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Obvious and possible software innovations

scottlocklin.wordpress.com

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Re: Obvious and possible software innovations

#51

Post by Santosh83 »

> Engineers are a defeated tribe; it’s cheaper to hire an “AI” (Alien or Immigrant) slave to write the terraform or electron front end rather than paying clever engineers well enough to build themselves useful tooling to make them more productive and the world a better place.

Offensive passage that subtly implies immigrants from the developing world are slavish (and dehumanising them as well, using the word alien), incapable of intelligence, and who're undercutting honest-to-god 'engineers', and preventing the world from becoming a better place.

I'm astonished that hordes of people are still ready to sell their first born if they can get a citizenship amid such a culture of passive racism and superiority complex.

Re: Obvious and possible software innovations

#52

Post by masklinn »

TimTheTinker wrote: post #33
roca wrote: post #23

I only had to read the first few sentences of the first point to see that the author thinks problems are easy because they don't understand the difficulties. Parsing C function prototypes doesn't give you enough information to write safe language bindings. For example if you see "char* make_stuff(const char* param);", you don't know whether the memory pointed to by 'param' can be reused after the function call, or wh…

You raise a good point, but the OP's point still stands. All we'd need is comments in header files with the extra type information encoded, and automated FFI would be possible. Not to say that would be easy... building a type system on top of a language that lacks it is anything but easy, but it's possible. TypeScript is an excellent example.

> All we'd need is comments in header files with the extra type information encoded, and automated FFI would be possible.

That’s SWIG. It’s something like 15 years old, possibly more.

> building a type system on top of a language that lacks it is anything but easy, but it's possible. TypeScript is an excellent example.

That has nothing to do with the issue at hand. You can compile haskell to c, that does not help FFI-ing to unannotated C functions.

Re: Obvious and possible software innovations

#53

Post by approxim8ion »

japhib wrote: post #9

I actually really dislike this whole post. There’s a really condescending tone lurking just beneath the surface for most of it. It’s also extremely hand-wavy about the problems, their causes, AND possible solutions. Also, so whiny. At this point I don’t care if he even has any good ideas because he’s made me so mad just by his writing style.

Author belongs to the special class of people who think sounding like a dick makes them more authoritative. All their posts are like that.

Re: Obvious and possible software innovations

#54

Post by wokwokwok »

> The reality is they’re all quite possible, but nobody makes money doing them.

You don't get nice things for free.

Seriously, we could build a space station around Jupiter if we reallllly wanted to. It would be hard, and people would probably die, but if you really wanted to, you could do it.

Similar story for these problems: Solvable? yes.

Valuable?

Well... maybe; but probably hard enough that you can't do them for free, and not valuable enough to justify the cost and effort of doing them.

> Engineers are a defeated tribe...

Is that the take-away here? Be sad, give up? Go and build some electron apps?

There are two problems here: doing (hard task), and paying for it; you can solve either of them by either a) volunteering your time to work on (hard task) or, b) helping fund people who are.

Not to say that the points raised are all invalid, and enumerating things which are worth working on is also helpful, but yeah, well, when people are trying to address them, and all you've got to say is:

> You see pieces of this idea here and there, but like everything else about modernity, they suck.

...complaining that no one else is doing either of these two things, or the ones that are trying suck, is... well, I'm going to be generous and say, entitled.

Re: Obvious and possible software innovations

#55

Post by spullara »

Some responses:

1. Java is adding this with Panama. Definitely a sore point and should be standard when folks are making their languages. https://openjdk.java.net/projects/panama/

2. Meh.

3. This is exactly how to get zero people to use your cloud. Everyone would love to do this but adoption risk is too high.

4. This will never pass muster when it encounters design. There are plenty of tools that do this but generate half-hearted interfaces. Xcode (interface builder) does a pretty good job of it anyway but folks will still want to customize their UIs.

5. Fair criticism.

6. I think that CoreOS was a step in the right direction. Not sure if they have seen it.

Re: Obvious and possible software innovations

#58

Post by cratermoon »

the_optimist wrote: post #24
dogman123 wrote: post #2

“He would be hailed as a Jobs-like technical innovator if he had some of his slaves do this, and he would be remembered with gratitude, rather than as the sperdo who dumped his wife for sexorz with lip filler Cthulhu.” Misogyny is really cool! Thanks Scott Locklin!

There is nothing in this quote which implies a hatred of women, and perhaps you inferring it says more about you than about the quote.

Misogyny isn't just about hate. Sexualization, denying agency,

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/08/style/misogyny-women-hist...

Re: Obvious and possible software innovations

#59

Post by jacobsenscott »

underwater wrote: post #8

Feels like a list of stuff where he massively underestimates the complexity of the fields he's talking about. Drag and drop UIs have, as he indentified, been tried. They were a leaky abstraction where incremental functionality was difficult to implement.

I've never seen a web UI that couldn't be built, and built better, in an hour with an old school drag and drop gui builder. Unfortunately the web was built on markup, and markup is a terrible way to define a UI. There is really no way to make a good gui builder for html/css, so we are stuck with literally the worst possible way to build UIs today. CSS is 24 years old, and nobody has figured out a sane way to use it yet. We've gone from inline styles to "semantic" to BEM, and we've come full circle to what are basically inline styles (tailwind) and they all suck. Even html frames and tables were better than what we are using today. In many ways the history of building UIs in HTML is just people trying to find ways to mimic a frames/tables layout without using frames and tables.

Re: Obvious and possible software innovations

#60

Post by ajarmst »

ajarmst wrote: post #44

If they're so easy and obvious, why hasn't the author done it, at least as a demo? The article also reeks of "this doesn't work for me, therefore it won't work for anyone" I doubt I'm the only one who absolutely does not concede that everything should have a GUI interface. "Why does shit like DPDK exist?" I don't know, but I bet you could find out with a little investigation, which might make this sound more like a w…

The author's about page reports that he is a former physicist with experience in automotives and law enforcement. It also contains the statement "I have a particular dislike of self-anointed 'experts';" with no apparent irony.

And my personal favourite: "People may think I’m fighting above my weight class, because many of the people I label as clowns are on television and in important newspapers, much like the stars of 'The Bachelor.' "

Uh huh.

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