6 ms·

The "Do Not Speculate!" idea reminds me of the practice of delivering "the kitchen sink" when only a small program that does one thing would suffice. It remind

The "Do Not Speculate!" idea reminds me of the practice of delivering "the kitchen sink" when only a small program that does one thing would suffice. It reminds me of when, e.g., a 1990s-2000s Windows user needed a small program that does one thing, and in order to get it, the download from Microsoft was an installer with hundreds of megabytes of unneeded binary files. It was not possible to download only the single program, which was no more than 1-2MB in size. It reminds me of this quote: "The problem with object-oriented languages is they've got all this implicit environment that they carry around with them. You wanted a banana but what you got was a gorilla holding the banana and the entire jungle." - Joe Armstrong It reminds me of bloat, of giving users things they do not need. A problem that continues to this day. Instead of bloated, complex UEFI, I wish something like OpenBIOS/OpenFirmware/SmartFirmware/OpenBOOT would be available for today's hardware. I have played around with fgen on i386 and read some of the history. They even provided courses on how to write drivers. Besides OLPC, why did this not catch on? IMO, Forth is the most elegant and flexible language for initializing hardware.

com2kid 9y ago
> It reminds me of when, e.g., a 1990s-2000s Windows user needed a small program that does one thing, and in order to get it, the download from Microsoft was an installer with hundreds of megabytes of unneeded binary files. It was not possible to download only the single program, which was no more than 1-2MB in size. That might have been more to do with how hard publishing code to the web was back then, an internal process problem, which discouraged tiny stand alone exes from being put online.
- woodrowbarlow 9y ago
  i don't buy it. dpkg was released in 1994, and that was designed to tame the nest of people passing around small executables on the internet.
  - com2kid 9y ago
    > i don't buy it. dpkg was released in 1994, and that was designed to tame the nest of people passing around small executables on the internet. The problem is corporate policy. In the yee old days, publishing content to MSDN was not easy. Bill Gate's rant[0] on this topic gives some insight. Grabbing small EXEs is now a lot easier. See: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/ https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/ [0]http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/2008/06/24/full-text-an-epic-bill-gates-e-mail-rant/ http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/2008/06/24/full-text-an-...
    - ryandrake 9y ago
      I knew which rant that was going to be before I even clicked on the link. Great memo. Really refreshing Software companies need leadership who actually dogfood the software they make and who care enough to rant when quality, usability, performance, etc. has gone to shit. Too many seem to simply have their noses in their competitors' feature checklists, so their E-mails are all "Company X has Feature Y. Why can't we have Feature Y??"
  - posterboy 9y ago
    designed to facilitate, rather
- kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
  It has always been possible. Sysinternals was doing it 20 years ago. The catch is you had to build with Win32 and not the framework du jour.
  - Shorel 9y ago
    wxWidgets has very low overhead. I think I have done some stuff that's also 1-2MB and much easier to code than plain Win32.
primeblue 9y ago
Reminds me of LibreOffice doh!
HumanDrivenDev 9y ago
> It reminds me of this quote: "The problem with object-oriented languages is they've got all this implicit environment that they carry around with them. You wanted a banana but what you got was a gorilla holding the banana and the entire jungle." - Joe Armstrong What Joe Armstrong (who I admire) complains about is actually what I love about OO languages. And for me that's the true essence of what OO is, and how it differs from non-OO. People keep trying to frame OO in terms of mutability (completely orthogonal) or C++/Java coding practices (C++ doesn't define OO because it has objects, anymore than it defines FP because it has lambdas). The real difference, the real paradigm shift is in data + functions vs objects. And I maintain that objects are more powerful and better idea than data + functions. The banana can't be peeled without the gorillas opposable thumbs.
- throwaway7645 9y ago
  I'd love to see if in 50 years we're closer to Smalltalk, Haskell, or something completely different. I'd love to say something radically different, but I have a feeling static types will continue to increase in popularity. No real evidence, just a gut feeling. Thanks for posting your feeling on OO. In some ways I've always felt very restricted writing OO (even in Python), but learning Smalltalk is making me see it from an entirely different perspective.
  - HumanDrivenDev 9y ago
