Software disenchantment
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@dkf said in Software disenchantment:
too limited even to use the C++ standard library
@topspin said in Software disenchantment:
Without touching the STL at all
STL isn't the same as the entire C++ standard library.
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@Magus said in Software disenchantment:
@pie_flavor He isn't saying anything remotely that strange. He is, as he always has been, advocating that we try to make things less bad, and make things easier for end-users, of which we are a part.
He wants everything to just be easy, but doesn't expect that to just happen. He wants us to try. That's what all the stuff he's been saying about ideals is about.
He's not @Gribnit . Pretty much anyone can understand what he's saying.
Oh, I can understand exactly what he's saying. That's part of the problem.
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@Gąska He's not entirely wrong about that, either. I've seen what he's talking about.
People are that elitist about programming, and that includes you sometimes, but the fact is most programming tasks aren't very hard, and things like Access and Power Apps do actually allow people to solve problems without us, and are therefore good things.
There will always be limitations to stuff like that, but easy tools that make it so you don't need programmers for every dumb little thing are worth having, and are almost entirely untapped. There's a lot that can still be done, but most developers would rather tinker with git, and will always claim that the CLI is the one true interface.
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@Magus said in Software disenchantment:
People are that elitist about programming, and that includes you sometimes, but the fact is most programming tasks aren't very hard, and things like Access and Power Apps do actually allow people to solve problems without us, and are therefore good things.
Yeah, and then doing all those easy tasks still results in crappy usability and he'll rant about the idiots not writing good software.
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@sockpuppet7 said in Software disenchantment:
@dkf said in Software disenchantment:
too limited even to use the C++ standard library
@topspin said in Software disenchantment:
Without touching the STL at all
STL isn't the same as the entire C++ standard library. to your , STL is not part of the C++ standard library at all. It's an independent library that heavily influenced the stdlib, nothing more. In common parlance, people say STL when they mean standard library.
What's the difference between "STL" and "C++ Standard Library"?
Someone brought this article to my attention that claims (I'm paraphrasing) the STL term is misused to refer to the entire C++ Standard Library instead of the parts that were taken from SGI STL. (...
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@Magus said in Software disenchantment:
He's not @Gribnit . Pretty much anyone can understand what he's saying.
I understand Gribnit..
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@boomzilla said in Software disenchantment:
@Magus said in Software disenchantment:
People are that elitist about programming, and that includes you sometimes, but the fact is most programming tasks aren't very hard, and things like Access and Power Apps do actually allow people to solve problems without us, and are therefore good things.
Yeah, and then doing all those easy tasks still results in crappy usability and he'll rant about the idiots not writing good software.
And it'll always be a kludgy 80% solution.
Which is perfectly fine if it helps the user to get something done right now, but it's the kind of stuff that ends up on the front-page when an entire organization's process starts to depend on some excel macro that the accountant hacked together 5 years ago.Most ordinary people who want the computer to "just do it already" are also not aware of edge cases of what they want. Should they ever run into them they make up an answer on the fly, because they've not thought of it before.
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@Magus said in Software disenchantment:
@Gąska He's not entirely wrong about that, either. I've seen what he's talking about.
You're doing a very similar thing to what he's doing that pisses me off. I gave you a list of things I think are bullshit, and you start talking about an unspecified "that" and pretend this addresses the entire list, up until someone calls you on that, after which you'll claim shoulder aliens because you never said "that" refers to the entire list - which is true because you never said what "that" refers to at all. And he does that all the time, no matter which topic we talk about. And then he cries that everyone is mad at him for no reason, and that saying that Blakey is an idiot became a meme around here.
People are that elitist about programming
Most aren't.
and that includes you sometimes
Not when I make design decisions about UI in the software I'm working on. And he claims that dev tools programmers make design decisions about UI that make software harder to use on purpose.
but the fact is most programming tasks aren't very hard
In isolation. The hardest thing about programming is putting all these "not very hard" pieces together in a way that works and doesn't become incomprehensible mess that has to be rewritten from scratch whenever you want to change something.
and things like Access and Power Apps do actually allow people to solve problems without us, and are therefore good things.
