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Cold Showers: For when people get too hyped up about things

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Re: Cold Showers: For when people get too hyped up about things

#81

Post by Taikonerd »

wenc wrote: post #73
Taikonerd wrote: post #58

I read this and thought, "oh, the author is calling out formal verification as overhyped? Hillel Wayne ( https://hillelwayne.com/ ) is going to be angry! Wait, who wrote this..."

Me too. I recall that F Scott Fitzgerald said "the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function."

In Hillel's defense, maybe they're not opposed ideas... this article talks about problems with formal verification, but I think his thing is more formal modeling (with TLA+).

Re: Cold Showers: For when people get too hyped up about things

#82

Post by hwayne »

Taikonerd wrote: post #81
wenc wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me too. I recall that F Scott Fitzgerald said "the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function."

In Hillel's defense, maybe they're not opposed ideas... this article talks about problems with formal verification , but I think his thing is more formal modeling (with TLA+).

If I find any cold showers with formal modeling, I will absolutely include those too. :D

Re: Cold Showers: For when people get too hyped up about things

#83

Post by catdog »

quonn wrote: post #10

I wish it would be possible to have better studies for that. I believe that static typing has huge benefits as software scales. I also believe that the type system of TypeScript is actually stronger in practice than the Java or C# one (despite theoretical weaknesses). It has the right tradeoffs (e.g. structural equivalence, being able to type strings, being able to check that all cases are handled, etc.) It would be…

> I wish it would be possible to have better studies for that. I believe that static typing has huge benefits as software scales.

I also believe that, especially after it outscales what one person is able to (fully) overview. Static types are something a program can reason about so it allows so much more productivity boosting tooling to be created. This also goes way beyond simply catching type errors at compile time vs. runtime (a downside which can largely be mitigated by test coverage). Just look what an IDE for e.g. Java can do simply in helping you navigating a big codebase. Then throw in refactoring which is in many cases can even be a completely automated operation and in much more cases is at least greatly assisted by the tools. Tools for dynamic languages can often at most guess, making good guesses is hard so in practice you get mostly stuff which is pretty limited in its usefulness.

Re: Cold Showers: For when people get too hyped up about things

#84

Post by hwayne »

the_af wrote: post #70

A Cold Shower for (early) testing of software, maybe: There used to be an often cited paper by Boehm about the cost of catching bugs early vs late on production, usually mentioned by advocates of testing early, where the quoted conclusion was something like "studies show it's 10 times more costly to catch bugs late on production" or something like that. This is a very well known study, I'm likely misquoting it (the i…

Laurent Bossavit tears the Boehm paper apart in his book "Leprechauns of Software Engineering"[1]. It's a good read for anyone interested in the empirical side of software research.

[1]: https://leanpub.com/leprechauns

Re: Cold Showers: For when people get too hyped up about things

#85

Post by pantaloony »

jedimastert wrote: post #63
ahelwer wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone I know who identifies as a stoic is an emotionally stunted software engineer who realistically isn't tasked with stoically shouldering very much of anything.

As a counterpoint, most of the people I know whom I would consider to follow a Stoic philosophy don't self-classify all that much. I would also say that there's a pretty big difference between "stiff upper lip/no emotions" that people imagine when using the the adjective "stoic" and the Stoic writings of Marcus Aurelius and the like.

> I would also say that there's a pretty big difference between "stiff upper lip/no emotions" that people imagine when using the the adjective "stoic" and the Stoic writings of Marcus Aurelius and the like.

A quick way to find out what sort of self-proclaimed lover of Meditations you’re dealing with is to ask what they think of its physics and metaphysics.

Re: Cold Showers: For when people get too hyped up about things

#86

Post by castorp »

bob1029 wrote: post #71
hans_castorp wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If at this point you are still finding that SQLite is not as fast or faster than SQL Server, MySQL, et.al., then I would be very surprised. What about large aggregation queries, that are parallelized by modern DBMS? Does it still scale that well if you have many concurrent read and write transactions (e.g. on the same table)?

We aren't running any reports on our databases like this. I would argue it is a bad practice in general to mix OLTP and OLAP workloads on a single database instance, regardless of the specific technology involved. If we wanted to run an aggregate that could potentially impact live transactions, we would just copy the SQLite db to another server and perform the analysis there. We have some telemetry services which ope…

> At the end of the day, you still have to go to disk on writes, and this must be serialized against reads for basic consistency reasons.

No, absolutely not.

That's why modern databases use a thing called multi version concurrency control. You can run (multiple) queries on the same table that is updated by multiple transactions at the same time without one blocking the others (assuming the write transactions don't block each other). Of course they are fighting for I/O, but there is no need so serialize anything.

Mixing OLTP and OLAP becomes increasingly "normal" theses days as the capabilities of the database products and the hardware improve. With modern high-end hardware (hundreds of CPUs, a lot of SSDs, large RAM) this actually scales quite nicely .

Re: Cold Showers: For when people get too hyped up about things

#87

Post by SNACKeR99 »

bob1029 wrote: post #79
saberience wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you living on another planet? Are you seriously suggesting people replace SqlServer or MySQL with SQLite? If you can come to my company and replace our 96-core SqlServer boxes with SQLite I'll pay you any salary you ask for.

I can assure you that I live on the same planet as everyone else posting here. Whether or not I could perform this miracle depends entirely on your specific use cases. Many people who have this sort of reaction are coming from a place where there is heavy use of the vendor lock-in features such as SSIS and stored procedures. If you are ultimately just trying to get structured business data to/from disk in a consisten…

This is a great answer. The details REALLY matter. One of my best early tech success stories was rewriting a SQL query that took 27 hours to one that took ~5 seconds. This was running on a very large Oracle cluster. They had poured more and more money into hardware and licensing trying solve this. In the end, it was a matter of turning a cursor-based query into a set-based query.

Re: Cold Showers: For when people get too hyped up about things

#89

Post by hwayne »

beh9540 wrote: post #62

I was really surprised docker or kubernetes wasn't one of the items on here. While I use both, they definitely both could use cold showers to make sure they provide value.

I seeded most of the list and know basically nothing about docker or kubernetes, so don't know of any cold showers myself. But I would be more than happy to edit a submission by someone who knows the space!

Re: Cold Showers: For when people get too hyped up about things

#90

Post by hwayne »

fmakunbound wrote: post #61
rwoerz wrote: post #28

We software engineers are still more like alchimists rather than chemists. That list reminds me of [1], which rants about this state of affairs and [2] that puts many beliefs to the test. [1] https://youtu.be/WELBnE33dpY [2] https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/making-software/9780596...

In addition to that, I also feel calling ourselves engineers is a stretch.

I used to think this, and then I interviewed people who did both traditional and software engineering professionally, and now I'm not so sure. I did a first draft of what I learned here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3018ABlET1Y

I'm hoping to have a written version by the end of September.

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