    > I'd love to see if in 50 years we're closer to Smalltalk, Haskell, or something completely different. I guess in my mind FP and OO are orthogonal. If I write an immutable object and I send it messages that are referentially transparent, am I not doing both? Would it help FP people if they thought of such objects as "a record of partially applied functions"? So I hope both. I'd love if there was a statically typed, high level pure OO language without all the cruft of Scala or C#. Maybe I have to wait for the next programming fashion cycle for that to happen. > Thanks for posting your feeling on OO. In some ways I've always felt very restricted writing OO (even in Python), but learning Smalltalk is making me see it from an entirely different perspective. I often wonder if I need to coin a better term for "OO" for what I am talking about. Alan Kays whole schtick was that objects contained both data and procedures, but by combining them they became something new, and more than just the sum of their parts. That's the powerful idea to me. But language changes, and OO in 2017 just means "Java".
throwaway7645 9y ago
This is what I like about Rebol & Red...pity Rebol didn't catch on more. The full Rebol download is a single executable (no real install) and can build GUIs, and so much more in a very small amount of code.
- PeCaN 9y ago
  I'm always amazed when I see things like Red, with a 1MB executable with an interpreter, compiler, GUI, networking libraries, parsing libraries, and more all built in. Or the QNX demo disk back in the day. OS, GUI, web browser (with javascript), full clustering support, and more, on a single 1.44MB floppy.
  - throwaway7645 9y ago
    I've heard of the QNX OS...that seems magical.
- hdhzy 9y ago
  Not to mention Red can cross compile for multiple OSes and the parse dialect that is basically generalized, readable regular expressions. My personal theory why Rebol/Red didn't succeed in the mainstream is steep learning curve, it's hard to discover how to do things if you haven't already done some substantial programming work in it. While built-in help is good you need to know what you're looking for. (Delphi had better help in this matter, with examples etc.). By the way I wonder why Pecan's post is [dead], it doesn't seem to be violating any rule.
  - exikyut 9y ago
    Open it (click the duration), and click vouch. Arc has some (necessarily-)undocumented flagging code, and it frequently backfires. The worst-case scenario is when you open the account in question and every single comment is grey... it hurts to see. (In that case, the account itself has been flagged. Not quite the same as reddit's shadowbanning, but only technically not the same.) It's bittersweet that the moderation here is paid: there are AFAIK only two people (but don't quote me on that). There were some hazy plans to give some users fractionally elevated capabilities at some point, but it just hasn't happened yet.
astrobe_ 9y ago
"Do not speculate" or YAGNI is really difficult to do past a certain point. You have to vanquish your own FUD one piece at a time. Nobody really does that unless they are really forced to. Ignore the occasional statements in forum threads about how Forth is so powerful. Forth is not powerful. It is ugly, stupid and mean. Because of this, you simplify, simplify and simplify again, up to the project's specs if you can.
- progman 9y ago
  > Forth is not powerful. It is ugly, stupid and mean. That's a statement of someone who doesn't understand Forth. Of course, one can write ugly code easily. Any language with raw power (Asm, C, Forth, Ada) needs a disciplined developer to get beautiful and maintainable code. Forth code can be really beautiful if the vocabulary is well thought out. I consider Forth the best choice for tiny iOT devices, Firmware, and other essential things which can be kept simple and stupid, following the KISS principle which works very well in many cases. Our vastly proliferated software security problems come from complexity which developed by despising the KISS principle. Many developers didn't choose the simplest way, they chose the most convenient way. Now, we realize that keeping things simple and stupid is not that bad after all.
  - oneeyed 9y ago
    Forth is an amplifier. Bad programmers will write very bad programs, good programmers will write very good programs.
  - astrobe_ 9y ago
    I've written a standalone Forth system that could boot from a floppy and recompile itself. I've ported the core interpreter to C so I could use libraries. I've rewritten it using various threading techniques. Up to that point it was just toy systems because i never did something useful with those. Then I rewrote a Forth interpreter than would play really nice with C. That thing right now is around 30k/3KSLOC. This time I wrote various utilities I needed for my job using it. One of them is a log server that runs 24/7 that provides web interface, and I consider making it send emails... So I think I do understand Forth a little bit.