Agreed. But because of the scope, the problems these tools solve are completely different class of problems than "making tools" in general. I agree that many things can be done with simple user scripts, and making user scripts easy to make is worthwhile. I just disagree that the same applies to more complicated software, solving more complicated problems.
There's a lot that can still be done, but most developers would rather tinker with git, and will always claim that the CLI is the one true interface.
No, that's not how most developers think. Many, but not most. Not even in Open Source world. In fact, the only people who think like that are Vim users, who are a small minority everywhere except some programming forums. Most developers want easy tools and want to make easy tools. Of them, most lack skill to do so, but that's irrelevant to this discussion.
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@Gąska said in Software disenchantment:
You're doing a very similar thing to what he's doing that pisses me off. I gave you a list of things I think are bullshit, and you start talking about an unspecified "that" and pretend this addresses the entire list, up until someone calls you on that, after which you'll claim shoulder aliens because you never said "that" refers to the entire list - which is true because you never said what "that" refers to at all. And he does that all the time, no matter which topic we talk about. And then he cries that everyone is mad at him for no reason, and that saying that Blakey is an idiot became a meme around here.
Yeah, yeah, and I explained what I meant as I went along.
@Gąska said in Software disenchantment:
No, that's not how most developers think. Many, but not most. Not even in Open Source world. In fact, the only people who think like that are Vim users, who are a small minority everywhere except some programming forums. Most developers want easy tools and want to make easy tools. Of them, most lack skill to do so, but that's irrelevant to this discussion.
You don't know many developers. I've seen many fall down the Unix hole.
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@Kian said in Software disenchantment:
@sockpuppet7 said in Software disenchantment:
@dkf said in Software disenchantment:
too limited even to use the C++ standard library
@topspin said in Software disenchantment:
Without touching the STL at all
STL isn't the same as the entire C++ standard library. to your , STL is not part of the C++ standard library at all. It's an independent library that heavily influenced the stdlib, nothing more. In common parlance, people say STL when they mean standard library. to your 's : STL began life as a proposal presented to C++ standarization committee, which was approved to be included in the standard. Because the standard wasn't a thing yet for quite a while, the proposal was published independently of the standard in 1994, and implementations started to spring up. In the meantime, C++ standard was finished, and it included entirety of STL with only minor changes as part of C++ standard library. So while there were STL implementations separate from C++ standard library, saying that STL isn't part of C++ standard library is just plain wrong.
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@Gąska When you're explaining your flame war arguments to a third party it's a clear sign that you're both going way too far. Just stop it.
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@Magus said in Software disenchantment:
@Gąska said in Software disenchantment:
No, that's not how most developers think. Many, but not most. Not even in Open Source world. In fact, the only people who think like that are Vim users, who are a small minority everywhere except some programming forums. Most developers want easy tools and want to make easy tools. Of them, most lack skill to do so, but that's irrelevant to this discussion.
You don't know many developers. I've seen many fall down the Unix hole.
Probably because it solved their problem that they couldn't solve otherwise. Also known as using software that's easiest to use.
Our entire programming ecosystem is thoroughly fucked up, incredibly overcomplicated and overly reliant on broken half-assed CLI tools. But none of this is because it was designed to be hard. More often than not, it's the opposite - it's because software was designed to be easy for everyone - or rather, because the design goal was to be easy for everyone, but the developers lacked skill to really make it so, and ended up with PHP.
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@sockpuppet7 said in Software disenchantment:
@Gąska When you're explaining your flame war arguments to a third party it's a clear sign that you're both going way too far.
Technically, all discussions between more than 2 people go through the phase of explaining arguments to a third party. So going too far is kind of normal for an online forum.
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@Gąska said in Software disenchantment:
Our entire programming ecosystem is thoroughly fucked up, incredibly overcomplicated and overly reliant on broken half-assed CLI tools. But none of this is because it was designed to be hard. More often than not, it's the opposite - it's because software was designed to be easy for everyone - or rather, because the design goal was to be easy for everyone, but the developers lacked skill to really make it so, and ended up with PHP.
