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Shipping Culture Is Hurting Us

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Re: Shipping Culture Is Hurting Us

#101

Post by rjblackman »

pjmlp wrote: post #63
kazinator wrote: post #44

> Systems stopped using cooperative multitasking at least 20 years ago because it sucked compared to the alternative of automatic, preemptive multitasking. And yet Node.js harks back to those dark days with its callback-based concurrency, all running in a single thread. Uh, no. For instance, Unix kernels have been traditionally cooperative---at least when executing kernel code. That is to say, user space can be preem…

>Unix might not have been successful had Ken Thompson decided to make the kernel preemptive, and then spent 1973-1987 debugging it. :) Sadly that didn't happen, UNIX was adopted by 80's hipsters into their startups, became adopted by the industry at large, thus spreading C into the industry. Now we have patch .

people working on computers in the 80s were not hipsters.

Re: Shipping Culture Is Hurting Us

#102

Post by McUsr »

pavlov wrote: post #99
McUsr wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The short definition would be: "node.js is something that eats up my browsers latency", something along those lines, and as far as I am concerned, that is everything I have to know about it. Node.js is a no stop for me.

Can you name some of those Node.js apps that have been causing problems for you?

PopcornTime is performing badly on my machine, I actually have to shut down the browser to use it, I usally have 50+ tabs open in it, -that I use.

Re: Shipping Culture Is Hurting Us

#103

Post by deong »

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++.

C++ is fine for complex software; it's bad for simple software. The problem is that it provides benefits that are irrelevant for most people, and the costs of making those benefits available is pretty high, so for the average developer, it seems stupidly complicated.

Re: Shipping Culture Is Hurting Us

#104

Post by adestefan »

hackuser wrote: post #66
didgeoridoo wrote: post #2

The author talks about languages and technologies (JS, Mongo), but he's really getting at something deeper. The real danger of the "ship it" culture is that things that can't be "shipped" right away — things that require solving really hard problems — tend to fall off our collective radar because there is just SO MUCH cool and (relatively) easy stuff to do right now. PG has a great term for this: "schlep blindness":…

Perhaps ship-it-now is the right answer for the times. With so many rapid changes in technology there should be 1) a lot of low-hanging fruit (i.e., quick, high-value solutions), making short-term project more valuable and 2) a shorter shelf-life for any solution (i.e., a new tech will make it obsolete), making long-term projects less valuable.

The only reason why there is low-hanging fruit is because you need to reimplement solution in the tech du juor to problems that were solved 30 and 40 years ago.

Re: Shipping Culture Is Hurting Us

#105

Post by hyc_symas »

halayli wrote: post #83

It's a spectrum. Trying to ship a perfect software from the start will probably end up like OS/360 project. Then K&R came along and designed what we know now as unix. An OS that wasn't complete and fully featured like OS/360 was intended to be, but it worked! Making the wrong choices is inevitable, but correcting them is part of the software life cycle. We aren't working with concrete and building bridges here. If we…

Delays getting OS/360 were a blessing, really - it prompted many universities to develop their own mainframe OSs, thus helping OS research flourish around the world.

Re: Shipping Culture Is Hurting Us

#106

Post by EliRivers »

dkarapetyan wrote: post #37
digi_owl wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Makes me wonder if this is why i find the whole "devops" concept to be raising my hackles.

How about "full-stack developer"?

Which really means "OUR stack developer, being a subset of the full-stack in our particular narrow domain, going as high as we go, and as low as we go".

Re: Shipping Culture Is Hurting Us

#107

Post by hyc_symas »

igl wrote: post #79

The problem is that the Author is assuming that 90% of software we write to make a living is set into stone and suppose to run forever. Almost everything we do is disposable and replaced within the same decade. So he does not like Javascript and Nosql. Is it hard to find a JavaEE job? I think not.

I think the real problem is the disposability attitude you just described. It's prevalent in our real world consumerist economy and it's killing us there too.

Building software that's to be thrown away is a waste of mental resources and physical resources. Society and civilization advances on top of our lasting creations, not the ephemeral ones. Reinventing the wheel doesn't advance the state of the art. You want to build one good set of tools that will last a long time, so you can stop thinking about them and be free to tackle the next truly new challenge. Doing anything else is just a waste of life.

Re: Shipping Culture Is Hurting Us

#108

Post by pjmlp »

rjblackman wrote: post #101
pjmlp wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Unix might not have been successful had Ken Thompson decided to make the kernel preemptive, and then spent 1973-1987 debugging it. :) Sadly that didn't happen, UNIX was adopted by 80's hipsters into their startups, became adopted by the industry at large, thus spreading C into the industry. Now we have patch .

people working on computers in the 80s were not hipsters.

The persons called hipsters in computer culture already exited back then, we just didn't called ourselves hipsters.

The remark was for the younger readers.

Me, I was into the demoscene and couldn't care less about UNIX until around 1993.

Re: Shipping Culture Is Hurting Us

#110

Post by andrewstuart2 »

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).…

Funny you mention flash, since any logic in flash is done in ActionScript, an ECMAScript variant.
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