Everything that is billed as easy (especially by programmer types) is anything but. They think that configuring/compiling/installing is so straightforward that anyone who can't do that might be one dumb person. Now don't get me wrong...I've been guilty of such BS myself but I've gotten better over the years...at least I think so. One of the reasons I'm a huge fan of python (lua,ruby,and perl too) and J (especially!!) is that I don't have to worry about all this configure/compile/install nonsense. Case in point: I'm attending a high performance cluster (HPC) workshop @ IU ( http://ittraining.iu.edu/training/Browse.aspx?workshop=HPCIU#workshop601) and we're spending all our time trying to learn directives of compilers (C/C++/fortran) to get some simplistic code to work on a cluster. How is this not brute force? I can do in 10 seconds (with 5 mins of coding it up) in numpy (let alone J/APL) what I learned (very basic matrix multiplication....dot product of 1000x1000....mind you) in 3 days in this workshop! And oh, the stuff I learned (2 more days to go) in this workshop cannot be applied to more than 3 dimensions. What?!?!? So depressing.
Sorry for ranting. On Wed, Jul 9, 2014 at 7:28 PM, Joe Bogner <[email protected]> wrote: > Software, written by people, will always have problems. The authors are > imperfect and so is the result > > I have stopped compiling things from scratch if I can avoid it. A > reasonably current version from a package is fine givem the opportunity > cost of building all dependencies. Some build systems are getting better > and some authors include links to dependencies in their repos. It is still > often too hard to make it worth it. > > It may not be as secure but I don't keep anything terribly sensitive on > those boxes. On any box, I keep my sensitive electronic data to a minimum. > I may have a ssn in a tax return pdf but everything else is stored online > at the provider (like banking data) > On Jul 9, 2014 6:51 PM, "Raul Miller" <[email protected]> wrote: > > > So... J has a lot of bugs that need fixing. > > > > Meanwhile, my laptop died, and I've been working on getting some > > others set up so I can work. > > > > Windows 8 is something of a mess, I've been working all day on getting > > a laptop with windows 8 up to the current specs. > > > > OpenBSD is something of a mess, I've been working all day on getting a > > browser running on it. > > > > It's kind of amazing that anything works, given how many problems there > > are. > > > > Let's take OpenBSD - I'm trying to build www/chromium there. But > > building pulseaudio I need to build python which needs tcl which needs > > some xml documentation which needs db/v4 which if I build it needs jdk > > which needs python, but there's another way of building it without jdk > > but that still fails because install wants to change directory to > > example.c which doesn't work, so everything fails, and now I have to > > unsnarl an install process which probably never worked because whoever > > is working on this stuff probably got their executables from someone > > else that doesn't use this rats nest of chained dependencies. > > > > With proprietary software, it's probably worse, but it's hidden so we > > can't see it. Except, the problems there are so enormous that after > > all day of applying patches to a factory clean version of windows 8, > > I'm just now getting to a point where it approximately works. > > > > What's amazing is that anyone can even talk about security, given this > > rats-nest of laziness, without breaking down laughing. > > > > Meh... > > > > Oh well, > > > > -- > > Raul > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
