21–30 of 585 posts
I feel like this is heavily connected with the idea of legacy. I grew up in Scotland, and lots of the buildings, culture, etc, have been around for hundreds of years. It would be nice to feel like something I was building would last as long and outlive me. It doesn’t though. Sometimes I think that this is just the nature of software development. Most of the stuff I build is built to solve an immediate business proble…
Interesting how C programming has survived that entire time period in the operating system and embedded worlds, although the spread of multicore hardware running lots of threads in parallel has also led to many changes (but even those changes were beginning to be implemented 20 years ago). 20 years from now, C will probably still be a core language in its niche.
Queue rust apologists… I think C and its direct descendants will slowly fade away over the next 20 years as new developers want to get away from the legacy of language specifications that span existing codebases. There are so many sharp edges in C that have automatic fixes/detections/etc in newer languages and don’t get me started about multiprocessing complexity in C.
He knows Rust well but software design not so much. I know software design well but Rust not so much. My experience can be summed up with:
let &mut writer = Writer::writer::new(connection.clone()).clone(); // TODO ??? writer.write(*data.clone()).unwrap();
Meanwhile in C++ I'm like
if (!write(connection, data, data_len)) { return false; }
I feel like this is heavily connected with the idea of legacy. I grew up in Scotland, and lots of the buildings, culture, etc, have been around for hundreds of years. It would be nice to feel like something I was building would last as long and outlive me. It doesn’t though. Sometimes I think that this is just the nature of software development. Most of the stuff I build is built to solve an immediate business proble…
But even a Cathedral changes over time, and your work may not last; but all human work is a shrill scream against the eternal void - all will be lost in time, like tears in rain. The best we can do is do the best with what we have in front of us. And maybe all the work you did to make sure your one-off database code correctly handled the Y38 problem back in 2000 will never be noticed; because your software is still running and didn't fail.
Remember Crystal Reports? Oh god, the pain. The pain.
I feel like this is heavily connected with the idea of legacy. I grew up in Scotland, and lots of the buildings, culture, etc, have been around for hundreds of years. It would be nice to feel like something I was building would last as long and outlive me. It doesn’t though. Sometimes I think that this is just the nature of software development. Most of the stuff I build is built to solve an immediate business proble…
Core Libraries/Kernels, like LibC or The Linux/NT Kernel.
I feel like this is heavily connected with the idea of legacy. I grew up in Scotland, and lots of the buildings, culture, etc, have been around for hundreds of years. It would be nice to feel like something I was building would last as long and outlive me. It doesn’t though. Sometimes I think that this is just the nature of software development. Most of the stuff I build is built to solve an immediate business proble…
Core Libraries/Kernels, like LibC or The Linux/NT Kernel.
It's like how the streets in Rome have been the same for much longer than many of the buildings have been standing, even though the buildings are hundreds of years old.
Interesting how C programming has survived that entire time period in the operating system and embedded worlds, although the spread of multicore hardware running lots of threads in parallel has also led to many changes (but even those changes were beginning to be implemented 20 years ago). 20 years from now, C will probably still be a core language in its niche.
The fun thing is that, until CS slows down, stuff gets better so fast that we get to reimplement the same thing, but 10x better every 5 years or so. First I wrote single threaded code code with automatic memory management, then single threaded synchronous with manual memory management, then synchronous multi-threaded, then async, and then async lock free. Now I am writing async lock free, and the compiler is helping…
> so fast that we get to reimplement the same thing, but 10x better every 5 years or so. Citation needed. Seems that it just us getting more and more abstracted which can make it easier but not necessarily easier. The hardest part for the next gen of developers is not having Moore's law to save them from crappy coding.
What do all these things have in common? MS Visual Basic 6, MS ActiveX, MS Silverlight, MS Visual Foxpro, MS C# .NET Compact Framework, MS ASP.NET WebForms, MS ASP.NET MVC, MS Windows Communication Foundation... I think there common is a theme there. But shhh, don't tell him.