There are things that are clumsy in a GUI, like dealing with a directory tree with which you are familiar. It's often a lot easier to use the CLI with good autocomplete to deal with those sorts of tasks.
A mini-task that I do a lot is getting a list of changed files (
svn st -q) then doing something with maybe just a few of them, which means typing something (e.g.,svn diff) and then double clicking on the files I'm interested in then middle clicking to put them into my current command. So really, it's not pure CLI but the CLI gives me flexibility and power that aren't easy to get in a GUI.
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@Jaloopa said in Software disenchantment:
An accountant shouldn't need to know software development to make a tool to help them with their accountancy. An architect shouldn't have to know about software development to be able to make an architecture tool.
IOW, a mechanic should be able to create an engine from scratch, no needs for a mechanical engineer
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@blakeyrat said in Software disenchantment:
Even if it took him his entire lifetime, the answer is still "sure why not?"
Because at that point, he's no longer an architect making a tool to help him do architecture stuff. He's now a career software developer — with no knowledge of software development — reinventing a wheel that's already been made and refined by a team of people who do know about software development. The architect has wasted his time and training doing — badly — a not-architecture thing that someone has already done better.
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@blakeyrat Sounds good. Build some.
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@boomzilla said in Software disenchantment:
@blakeyrat said in Software disenchantment:
@Kian said in Software disenchantment:
If I want a chair, I don't expect to be able to create one starting with no knowledge of woodworking to reasonable final product in a matter of months.
First of all, it doesn't take months to learn enough woodworking to make a quality chair, most people did it during one semester of middle school.
Really? I remember people struggling to make birdhouses that didn't have gaps all over the place.
I sure as heck didn't learn enough woodworking in middle school to build a chair, much less a quality one. We made a checker/chessboard, which consisted of a square of plywood, cutting grooves in one side to create a grid, staining alternate squares, filling the grooves with spackle, sanding it, and varnishing it. Much simpler than making a chair. I never finished it.I've gone on to become a passable carpenter. But I didn't learn it in a few months. And if I were to build a chair now, it would be sturdy and functional. It would also be plain, utilitarian, uncomfortable, and ugly, because, despite a lifetime of woodworking, I've never learned to make a quality chair.
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@topspin said in Software disenchantment:
And it'll always be a kludgy 80% solution.
Which is perfectly fine if it helps the user to get something done right now, but it's the kind of stuff that ends up on the front-page when an entire organization's process starts to depend on some excel macro that the accountant hacked together 5 years ago.Now you’re just “Excel-shaming” me.
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@boomzilla said in Software disenchantment:
@Kian said in Software disenchantment:
The problem is, most people don't care about most things. If they cared about development, they would probably be developers already.
I'm not convinced that all or even most people are even really capable of it.
Some people seem to be incapable of logical thought, or at least of thinking of a task as a logical sequence of steps and decisions. Think of your tax form: If line 17 is greater than line 18, subtract line 18 from line 17 and write the result on line 19; otherwise, write 0 on line 19. Some people can barely follow those instructions when they're already written out in front of them; their minds just don't work that way. Forget them ever managing to think up such simple instructions themselves. They may be wonderful people otherwise, maybe even highly knowledgeable in some domain, but logic just isn't their strong suit.
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@Gąska said in Software disenchantment:
In fact, the only people who think like that are Vim users
No. Vim users don't think like that, either.
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@HardwareGeek then why are they using Vim?
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@Gąska said in Software disenchantment:
or rather, because the design goal was to be easy for everyone, but the developers lacked skill to really make it so, and ended up with PHP.
I'd say often the goal was to be useful to the person who wrote it, and it was easy enough for him, because he understood what it was doing and how. Then somebody else with the same problem saw it was useful and started using it; it's not quite as easy for her, because she doesn't have the depth of knowledge, but it solves her problem, and it's easy enough. Then somebody else with a similar but slightly different problem discovered it; it's harder, because he's using it to do something a little different, but it works, and it's not too difficult.
