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The curious case of the missing period

tjaart.substack.com

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Re: The curious case of the missing period

#51

Post by vlovich123 »

blueflow wrote: post #11
quotemstr wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Implementing protocols correctly is hard That's why it's a best practice to specify protocols at a very high level (e.g. using cap'n'proto) instead of expecting every random sleep-deprived SDE2 to correctly implement a network exchange in terms of read() and write().

That why you have to read the specs of the protocol you want to implement. Its a matter of engineering rigorousness. Brute-forcing until "it works" doesn't cut it.

I think you're missing the fact that experience has taught us repeatedly that separating the protocol definition from the wire format is a good idea. But sure, feel free to ignore the many lessons and blame it on individuals as if anything could be implemented free from human laziness, error, & economic demands (which btw is ironically a lack of engineering rigour which I was always taught as you assume that humans will be lazy, corrupt, make mistakes & that economics of making things as cheap as possible are a real part of engineering & not something to handwave away as "they're not doing real engineering").

Re: The curious case of the missing period

#52

Post by rrr_oh_man »

ryandrake wrote: post #45
the_real_tjaart wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Don’t implement standards haphazardly, if you even should do so yourself. Either give the implementations the necessary care and attention, or use a pre-made library. I agree 100%.

Famous last words at >50% of the companies I've worked: "Just implement as much of standard X as you need to ship an MVP of feature Y!"

Can you share a story?

Re: The curious case of the missing period

#53

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

ummonk wrote: post #44
kazinator wrote: post #34

Why would a cron job that sends e-mails need to implement its own SMTP client??? You just use the mail program from mailutils or whatever. Just from a point of view of deliverability, developing bare bones SMTP interaction over a socket is a nonstarter. You can't just connect to random mail exchange hosts directly and send mail these days. A solution has to be capable of connecting to a specific SMTP forwarding host…

Just another example of Zawinski's law, no?

> Zawinski's Law captures common market pressure on software solutions, stating that “every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.”

Re: The curious case of the missing period

#59

Post by maxbond »

rrr_oh_man wrote: post #52
ryandrake wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Famous last words at >50% of the companies I've worked: "Just implement as much of standard X as you need to ship an MVP of feature Y!"

Can you share a story?

I had a very difficult to track down bug that ended up losing us a very big fish client, that came down to parsing a binary file with an ad-hoc parser that looked for the index of a header. They didn't realize that after the header was some metadata, so a small amount of metadata was interpreted as data. I fixed it by writing a proper ad-hoc parser that actually worked on a header-by-header level. But the damage was done and we had looked like buffoons to the client.

Was very hard for the team. There was a shouting match over it, some hard feelings. The code was written in the spirit GP alludes to by an enthusiastic executive who wanted to help lighten the load. I should've rejected the PR but was intimidated to reject the exec's code (not an engineering reason for an engineering decision!). The exec was a good data scientist but not as strong a coder as me, and parsing binary files is one of my specialties.

Friends don't let friends parse using "indexOf()".

Re: The curious case of the missing period

#60

Post by aftoprokrustes »

I will not comment on the technical part, as others already did it better than I could, but it just reminded me of an anecdote that reminds of the importance of such trivial things as a period at the end of a sentence:

In Germany, where I work, it is usual at the end of employement to ask for a letter of recommendation ("Zeugnis") that lists the tasks performed, and how good the employee was. It is an important document, as it will typcally be required when applying for jobs. Obviously, no employee would accept a document explicitly stating "this guy is a lazy bastard, do not hire him", so there is a "Zeugnissprache", a "secret code" to disguise this information as praise. One part of this code is that a missing period in the last sentence means "please ignore everything said here, this guy is horrible".

How do I know? I let a lawyer check my Zeugnis after my last employment, and (I assume out of lack of care, as all my performance reviews were positive) the last sentence was missing the period.

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