toadpipe · HackerTrans

16 years agodiscuss

What a crock. The things we know amount to nothing compared to the things we don't, and education doesn't even move the needle on that dial. So what? What matters is what you need to know to accomplish some goal vs. what you know right now, and that's much more tractable. Focusing on the (incorrect) idea that no one else knows anything either so you're just fine the way you are is pabulum designed to boost self-esteem at the expense of actually learning something.

toadpipe

16 years agodiscuss

Niceness is not the same thing as determination. Also, trying to flatter someone described as a good judge of character doesn't seem like a good idea to me. /serious

toadpipe

16 years agodiscuss

People who give up too early, for any reason.

toadpipe

16 years agodiscuss

Pretty much the entire industry, as well as the academic system, is based on the premise that the vast majority of code can and should be written by programmers who will be borrowing heavily against great (in the sense of being large even more than in the sense of being high quality or thoughtfully designed) black box systems in the form of languages, compilers, libraries, operating systems, databases, and other applications that are written by a small fraction and are mostly built to make sure that the rest can't screw things up too badly. Leveraging Ruby on Rails to throw together a barely functional website/app is just one of the more blatant examples of the pattern that pervades the pipeline that now produces most of the software in the world.

There seems to be a large demand for software, and the system is good at producing a lot of software.

toadpipe

17 years agodiscuss

If you are not interested in learning how to do it properly, then hire someone who is. Failing that, do not attempt to do it in C.

toadpipe

17 years agodiscuss

It can increase people's commitment to compassion too. Like Lisp or Forth, it is an amplifier. Actually placebos are a better analogy. Both are imaginary social support that allows a body to commit resources that would otherwise be held in reserve.

toadpipe

17 years agodiscuss

Expressiveness in a single line of code is such a stupid metric.

magic()

What's that? It's a function call. What does it do? Anything. Everything. Why does it need a complex grammar? It doesn't. Spend your time thinking about the problem, not the language. What a concept!

Do simple things take many lines of code in C? Yes. If you only have a few data structures and algorithms in your mental toolbox, simple things will take many lines of code in C, or C++, or in any language. Why do people advocate baroque languages by claiming that you cannot do simple things simply except with baroque languages, and then blame people for complicating their programs by using that baroqueness?

Yeah, C++ programmers are feature junkies; the language is designed by a feature junkie and promotes language features as the solution to every problem. If you go against that, you are going against the whole culture.

If PL/I was the fatal disease, C++ is the shambling corpse.

toadpipe

17 years agodiscuss

If someone could come along and invest the millions of man hours required in making a performance-critical high-level language without the C-baggage

As long as it also had C syntax, and something close to the C memory model, and was recognizably object oriented and/or functional. And came with a lot of libraries. And 3D graphics engines. And physics engines.

Unless some independent game developer does something in a new language that other developers can't easily duplicate with their current ecosystem (not that it couldn't be done in C++), and it catches on, there's no incentive to do anything other than continue to evolve things in the most backwards compatible way. There are always more C++ programmers coming off the assembly lines who want nothing more than to work on games.

toadpipe

17 years agodiscuss

This is really tempting, but my guess is that the answer is going to be no. Users want something that just works, and they would probably rather dig through a pile of stuff to find that one thing that just works rather than script it themselves. Elegant solution > pile of features > elegant scripting > source. Or you can do it all, like Excel. Even Word has scripting.

I think ahoyhere has alluded to the reason why the pile of features tends to win, and that is because it is better at leveraging the economies of scale in the shrinkwrap software business. It is so cheap to distribute software that you are much better off building for the mass audience. Now the hot thing is webapps which do not scale nearly as well (but avoid most of the junk that comes with shrinkwrap scaling, like having to deal with a strange machine and a crappy OS that deluges the end user in spyware, or pushing updates to users you don't know much about), so there is more incentive to meet the needs of a niche audience. And Apple is having some success sort of splitting the difference (vertical integration from the hardware up, and attempting to exert more discipline on developers to increase quality, all at the expense of distributing software to mass audiences). Microsoft, of course, is still in a pretty dominant position from exploiting this scaling to the max when IBM so graciously made the hardware into a commodity mass market item.

