TIL: First patch of history
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Well, now it makes sense.
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Where do the monkeys come in?
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I knew this in abstract, but I'd never seen one before.
COOL.
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Always shocked at how many programmers have so little knowledge of the history of their field.
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Always shocked at how many programmers have so little knowledge of the history of their field.
Everyone who drives a car should know how a crank starter works.
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Everyone who drives a car should know how a crank starter works.
No; but I think that everybody who designs cars should.
Programmers are the people who define what computers look and act like. If these people don't know history, there's no "standing on the shoulders of giants" phenomena, which is one of the reasons this field is so lousy at the moment.
You see Google engineers re-implementing bad ideas that Microsoft engineers tried and failed back in 1999, with apparently no self-awareness at all that it's already been determined to be a bad idea. But hey, they were all 11 years old back in 1999, why would they go back and read information about those dinosaur computers? They just want to be 1337 Lunix hackers with their 1337 1985-esque Lunix tools on their 1337 1970s Lunix OS!
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Always shocked at how many programmers have so little knowledge of the history of their field.
I find such knowledge largely irrelevant. I do know the history of how we got to where we are - I just find that it doesn't provide any real relevance.
For example, do people care about why bugs are actually called bugs? Does it matter? As long as you know what is meant by the term, does it matter if you know the history of it?
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That's totally bullshit.
You're not a better mechanic for knowing who invented the term "piston".
You're not a better architect for knowing who coined the term "concrete".
You're not a better electrician for knowing which elements the first light bulb used.
You're not a better electronic engineer for knowing the resistance of the first transistor.
You're not a better MD for knowing why a vaccine is called a vaccine.
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You're not a better mechanic for knowing who invented the term "piston".
Maybe.
But you're a fucking awful mechanic if you "invent" a piston in 2014 and show absolutely zero signs of knowing it ever existed before. Which is exactly what Google's doing in my little example up there.
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You do realize that not all software is done by developers having an idea, right? Specially in the big corporate, engineers are basically given an idea for a product they ought to build, like it or not.
BTW, what is that thing you're talking about that Google is re-implementing?
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do people care about why bugs are actually called bugs? Does it matter? As long as you know what is meant by the term, does it matter if you know the history of it?
No, but you gain an evolutionary advantage by knowing why Alt-Space brings up the universal menu in Windows.
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BTW, what is that thing you're talking about that Google is re-implementing?
Every awful UI decision in the history of computing.From a purely technical standpoint, they do alright. Except for the creepy Javascript-as-the-assembly-language-of-the-internet brain worms. Is anyone could actually initiate a change to something less abjectly terrible, it's Google. But they won't. Instead they're wasting time with stuff that compiles INTO Javascript.
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Um... did you forget Dart?
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Um... did you forget Dart?
Did they make Chrome support Dart natively? No? Then it's just yet another language that compiles into JS. And thus… Meh.
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Always shocked at how many programmers have so little knowledge of the history of their field.
Think of it this way: if you do have a knowledge of the past, you've got a huge treasure trove of ideas to raid for when you're setting out to do things right, and that's an advantage to you.
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BTW, Monkeys came from Guerrillas. That's where the monkeys come from. It's as bad a pun as it is an idea.
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Did they make Chrome support Dart natively? No? Then it's just yet another language that compiles into JS. And thus… Meh.
Compilation to JS is more of a sideline, that wasn't the intention behind it originally, it was supposed to be a JS-killer. The fact it compiles to JS is because like most Google things, it ended up being an also-ran.
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ended up being an also-ran
Lots of stuff ends up like that, to be fair. You've got to occupy your niche better than the alternatives (bearing mind the weight of incumbency).
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So not actually deployed except to a few interested hackers? Definitely meh. It's about at the level of a rare browser plugin or something. At best.
Since it can actually be implemented by targeting the same engine that they're already shipping, all they'd be doing is moving the compilation to the client side. No greater security implications than before. All that is changing is the format of the code being sent. No confidence in their own stuff.
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Blakeyrat has a point, even if it's not really the same thing the OP was about.
For example, I used to think a lot about how programming and scripting could be improved. One day I found this online book: Watch What I Do: Programming by Demonstration. Turns out a lot of interesting ideas had already been tried in the 80s. Yet most of them are virtually unknown today.
(also, just because you've tried something once and it failed doesn't mean it's a bad idea. What's important is to know why it failed. Maybe your implementation just sucked)
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Javascript-as-the-assembly-language-of-the-internet brain worms
To be fair, it's about as unmaintainable and undebuggable once it reaches more than a few hundred LOC.
Or maybe I just suck.
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It's as bad a pun
Which completely fails if, like me, you tend to read that word with a mental Spanish pronunciation.
Filed under: Pun? What pun? Oh, if you pronounce it like a Murican.
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TIL: "Too Many Puppies" Primus, 1990 has an eponymous children's book, "Too Many Puppies" Random House, 2014.
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Goddamit
fbmac
