On 10/2/2012 12:19 PM, Paul Homer wrote:
It always seems to be that each new generation of programmers goes
straight for the low-hanging fruit, ignoring that most of it has
already been solved many times over. Meanwhile the real problems
remain. There has been progress, but over the couple of decades I've
been working, I've always felt that it was '2 steps forward, 1.999999
steps back".
it depends probably on how one measures things, but I don't think it is
quite that bad.
more like, I suspect, a lot has to do with pain-threshold:
people will clean things up so long as they are sufficiently painful,
but once this is achieved, people no longer care.
the rest is people mostly recreating the past, often poorly, usually
under the idea "this time we will do it right!", often without looking
into what the past technologies did or did not do well engineering-wise.
or, they end up trying for "something different", but usually this turns
out to be recreating something which already exists and turns out to
typically be a dead-end (IOW: where many have gone before, and failed).
often the people will think "why has no one done it before this way?"
but, usually they have, and usually it didn't turn out well.
so, a blind "rebuild starting from nothing" probably wont achieve much.
like, it requires taking account of history to improve on it
(classifying various options and design choices, ...).
it is like trying to convince other language/VM designers/implementers
that expecting the end programmer to have to write piles of boilerplate
to interface with C is a problem which should be addressed, but people
just go and use terrible APIs usually based on "registering" the C
callbacks with the VM (or they devise something like JNI or JNA and
congratulate themselves, rather than being like "this still kind of sucks").
though in a way it sort of makes sense:
many language designers end up thinking like "this language will replace
C anyways, why bother to have a half-decent FFI?...". whereas it is
probably a minority position to design a language and VM with the
attitude "C and C++ aren't going away anytime soon".
but, at least I am aware that most of my stuff is poor imitations of
other stuff, and doesn't really do much of anything actually original,
or necessarily even all that well, but at least I can try to improve on
things (like, rip-off and refine).
even, yes, as misguided and wasteful as it all may seem sometimes...
in a way it can be distressing though when one has created something
that is lame and ugly, but at the same time is aware of the various
design tradeoffs that has caused them to design it that way (like, a
cleaner and more elegant design could have been created, but might have
suffered in another way).
in a way, it is a slightly different experience I suspect...
Paul.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*From:* John Pratt <[email protected]>
*To:* [email protected]
*Sent:* Tuesday, October 2, 2012 11:21:59 AM
*Subject:* [fonc] How it is
Basically, Alan Kay is too polite to say what
we all know to be the case, which is that things
are far inferior to where they could have been
if people had listened to what he was saying in the 1970's.
Inefficient chip architectures, bloated frameworks,
and people don't know at all.
It needs a reboot from the core, all of it, it's just that
people are too afraid to admit it. New programming languages,
not aging things tied to the keyboard from the 1960's.
It took me 6 months to figure out how to write a drawing program
in cocoa, but a 16-year-old figured it out in the 1970's easily
with Smalltalk.
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