More people start using it in ways that get farther and farther from the author's original assumptions. They start asking for features that he never intended it to do, and some of them don't integrate smoothly with the program's workflow, making it harder for everybody to use. And so on. The more popular it becomes, the more diverse the user base, the more their usages and workflows diverge from the original assumptions, the more difficult it becomes to use.
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@blakeyrat the kind of software that allowed people to make stuff without knowing what code even is has existed and proliferated through the '90s. Most of it died out. You mentioned Access. I'll provide a few examples I'm familiar with. For starters? Klik & Play. Guess what? The problem is that making software is hard even when it's "easy". The demo games were sometimes "oooh cool!" but it was really hard work anyway even while you didn't need to know any code at all. So you usually stopped at a much lower complexity level. There were tonnes of free Klik & Play games on the net, back then. Regardless of whether they sucked or not (they did), they were basically all the same. Another example: MS Frontpage. What happened to it? I don't think anybody ever uses even Dreamweaver or whatever the market provides today. And guess what, the web pages were all clumsy, untidy, ugly, and despite all the customisation, they all looked the same and eventually, after a while, people see something professionally made, which is nice, tidy, sleek and most of all it's not locked into the "easy" pattern those tools direct you towards, and they lose motivation, also because a very large part of programming is not really intellectually stimulating, it's "look this function call up in the documentation (usually of a yuge library so that you're not learning to code, you're really learning the library), see what arguments it takes and what you need to do to provide those arguments to it" (it's tedious to write this down already).
Easy and rapid development is a sham, the truth is that regular people do not want to code, have no desire to do so, and if they do, they either become actual programmers (and maybe learn to love all the '80s stuff you love to hate, for whatever reason you may think this happens) or they lose interest.
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@Gąska said in Software disenchantment:
@HardwareGeek then why are they using Vim?
Because they haven't figured out how to exit it yet.
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@boomzilla said in Software disenchantment:
Either you have strong AI (which may not even be possible)
I think it is possible but we don't know how much computing resources it will require to do properly. Also, a strong AI might decide that it prefers writing bad poetry about that sexy little printer down the hall.
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@topspin said in Software disenchantment:
I disagree with that.
You're welcome to disagree. We have proved that you're correct too, but you next need to write all the support libraries (especially for efficient fixed point math) so that actually writing the sorts of applications on that hardware that we do is possible. We've already got those for C. (The applications in question have real-time execution constraints and use quite a few interrupts too.) The result would be rather different from most sorts of C++ you're used to; no STL, no exceptions, no floating point, and not much chance to debug when things go wrong.
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@sockpuppet7 said in Software disenchantment:
STL isn't the same as the entire C++ standard library.
Yes, but virtually none of the C++ standard library works on our platform as-is. It's very much non-standard.
For example, memory allocation needs to know which zone it is being allocated from, and memory copies need to know the zones too in order to work out whether to use a DMA or not; get that wrong and you'll either run out of timer tick or you'll outright crash the core. Yes, that means that while the address space itself is flat, the memory itself isn't. (Also, the execution cost models are different to what most libraries are optimized for. You won't want to just take existing code and copy it over; you need to recheck.)
In our experience, the deep problems are usually at a level whether the differences between C and C++ are minimal (and where Rust or Go wouldn't really help much either). We use C because we already have the libraries for it and the user-code-level parts are fully debugged. The OS-level parts still have some nasty bugs in them, but changing language there would be merely a displacement activity and wouldn't fix those bugs at all.
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@Gąska said in Software disenchantment:
the only people who think like that are Vim users, who are a small minority everywhere except some programming forums
Don't forget the
edusers (all two of them, worldwide) who think that the vim users are a bunch of stupid weenies who need training wheels all the time.
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@sockpuppet7 said in Software disenchantment:
Company makes me use skype for business
If $company has full Office365 license for you, it probably includes Teams, which preserve history and allows uploading files (it actually uploads them to onedrive) and is generally closer to slack. It won't help against stupid secinfo policy though (and it is also Electron-packed bloatware that restarts on average twice a day for updates).
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@Bulb said in Software disenchantment:
restarts on average twice a day for updates
It's probably restarting to update the stupid secinfo policy as they find yet another site that they want to ban.
