4 ms·

It's really godawful. Software guys have no idea how good they have it. You have layers upon layers of closed source EDA tools and home-brew scripts, all buil

It's really godawful. Software guys have no idea how good they have it. You have layers upon layers of closed source EDA tools and home-brew scripts, all built around horribly abysmal "standards" like SystemVerilog, mostly cobbled together in TCL and Perl. For instance, the following sounds like a horrible joke, but it is real. In a real life, world-class company, port connections between modules are handled using a Perl script. This perl script invokes, I shit you not, an Emacs-Lisp Verilog parser, that scans your files to figure out what submodules you are instantiating, infers the ports that you want to connect, then injects a blob of connections directly into the source code file you were editing. The engineers at this company then commit the output of this Perl script into their source code repository. Predictably the diffs are full of line noise. And you can't escape from this, any of it, because there are so many tools involved, and they all do such useful things, that you end up truly stuck using whatever features all of the tools support. And `ifdefs. Sigh...

kazinator 8y ago
Software guys have it good thanks to software guys; especially the code-sharing, open-sourcing software guys. And mostly just in the last quarter century or so.
amelius 8y ago
> It's really godawful. Software guys have no idea how good they have it. You can also look at it from the other perspective: at least you can still make money making hardware tooling. That is not possible for software tooling, as everything is open-source already.
- ur-whale 8y ago
  >That is not possible for software tooling, as everything is open-source already You have a very distorted view of OpenSource. People working on OpenSource related project do make money. And lots of it. They're just not selling what essentially amounts to obfuscated source code, a way of doing business that is apparently a great source of astonishment for HW folks. The other point is the state of hardware tooling. Tool vendors may be making money, but their customers are getting shafted something fierce. Every single EDA tool I've used feels like it was written in the 80's: slow, bulky, bloated, opaque, complicated, unpredictable behavior, need band-aids all over the place to get it to do what you actually need (Tcl anyone?) The typical byproduct of an industry focused on secrets instead of innovation.
  - amelius 8y ago
    > People working on OpenSource related project do make money. And lots of it. I was talking about compilers and such. Do you have any evidence to support this case?
    - ur-whale 8y ago
      >Do you have any evidence to support this case In the SW world tooling people are busy kick-starting entire industries. You can argue they may be making less money, but as to their overall utility to the ecosystem, clear win AFAIC. Here's an example: https://www.infoworld.com/article/3247799/development-tools/what-is-llvm-the-power-behind-swift-rust-clang-and-more.html https://www.infoworld.com/article/3247799/development-tools/... Where is the LLVM of the HW world?
      - amelius 8y ago
        Yes, my entire point was about it being difficult to make money writing SW tooling, like it was in the past (e.g. like Borland made a lot of money selling different kinds of compilers in the 80s and 90s). Nowadays, I suppose you can still make money writing compilers, but besides being a master at compiler design, you now also have to have the skills to sell your services, which is difficult, time-consuming and boring. You can't just sell shrink-wrapped products like before.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
geomark 8y ago
So true. I used to manage a design verification business that made very good money consulting for companies' in-house design groups. Most of what we did was write Tcl and Perl scripts to glue together tools. Our mojo was that we had seen so many examples of design flows that had terrible tool integration and had to be fixed with one-off scripts, and as a result had built up a large library of scripts that could be be quickly tweaked to fix the next customer's problems. It felt a lot like working as a plumber to clean old clogged drains, a pretty dirty business.
- specialist 8y ago
  "...a lot like working as a plumber to clean old clogged drains..." Working IT (aka DevOps, continuous tech support), it's just cutting & pasting strings. Maybe some data quality stuff. Gods I miss product development. Actual design & programming.

kazinator 8y ago

Software guys have it good thanks to software guys; especially the code-sharing, open-sourcing software guys. And mostly just in the last quarter century or so.

amelius 8y ago

> It's really godawful. Software guys have no idea how good they have it. You can also look at it from the other perspective: at least you can still make money making hardware tooling. That is not possible for software tooling, as everything is open-source already.

ur-whale 8y ago
>That is not possible for software tooling, as everything is open-source already You have a very distorted view of OpenSource. People working on OpenSource related project do make money. And lots of it. They're just not selling what essentially amounts to obfuscated source code, a way of doing business that is apparently a great source of astonishment for HW folks. The other point is the state of hardware tooling. Tool vendors may be making money, but their customers are getting shafted something fierce. Every single EDA tool I've used feels like it was written in the 80's: slow, bulky, bloated, opaque, complicated, unpredictable behavior, need band-aids all over the place to get it to do what you actually need (Tcl anyone?) The typical byproduct of an industry focused on secrets instead of innovation.
- amelius 8y ago
  > People working on OpenSource related project do make money. And lots of it. I was talking about compilers and such. Do you have any evidence to support this case?
  - ur-whale 8y ago
    >Do you have any evidence to support this case In the SW world tooling people are busy kick-starting entire industries. You can argue they may be making less money, but as to their overall utility to the ecosystem, clear win AFAIC. Here's an example: https://www.infoworld.com/article/3247799/development-tools/what-is-llvm-the-power-behind-swift-rust-clang-and-more.html https://www.infoworld.com/article/3247799/development-tools/... Where is the LLVM of the HW world?
    - amelius 8y ago
      Yes, my entire point was about it being difficult to make money writing SW tooling, like it was in the past (e.g. like Borland made a lot of money selling different kinds of compilers in the 80s and 90s). Nowadays, I suppose you can still make money writing compilers, but besides being a master at compiler design, you now also have to have the skills to sell your services, which is difficult, time-consuming and boring. You can't just sell shrink-wrapped products like before.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

geomark 8y ago

So true. I used to manage a design verification business that made very good money consulting for companies' in-house design groups. Most of what we did was write Tcl and Perl scripts to glue together tools. Our mojo was that we had seen so many examples of design flows that had terrible tool integration and had to be fixed with one-off scripts, and as a result had built up a large library of scripts that could be be quickly tweaked to fix the next customer's problems. It felt a lot like working as a plumber to clean old clogged drains, a pretty dirty business.

specialist 8y ago
"...a lot like working as a plumber to clean old clogged drains..." Working IT (aka DevOps, continuous tech support), it's just cutting & pasting strings. Maybe some data quality stuff. Gods I miss product development. Actual design & programming.