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

The State of the Art is Terrible

zackarymorris.tumblr.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 242 posts

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#231

Post by jodrellblank »

bartwe wrote: post #137
thaumaturgy wrote: post #70

I'd like to buy Zack a drink, because all of this is obvious to those poor shmucks among us that handle the support end of things (also known as the "shit end"). I've been saying a lot of the same things for years. I'm tired of it now; I'm starting to give up, because it's obvious there isn't a programmer out there that gives a damn. You can try telling them that there's something wrong with software -- something fun…

As a programmer I find this offensive, we work all day trying to make software good (enough). As I see it the problem is with users, they think they should get programs, like firefox, for free. Most programs you use on a daily basis are now larger than anything a single person can build in a lifetime, and it should be free ? No business constraints and lack of money is what is keeping software down. Nobody is paying…

Most programs you use on a daily basis are now larger than anything a single person can build in a lifetime

And that's my fault, is it? I asked for a web browser with a pile of code so it can run on platforms I don't use? That supports user-unfriendly features I can't override, and which has its own configuration style so I can change the default display size of Tamil fonts?

Don't blame the users because software is huge, it's huge because developers made protocols complicated and wanted to offer one program to a lot of people to save themselves effort.

they think they should get programs, like firefox, for free

Remind me which happened first: Developers offer free web browsers, or users expect free web browsers? I think the former.

No business constraints and lack of money is what is keeping software down. Nobody is paying anyone to 'reinvent the wheel' to be better.

And we all know what a commercial web browser would look like - $300 per user, government mandated for mediacal use, Netscape 4 with knobs on, still crashy.

Good software is good, crummy software is crummy, and that seems largely independent of whether it is commercial or not, to my anecdotal eyes.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#232

Post by jodrellblank »

tensor wrote: post #106
zackmorris wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wasn't sure where to chime in on these comments but this one resonated with me because I used postscript for a year at hp and it's a remarkable language. I think it's a shame that it's mostly unknown today and the opaque pdf standard has taken over. The world has largely established that http is the way to query devices and control them. Device drivers are the spawn of the devil to me and completely unnecessary (th…

No other industry has the features you seem to want. You can't just put any tires on your car and have it just work. You can't just throw any gas in it. As for printers, PS was proposed as a standard so that printers "just worked". It cost money to license, not every jumped on board, and so it didn't establish itself as the dominant brand. PDF is based on PS and people could certainly standardize around it. The probl…

I don't think he's complaining that there is no CLI utility by default, but rather that he can't write one other than by going through Quicktime, because instead of a widely accessible (e.g. HTTP) server, it has some proprietary driver.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#233

Post by jodrellblank »

keeperofdakeys wrote: post #126
megablast wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are kidding, right? Cars have hardly changed at all, still the same petrol powered devices with are a hard shell. Sure the car companies were forced to add in some extra safety mechanisms, but this does not mean much.

How often do cars break down now compared to 30, 50 or 80 years ago? I am pretty sure most of the early drivers were quite good mechanics, these days? Not so much. I'm sure Mr. Ford would find modern cars very foreign. A chair, clothing and even houses haven't changed much over the years either. Most designs only change bits at a time, slowly morphing into unrecognisable things.

How often do cars break down now compared to 30, 50 or 80 years ago?

Major car failures in cars first 5 years fell by 1/3rd between 2005 and 2010.

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/06/more-reliable-cars.htm...

So, I'd expect a lot less than 30 years ago.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#234

Post by jodrellblank »

david927 wrote: post #140
gfodor wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other efforts similar in spirit but dramatically different in execution are Intentional Software and Jetbrains MPS. I really need to find a weekend to try to parse through VRI's work. Has anyone tried to make a digestable survey of the work they have done? I've glanced through their documentation but it seems quite sparse and their stuff is a moving target.

Kay and Simonyi are both PARC alumni, the place that has brought us a lot of the progress we've seen so far. This should be a slap in the face that current generations are making Angry Birds and Farmville, and these guys feel it is still upon them to do anything in the way of progress. It's just shameful.

Alternatively, those guys' actions then were the past which led to this present, of which they are ashamed.

Who better to do version two than the people involved in version one?

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#235

Post by jebblue »

jodrellblank wrote: post #227
jebblue wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> support people are not your janitors. Quit expecting us to spend hours digging through arcane documentation, followed by further hours troubleshooting things that you left half-finished, and then turn around and tell us to write it our own damn selves. Because, seriously, there just aren't enough hours in the day. Unless I'm missing something, if software were perfect then there wouldn't be a need for support peopl…

You're missing that software which works perfectly still wont do what you want magically. Just because it works on a terminal server doesn't mean it will select and install itself on your cluster when you want it. Just because it generates reports promptly without crashing every time doesn't mean it will know which reports to generate or which data to pull from, or how to include your new office statistics. Just beca…

You brought up some great points there but couldn't those be generally classified as training? When I think of support I think of people who help the customer to analyze problems and fix them. If support people are spending time holding the customer's hand then I'd say it isn't fair to be tasked with support and training.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#236

Post by wisp558 »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #214
thaumaturgy wrote: post #70

I'd like to buy Zack a drink, because all of this is obvious to those poor shmucks among us that handle the support end of things (also known as the "shit end"). I've been saying a lot of the same things for years. I'm tired of it now; I'm starting to give up, because it's obvious there isn't a programmer out there that gives a damn. You can try telling them that there's something wrong with software -- something fun…