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@dkf said in Software disenchantment:
@Gąska said in Software disenchantment:
the only people who think like that are Vim users, who are a small minority everywhere except some programming forums
Don't forget the
edusers (all two of them, worldwide) who think that the vim users are a bunch of stupid weenies who need training wheels all the time.Oh, and butterflies! Don't forget butterflies!
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@pie_flavor said in Software disenchantment:
@Gąska said in Software disenchantment:
@HardwareGeek then why are they using Vim?
Because they haven't figured out how to exit it yet.
Gvim — Click the red X, like any other program.
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@HardwareGeek and that's why less people use GVim than Vim.
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@dkf said in Software disenchantment:
the software emulation library is HUGE, over a kilobyte
The embedded world really requires a vastly different perspective than normal programming. The constraints are unimaginable to someone who hasn't worked in that world.
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@HardwareGeek said in Software disenchantment:
The embedded world really requires a vastly different perspective than normal programming.
That's the truth. In that environment, you really do end up worrying about every byte and every CPU cycle.
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@HardwareGeek said in Software disenchantment:
@dkf said in Software disenchantment:
the software emulation library is HUGE, over a kilobyte
The embedded world really requires a vastly different perspective than normal programming. The constraints are unimaginable to someone who hasn't worked in that world.
Embedded programming is much more attractive to me than regular "general purpose" programming. Much closer to the hardware, much more design and forethought into it, things must be kept as small as possible.
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@Gąska said in Software disenchantment:
@HardwareGeek then why are they using Vim?
Because we're true developers. Lazy as hell and muscle memory works just fine.
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@admiral_p said in Software disenchantment:
@HardwareGeek said in Software disenchantment:
@dkf said in Software disenchantment:
the software emulation library is HUGE, over a kilobyte
The embedded world really requires a vastly different perspective than normal programming. The constraints are unimaginable to someone who hasn't worked in that world.
Embedded programming is much more attractive to me than regular "general purpose" programming. Much closer to the hardware, much more design and forethought into it, things must be kept as small as possible.
Obviously you've never tried embedded programming.
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And then there are those that have to communicate with embedded devices using higher-level languages. I've got, for example:
- Timezone offset encoded in the rightmost bits of the Month byte as +/- (i * 15) minutes
- Circular buffers with unrelated data in the middle
- Text for seven-segment displays encoded with 6 bits per character strings
- And something that doesn't seem like saving any bytes - counter value 0..10 that toggles 11 bits instead of counting normally (no, not a bit-mask - it's a counter)
I'm not complaining, mind you.
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@dcon said in Software disenchantment:
Because we're true developers. Lazy as hell and muscle memory works just fine.
I must be a true developer. Too lazy to learn Vim, I use Nano
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@Gąska said in Software disenchantment:
@admiral_p said in Software disenchantment:
@HardwareGeek said in Software disenchantment:
@dkf said in Software disenchantment:
the software emulation library is HUGE, over a kilobyte
The embedded world really requires a vastly different perspective than normal programming. The constraints are unimaginable to someone who hasn't worked in that world.
Embedded programming is much more attractive to me than regular "general purpose" programming. Much closer to the hardware, much more design and forethought into it, things must be kept as small as possible.
Obviously you've never tried embedded programming.
No, I haven't (plan to do so in the future) but the kind of
I have seen is much more tolerable to me. Mind you, when we're talking about "embedded" programming, I mean the uC stuff, DSP, the like. Today IoT crap passes as "embedded" but they're full-fledged computers, comparatively speaking, they run regular OSs (I mean, the quickest way to do IoT crap is slap Linux + Busybox or something similar onto it and call it a day), have full networking capabilities but don't receive anywhere near the amount of attention (and support) they deserve.
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@admiral_p said in Software disenchantment:
@Gąska said in Software disenchantment:
@admiral_p said in Software disenchantment:
@HardwareGeek said in Software disenchantment:
@dkf said in Software disenchantment:
the software emulation library is HUGE, over a kilobyte
The embedded world really requires a vastly different perspective than normal programming. The constraints are unimaginable to someone who hasn't worked in that world.
