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akitzmiller

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akitzmiller
·vor 3 Jahren·discuss
I came here to pretty much make the same comment. If you have a business that can get away with OTS software, more power to you. But complicated things are complicated and complex billing rules can be make-or-break for a company. Whether you start with 3rd party or start home grown, billing systems often need humans and there really isn't a substitute.
akitzmiller
·vor 3 Jahren·discuss
Somebody mentioned this in a reply, but it deserves to be a top level comment. A good chunk of this year's unusual heat may be attributable to a reduction in SO2 emissions from shipping. Article cites other factors as well, but this implies that 2023 is the new normal.

https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-low-sulphur-shippin...
akitzmiller
·vor 3 Jahren·discuss
It's true that they are still there, but I think loyalty is really soft. Musk seems to make some antagonizing change at least once a month that results in defections, the whole Substack thing being the latest. I follow Rex Chapman who seems to be one of those people that just does not want to have to rebuild his following somewhere else. He just recently signed up at Spoutible.
akitzmiller
·vor 3 Jahren·discuss
There is a bit of a forest / trees problem here. Python's simplicity is all about the barrier to computing. Because the barrier to use of Python is so much lower than for Rust, et al. you can get to a point where you've automated some human activity much more quickly or, indeed, even bothered to automate it at all. Someone knocking out a Python tool so that a manager doesn't have to gather spreadsheets every month to monitor progress is better than it not happening because Rust doesn't have the higher level libraries to make it a 5 day, 1 person project.

This article really just reads like there is some internal griping about not using Python.
akitzmiller
·vor 4 Jahren·discuss
About 20 years ago, I was at a pharmaceutical company and, to put together a web application, - we had to buy a prod and a dev database server - we had to buy a prod and a dev application server - we needed Oracle as a database - we needed a DBA, a sysadmin, and a hardware team - we needed Tomcat / Java and Oracle development expertise

The idea of developing and running this application with a single person would have been laughable.

Today, because tools are soooo accessible, I can, and do, routinely spin up my own VM, apply Puppet, drop my MySQL and Django containers onto that VM, and pull https certificates in addition to doing the front and back end software development.

Life would be waaay simpler if I could just write server side web application code and wait around for database developers, sys admins, and front-end folks to do their thing. Imagine not having to learn a testing harness because there are actually people testing the software!
akitzmiller
·vor 4 Jahren·discuss
I think this is really the crux of the matter. More generally, STABLE management that drives software quality. Even if you're lucky enough to be part of a team that starts of with good management, reorgs, mergers, and turnover are just way too frequent to provide the year-over-year improvements needed for really good, efficient code.
akitzmiller
·vor 4 Jahren·discuss
For something like this to be successful, I think it has to have some kind of domain focus. I've been working in bioinformatics-adjacent jobs for the last couple decades and I've seen things like this get used when there were a lot of integrated, domain-specific tools. Even then, the users were a curious slice of the population that could think like a programmer, but had not bothered to learn a language.

It also has to have a lot of buy-in and support. As everyone here is fully aware, a lot of problems get solved by Googling for a Stack Overflow answer. That's tough to do with a niche-y tool.

Not saying this isn't a good thing; it's just that it'll be difficult to be successful as a general purpose tool.
akitzmiller
·vor 5 Jahren·discuss
I think the whole value of the Unix tool ecosystem is that you don't need to build large pieces of software. If you look at all the GUI tools that Microsoft had to build for Windows administration in the earlier days and how they eventually came out with PowerShell because of the inadequacy of those tools, you can see how successful Unix tools have been by the --lack-- of big software that does their job.
akitzmiller
·vor 5 Jahren·discuss
Thank you.