"I really don't like this industry much anymore. I guess that makes me a bad hacker or something." This is the 'little death.' Allow me to relate an anecdote. I grew up loving computers, loving everything about them, how they were built, how they were programmed, how they did what they did. I started out just as the 'personal computer' revolution was getting started, it was glorious, Altair, IMSAI, SOL20, Heathkit. L…

I am the child, instilled with a sense of wonder about, well, everything. I got kind of a late start, didn't run into computers until I was starting High School, until my parents gave me an old Pentium II that they had lying around. I'm 19 now, so that would have been 2005-2006-ish. A horribly underpowered machine. I was infatuated. I installed WinXP on it for the first time, I laid awake at night listening to the hard drive wail... an 8GB hard drive. It barely fit XP on it. Over the next few years I did everything I could think of with that box to make it run just a little bit better. I scavenged my house's parts drawer, googling serial numbers on the silicon to see just what this board did, and whether it would make my relic run faster. A few months later, I upgraded my computer for the first time... A Pentium III! A 20 GB hard drive! My world had opened up. I had to have my old data and parts, so I became familiar with the internals of the computer. Eventually I ran out of things to do in windows. I tried the linux thing I had heard about, burned myself a liveCD of ubuntu, gutsy gibbon. Wifi didn't work on the cheap usb dongle I was using, so it was back to windows to me. But I had gotten a taste. A taste of the terminal, and of an operating system that actually let me tinker with things. When ubuntu fixed the wireless driver for that dongle, and I was ready to install it again (after a failed fedora install or 2). After that it was just one software foray after another. Something broke, and I adventured deeper into the file system to fix it. I started to learn how to program. I learned about Arch Linux. I got a Dual Core computer (!!). The rest is history.

I still learn all I can, but my focus has shifted a little. I'm learning to program properly, to make new tools instead of understanding existing ones. I'm learning C and python and haskell and lisp (and looking for more!) and loving every minute of it.

I find it a little bit disheartening, however, the lack of curiosity that my peers display, even my fellow CS majors. To me, the computer is a vastly complex system, just waiting to be explored, and thanks to open source software, I can! But a lot of my peers don't see things that way. I would hazard a guess that part of that reason is that the environment presented to them is not particularly interesting, particularly in a windows or mac environment, where a lot of the details are abstracted as far away as possible. For me the spark of curiosity was ignited when I had a relic of a machine that I needed to make run faster. I tried to squeeze the most out of that computer, and it taught me enough to whet my appetite. I feel like our youth, my peers have been and are being short changed by technology today. I'm not sure what there is to be done about it, but I know that it isn't right.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#237

Post by thaumaturgy »

wisp558 wrote: post #236
ChuckMcM wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I really don't like this industry much anymore. I guess that makes me a bad hacker or something." This is the 'little death.' Allow me to relate an anecdote. I grew up loving computers, loving everything about them, how they were built, how they were programmed, how they did what they did. I started out just as the 'personal computer' revolution was getting started, it was glorious, Altair, IMSAI, SOL20, Heathkit. L…

I am the child, instilled with a sense of wonder about, well, everything. I got kind of a late start, didn't run into computers until I was starting High School, until my parents gave me an old Pentium II that they had lying around. I'm 19 now, so that would have been 2005-2006-ish. A horribly underpowered machine. I was infatuated. I installed WinXP on it for the first time, I laid awake at night listening to the ha…

I can't speak for your peers, but for me, deadlines and emergencies have probably taken a lot of the fun out of it. It's one thing when you're trying to debug some driver issue on your own system and you're doing it as a hobby so whether it gets done today or next month is no big deal, versus, say, crossing yourself and muttering a prayer and rolling out an update following weeks of testing, only to have it conflict with something you didn't anticipate and the entire network goes down in flames while your phone melts.

Or, for a slightly less doomsday scenario, just a relatively simple problem affecting one person, but they're still trusting you to figure it out, and they're expecting you to do it sooner than later.

There's a point at which the fun really starts to go out of that. I've always been a bit of an adrenaline junkie, I've always worked well under pressure, but nowadays my favorite thing is quiet time in the sunshine digging about in the garden. (Oh god, that makes me sound old.)

Maybe this will never happen to you. I hope not! But I've been thinking a lot about what Chuck said, and about my frustrations with technology, and I think that maybe this has a lot to do with it.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#238

Post by guard-of-terra »

lobster_johnson wrote: post #215
guard-of-terra wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there would be ruby but no python, or python but no ruby - the remaining one would be worse and less mature than it is now. Having competition made them both stronger, no doubt.

Maybe, but it's a shame you need two competing, but very similar projects, to accomplish this. If people had been competing about contributing the best code to the same project, we could have reduced the duplication.

That's how evolution works. By duplicating everything and then making it compete.

People tend to find their local maximum. Competition forces projects out of local maximums.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#239

Post by [deleted] »

balloot wrote: post #211
brain5ide wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hardware improved. I believe the guy's talking about software.

Which software was it exactly that was so great and just worked? MS-DOS? Windows 3.1? Windows Me? Some specifics would be nice, because across the board it seems everything is MUCH better now. It used to be that you would buy a computer game and 75% of the time it would not work out of the box.

[deleted]

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#240

Post by AppSec »

redler wrote: post #65

Programming, at least the fundamentals, should be taught in elementary school just like any other language, but the teachers don't yet have the required familiarity, so we should start with them. There's much to enjoy, agree with, and debate in this essay. But this is the most important line.

This isn't meant to be sarcastic or condescending, but isn't programming at it's fundamentals math and logic? Those are taught early on.

I mean, I worked with Logo in 6th grade. So I'm really not sure what else you would teach that is different.

Post reply on HN