com2kid 9y ago

> It reminds me of when, e.g., a 1990s-2000s Windows user needed a small program that does one thing, and in order to get it, the download from Microsoft was an installer with hundreds of megabytes of unneeded binary files. It was not possible to download only the single program, which was no more than 1-2MB in size. That might have been more to do with how hard publishing code to the web was back then, an internal process problem, which discouraged tiny stand alone exes from being put online.

woodrowbarlow 9y ago
i don't buy it. dpkg was released in 1994, and that was designed to tame the nest of people passing around small executables on the internet.
- com2kid 9y ago
  > i don't buy it. dpkg was released in 1994, and that was designed to tame the nest of people passing around small executables on the internet. The problem is corporate policy. In the yee old days, publishing content to MSDN was not easy. Bill Gate's rant[0] on this topic gives some insight. Grabbing small EXEs is now a lot easier. See: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/ https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/ [0]http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/2008/06/24/full-text-an-epic-bill-gates-e-mail-rant/ http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/2008/06/24/full-text-an-...
  - ryandrake 9y ago
    I knew which rant that was going to be before I even clicked on the link. Great memo. Really refreshing Software companies need leadership who actually dogfood the software they make and who care enough to rant when quality, usability, performance, etc. has gone to shit. Too many seem to simply have their noses in their competitors' feature checklists, so their E-mails are all "Company X has Feature Y. Why can't we have Feature Y??"
- posterboy 9y ago
  designed to facilitate, rather
kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
It has always been possible. Sysinternals was doing it 20 years ago. The catch is you had to build with Win32 and not the framework du jour.
- Shorel 9y ago
  wxWidgets has very low overhead. I think I have done some stuff that's also 1-2MB and much easier to code than plain Win32.

primeblue 9y ago

Reminds me of LibreOffice doh!

HumanDrivenDev 9y ago

> It reminds me of this quote: "The problem with object-oriented languages is they've got all this implicit environment that they carry around with them. You wanted a banana but what you got was a gorilla holding the banana and the entire jungle." - Joe Armstrong What Joe Armstrong (who I admire) complains about is actually what I love about OO languages. And for me that's the true essence of what OO is, and how it differs from non-OO. People keep trying to frame OO in terms of mutability (completely orthogonal) or C++/Java coding practices (C++ doesn't define OO because it has objects, anymore than it defines FP because it has lambdas). The real difference, the real paradigm shift is in data + functions vs objects. And I maintain that objects are more powerful and better idea than data + functions. The banana can't be peeled without the gorillas opposable thumbs.

throwaway7645 9y ago
I'd love to see if in 50 years we're closer to Smalltalk, Haskell, or something completely different. I'd love to say something radically different, but I have a feeling static types will continue to increase in popularity. No real evidence, just a gut feeling. Thanks for posting your feeling on OO. In some ways I've always felt very restricted writing OO (even in Python), but learning Smalltalk is making me see it from an entirely different perspective.
- HumanDrivenDev 9y ago
  > I'd love to see if in 50 years we're closer to Smalltalk, Haskell, or something completely different. I guess in my mind FP and OO are orthogonal. If I write an immutable object and I send it messages that are referentially transparent, am I not doing both? Would it help FP people if they thought of such objects as "a record of partially applied functions"? So I hope both. I'd love if there was a statically typed, high level pure OO language without all the cruft of Scala or C#. Maybe I have to wait for the next programming fashion cycle for that to happen. > Thanks for posting your feeling on OO. In some ways I've always felt very restricted writing OO (even in Python), but learning Smalltalk is making me see it from an entirely different perspective. I often wonder if I need to coin a better term for "OO" for what I am talking about. Alan Kays whole schtick was that objects contained both data and procedures, but by combining them they became something new, and more than just the sum of their parts. That's the powerful idea to me. But language changes, and OO in 2017 just means "Java".