So far, the most successful web app (Google) is the one which has made web app discovery scale like nothing else (every page with useful content on it is a web app - code, data, it's all the same). The brilliance of Google is that it captured a mass end user market with a minimal user interface. They did it with math (maximal leverage of plain text queries plus the structure of the web, and similarly with ads which have simple interfaces at both ends and are backed with sophisticated algorithms), and scaling by imposing unusual amounts of internal discipline on the best developers they can get (and they can get pretty good ones). All this just to get to a position where they might be able to compete with Microsoft as a platform, and unseat the power of shrinkwrap scaling. I think the only way they can do it is by attracting a lot more developers than Microsoft, and the only way they can do that is by taking a lot of Microsoft's developers away. They might be able to do it, but there are all sorts of challenges. My guess is that what will happen is that they will draw a lot of developers away from Microsoft, and in the process they will lose a lot of their external cultural influence as far as being able to promote clean interfaces. Web apps will be even more dominated by the everything in one place aggregators (exemplified by Amazon and eBay) than they are now.

The problem with nice UIs is that there just aren't enough good developers to make it scale.

toadpipe

17 years agodiscuss

In my opinion, a lot of The Software Problem(tm) can be traced back to this tendency to underestimate the difficulty of using magic black box X. Maybe this is because most programmers never try to make a real magic black box X that will be used by random person Y in random situation Z themselves. If they did, they might have a little more respect for the fact that it's really fucking hard, the interface will inevitably have all sorts of corners, and the result is never going to be as magic as you would like.

toadpipe

17 years agodiscuss

So now that I've voted up every plinkplonk comment, my comment is that most people obviously haven't read the book. The post is pretty good, but the book is better. You should read it.

If you do read the book, you will see that the discussion begins with Norvig saying that he thinks one of the most important things is being able to keep everything in your head at once. Extra tools come in when the problem gets too big to do that, but here's the key: he saw right from the very beginning that the Sudoku problem could be solved with two tools from the AI toolbox. In other words, he saw the entire solution immediately, and it was never too large to fit easily in his head.

Seibel's analysis fine as far as it goes, but he misses the really important thing here, which is that this is not just an example of someone recognizing a problem that they already knew how to solve. It's a case of someone with the mental tools that allow them to dramatically reduce the (apparent) complexity and size of a very large class of problems that happens to include Sudoku. Seibel takes a bottom up look at the data structures Norvig used, but this can be misleading because they weren't designed bottom up, they were designed all at once. You simply cannot do that unless you have the necessary training in abstract thinking (read: mathematics/formal logic/language development/ai techniques/etc).

No amount of code centric techniques or tools will ever make up for not having these tools. There will always be (relatively trivial) problems that you will never be able solve without them, because you will not be able to fit everything in your head and your ability to reason about the problem will be crippled by that. Debates about TDD are not even wrong, because they are at the wrong level of abstraction. Spending any significant amount of time discussing it is premature optimization.

toadpipe

17 years agodiscuss

The point is that some people are too blinded by their ideology to even come up with a crude solution, let alone an elegant one.

toadpipe

17 years agodiscuss

Per Minsky, big brains are a liability until an innovation comes along that allows them to be used properly. IMHO big disks, along with big RAM and big processing cores (now core arrays) are liabilities because we don't know how to use them. Because we don't know how to use them, we fill them with garbage and complexity, like big brains before whatever innovation enabled the human brain, and all that capacity becomes dead weight with a huge amount of inertia. A liability.

