was a crap shoot. It might un-break some page you wanted to use, but it might also be drastically slower, crash a page that you needed, lose your preferences, or whatever.

But the cool thing is that you could choose when or if to update! You could install the new version alongside the old one, try it out for awhile, and junk it if it was worse overall. If most people thought Netscape was getting worse, then most people would stick to the old, working version. Nowadays browsers follow the same "random walk" development model, but shove the latest version down most users' throats whenever they feel like it, and make it hard or impossible to revert the latest breakage. "Ship crap" combined with "software force-feeding" is good for no one but lazy coders.

Re: Shipping Culture Is Hurting Us

#58

Post by angersock »

username223 wrote: post #57
angersock wrote: post #10

So, there's a great argument to be made about the negative impacts of "Shipping Culture". One could argue that it encourages underdesigning of ultimately complex systems. One could argue that it encourages excessive code and infratstructure reuse, to the point that even trivial projects pull in more than is needed and consume more resources than even remotely necessary. One could even argue that it creates in custome…

Yeah, the title and the article have very little to do with each other. Complaining about NaN semantics is especially irrelevant. OTOH, it's funny you bring up Netscape. Yes, they shipped. Back in the Netscape 3-4 days of the Browser Wars, every new version was a crap shoot. It might un-break some page you wanted to use, but it might also be drastically slower, crash a page that you needed, lose your preferences, or…

So, on the one hand, I agree very much that having the options available was pretty cool.

On the other hand, having seen this repeated time and time again in the enterprise world, I don't think users should be given the option of not updating, especially for services that they aren't hosting themselves. All they end up doing is creating a support burden and being dissatisfied.

Our users are increasingly ignorant about the systems that they use--I think that precludes them from having final input about how said systems are implemented and deployed.

Re: Shipping Culture Is Hurting Us

#59

Post by angersock »

nulltype wrote: post #41
soup10 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Javascript has become the defacto browser programming language, even though it's objectively awful for complex software. The only reason it's achieved it's high status is because browser developers refused to cooperate and develop something better. Microsoft and Apple view software lockin as a competitive advantage and have actively undermined technologies they thought were threatening(java and flash amongst others).…

If you think Javascript is bad for complex software, you should try C++.

Hey, they're trying with ES6!

Re: Shipping Culture Is Hurting Us

#60

Post by nitrogen »

23david wrote: post #31
digi_owl wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way i have seen it used was more like the inverse of your first example, where one go from encoded and tested sysadmin tasks to "lets throw into production any newfangled thing the devs (monkeys hammering keyboards, more like it) wants to use".

Devops can definitely be used as a very expensive bandaid around poor engineering practices. But there's more to it... sometimes the engineering work it takes to prevent something from crashing is much less than just monitoring and restarting when failures are detected. Maybe "failure engineering" is a good term for a lot of the value Devops techniques can bring to a team?

When implementing a failure-tolerant system, one has to remember that "crash" can often be parlayed into "exploit" or at least "denial of service", and thus not become too tolerant of failure.
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