throwaway7645 9y ago

This is what I like about Rebol & Red...pity Rebol didn't catch on more. The full Rebol download is a single executable (no real install) and can build GUIs, and so much more in a very small amount of code.

PeCaN 9y ago
I'm always amazed when I see things like Red, with a 1MB executable with an interpreter, compiler, GUI, networking libraries, parsing libraries, and more all built in. Or the QNX demo disk back in the day. OS, GUI, web browser (with javascript), full clustering support, and more, on a single 1.44MB floppy.
- throwaway7645 9y ago
  I've heard of the QNX OS...that seems magical.
hdhzy 9y ago
Not to mention Red can cross compile for multiple OSes and the parse dialect that is basically generalized, readable regular expressions. My personal theory why Rebol/Red didn't succeed in the mainstream is steep learning curve, it's hard to discover how to do things if you haven't already done some substantial programming work in it. While built-in help is good you need to know what you're looking for. (Delphi had better help in this matter, with examples etc.). By the way I wonder why Pecan's post is [dead], it doesn't seem to be violating any rule.
- exikyut 9y ago
  Open it (click the duration), and click vouch. Arc has some (necessarily-)undocumented flagging code, and it frequently backfires. The worst-case scenario is when you open the account in question and every single comment is grey... it hurts to see. (In that case, the account itself has been flagged. Not quite the same as reddit's shadowbanning, but only technically not the same.) It's bittersweet that the moderation here is paid: there are AFAIK only two people (but don't quote me on that). There were some hazy plans to give some users fractionally elevated capabilities at some point, but it just hasn't happened yet.

astrobe_ 9y ago

"Do not speculate" or YAGNI is really difficult to do past a certain point. You have to vanquish your own FUD one piece at a time. Nobody really does that unless they are really forced to. Ignore the occasional statements in forum threads about how Forth is so powerful. Forth is not powerful. It is ugly, stupid and mean. Because of this, you simplify, simplify and simplify again, up to the project's specs if you can.

progman 9y ago
> Forth is not powerful. It is ugly, stupid and mean. That's a statement of someone who doesn't understand Forth. Of course, one can write ugly code easily. Any language with raw power (Asm, C, Forth, Ada) needs a disciplined developer to get beautiful and maintainable code. Forth code can be really beautiful if the vocabulary is well thought out. I consider Forth the best choice for tiny iOT devices, Firmware, and other essential things which can be kept simple and stupid, following the KISS principle which works very well in many cases. Our vastly proliferated software security problems come from complexity which developed by despising the KISS principle. Many developers didn't choose the simplest way, they chose the most convenient way. Now, we realize that keeping things simple and stupid is not that bad after all.
- oneeyed 9y ago
  Forth is an amplifier. Bad programmers will write very bad programs, good programmers will write very good programs.
- astrobe_ 9y ago
  I've written a standalone Forth system that could boot from a floppy and recompile itself. I've ported the core interpreter to C so I could use libraries. I've rewritten it using various threading techniques. Up to that point it was just toy systems because i never did something useful with those. Then I rewrote a Forth interpreter than would play really nice with C. That thing right now is around 30k/3KSLOC. This time I wrote various utilities I needed for my job using it. One of them is a log server that runs 24/7 that provides web interface, and I consider making it send emails... So I think I do understand Forth a little bit.