Few things depreciate in value faster than source code. Forgetting revisions is useless if the memory is just going to be filled with more code. The prospect of petabytes of bloated, broken, and rotting code in any sort of repository is frankly disgusting to me. We are drowning under the weight of programmers who think the product of their typing (not so much thinking) is so special that it needs to be preserved forever more. I pity the new yosefks, the debuggers of tomorrow, I really do.

toadpipe

17 years agodiscuss

It's quite interesting to think about how much I've learned about nature socially, vs. directly. It seems clear that I learn almost everything socially, and everything I learn directly is probably available socially, probably at a lower cost. In other words, nothing I learn directly is really new, and what is new could very easily be predicted from models - it's hardly even information in the Shannon sense. I'm a university student, but it's not clear to me that I've ever even met anyone who learned anything new themselves either (about the environment). Almost the entire information processing capacity of the species seems to be devoted to internal processing of information and the modeling of internal behavior. It seems like there's no other way it could be, given the sheer number of people, but it does make you wonder how far that can go.

Listening to people like Gwynne Dyer talk about global warming makes it sound like the problem is not so much that we don't have enough people tracking the environment, or even that we don't propagate the information fast enough, but that the sheer inertia of the system makes it so that changes can't be made fast enough to avoid major shakeups.

toadpipe

17 years agodiscuss

Individual members of populations of every species alter their environments. Humans may do it more deliberately, but as either civilizations or as a species as a whole it's not clear to me that we're all that much better at anticipating and avoiding environmental disasters than other species; we just do everything at a larger scale (more massive individuals, across the whole planet) than any other single species. Not necessarily longer time scales though - that remains to be seen.

toadpipe

17 years agodiscuss

Of course the problem is that 99% of non-conformists are wrong, but all of them believe that they are right, some of them are really dangerous, and some of them are work very hard to be persuasive. Society is a balancing act of incorporating as much diversity as possible without losing structural integrity. Most people disagree with each other about whether we need more diversity or more conformity, to what extent we are unbalanced, and pretty much everything else at any given point in time.

toadpipe

17 years agodiscuss

Exactly. Evolution is basically a filtering process that records and compresses memories of past changes to the environment, along with mechanisms for communicating those memories as widely as possible and incorporating the communications of other agents. The better agents are at this, the more resources can be marshaled for recording, compressing, and communicating memories. For this reason larger and more tightly coupled agents are favored, but the complexity of maintaining homeostasis increases with agent size, and increasing size also serves to move agents into new selection environments. In other words, an agent's own actions may cause their fitness function to change in ways that are difficult to predict from past experience of the environment alone, and this may become a bigger problem as agents increase in size. At some scale, agents who do not add models of themselves to the fitness search space may be at a disadvantage. If they are social agents in a society of agents similar to themselves, and if they already model other agents, creating self-models may not be much of a leap.

Or at least that's my half-assed theory. Guess I should probably read up on Robert Axelrod's stuff now. Thanks for the pointer.

toadpipe

17 years agodiscuss

So you're saying that "they weren't right for their jobs" is wrong. What about the "burned out" part? What do you know about why they left? Did they just move on the more interesting things, like so many startup people do?

Genuinely curious here, as I don't know, or know much about, any of the people involved.

toadpipe

17 years agodiscuss

You are standing on the shoulders of people who design languages, vs. standing on the shoulders of people who write libraries. Languages are much closer to the central concepts in computing, and the people who work on them have done a lot more careful and general thinking, in general, than what goes into libraries. Libraries are great to build on, but only so long as they are almost exactly what you need already, because you can't change them to any significant degree.

There's a reason why all the best languages (lisp/forth/etc) are language building languages, not library building languages. A library building language is just a DSL that you can't modify. You can write anything in it, but so what? You can write anything in Brainfuck too - that's what the term "Turing tarpit" was coined to describe.

When someone tells you what their favorite language is, you should ask what that person does. If all they do is write web apps, they probably like their language because it is a good web app DSL. Nothing wrong with that, except that it doesn't scale (webapps scale, but they do it by scaling the database, not the language).

toadpipe

17 years agodiscuss

It depends on your priorities. Many U.S. families move long distances every few years, and many young single people move significantly more often than that. Certain jobs can require someone to move almost daily. Part of it is because people want to, and part of it is because the culture makes it easy by providing technology that enables it. My guess is that the future will probably trend towards even more flexibility in mobility, not less (especially in the U.S.), although there will always be many people who want to settle down.

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