Embedded programming is much more attractive to me than regular "general purpose" programming. Much closer to the hardware, much more design and forethought into it, things must be kept as small as possible.
Obviously you've never tried embedded programming.
No, I haven't
Called it!
but the kind of
I have seen is much more tolerable to me.Are compilers generating invalid assembly tolerable to you? Are bugs in standard libraries resulting in totally different behavior than the standard says, tolerable to you? Because it's bread and butter of embedded folks.
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@admiral_p said in Software disenchantment:
Today IoT crap passes as "embedded" but they're full-fledged computers, comparatively speaking, they run regular OSs
And getting more fledged by the second.
We have a product with a load of sensors that the client wanted IoT'ified. I'd previously done a prototype portable video/payment-gateway thing using a RaspberryPi compute module, GStreamer, MPEG-DASH, a resilient file-system, and a remote NGINX server. So I suggested we could easily do it with a simple custom PCB with a RaspberryPi module and a COTS 4G USB dongle for a lot less than 100 USD.
Unfortunately, a Highly Paid Consultant got involved and the client now has Microsoft telling them they'll need an 800 USD IoT gateway running Windows 10 IoT, plus enough Azure compute and database provisioning to drive a small town.
The answers for why seem to be: 'RasberryPi is a toy' and 'We can send back ALL the data and dynamically reconfigure EVERYTHING'.
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@Gąska said in Software disenchantment:
@admiral_p said in Software disenchantment:
@Gąska said in Software disenchantment:
@admiral_p said in Software disenchantment:
@HardwareGeek said in Software disenchantment:
@dkf said in Software disenchantment:
the software emulation library is HUGE, over a kilobyte
The embedded world really requires a vastly different perspective than normal programming. The constraints are unimaginable to someone who hasn't worked in that world.
Embedded programming is much more attractive to me than regular "general purpose" programming. Much closer to the hardware, much more design and forethought into it, things must be kept as small as possible.
Obviously you've never tried embedded programming.
No, I haven't
Called it!
but the kind of
I have seen is much more tolerable to me.Are compilers generating invalid assembly tolerable to you? Are bugs in standard libraries resulting in totally different behavior than the standard says, tolerable to you? Because it's bread and butter of embedded folks.
It's more about the process. Embedded programming is badly suited to agile programming, everything is planned in advance, "ship now, fix later" is usually a no-no in the kind of embedded programming I'm thinking of, and there is little or no feature creep because you have very rigid constraints. Then of course those WTFs are infuriating, but it also depends on the tooling.
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@TimeBandit said in Software disenchantment:
@dcon said in Software disenchantment:
Because we're true developers. Lazy as hell and muscle memory works just fine.
I must be a true developer. Too lazy to learn Vim, I use Nano
When I first started, I didn't have a choice. I was doing QA on AT&T unix systems. Vi was the only real editor. Emacs wasn't even installed.
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@admiral_p said in Software disenchantment:
Embedded programming is badly suited to agile programming, everything is planned in advance, "ship now, fix later" is usually a no-no in the kind of embedded programming I'm thinking of, and there is little or no feature creep because you have very rigid constraints.
Literally everything you said in this sentence is wrong. It's kind of amazing, but also expected from someone who have zero knowledge of what they're talking about.
Then of course those WTFs are infuriating, but it also depends on the tooling.
Indeed it does. For example, embedded tooling is notorious for having insanely high WTF/min scores. And the ones that don't usually qualify as full-fledged computers, as you put it.
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@Gąska said in Software disenchantment:
@admiral_p said in Software disenchantment:
Embedded programming is badly suited to agile programming, everything is planned in advance, "ship now, fix later" is usually a no-no in the kind of embedded programming I'm thinking of, and there is little or no feature creep because you have very rigid constraints.
Literally everything you said in this sentence is wrong. It's kind of amazing, but also expected from someone who have zero knowledge of what they're talking about.
You are trying to tell me that in industrial embedded applications (you know, the ones where a bug can cost millions) you use agile programming, there is no planning, you adopt a very cavalier approach to testing and you add countless badly thought out features just because you can? Maybe with Elon Musk at the helm you do.
