8 ms·

The Need for Stable Foundations in Software Development

lmm 6y ago
Software development just isn't mature enough yet. A bug-free, stable version of an IDE from 10 years ago would be much less pleasant to work with than the flaky version with all the features that have been invented in the intervening years.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  Delphi, C++ Builder vs Visual C++. Visual C++ 6.0 vs Visual.NET Visual Studio 2010 vs Visual Studio 2015
- beagle3 6y ago
  Visual c++ 6 circa 1998 was the pinnacle of responsive IDEs, and was more responsive in 2000 on 2000 hardware than the the visual studio 2013 o last used in 2015 - are new versions any better, or so you still wait a couple of seconds when pressing “run” just for the IDE to figure out that no compiling needs to be done?
  - mrkeen 6y ago
    Yes, so much this. My thoughts on Eclipse the entire time I used it was "why can't this be as fast and reliable as VB6?"
    - beagle3 6y ago
      It is ridiculous. In 2015, when I had to port something to Windows, I was so frustrated by the IDE speed that I was doing “make ; make test” outside instead - only using the ide when I needed the debugger. (I had makefiles from Linux, I would probably have been to lazy to create them if I didn’t)
    - fomine3 6y ago
      I refuse to use the VB6 IDE that truncates characters from variable viewer.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
  I know of several programmers still running Visual Studio 6 because of how much more pleasant it is to work with than any modern VS version due to its responsiveness. That's without it even being bug free.
pjmlp 6y ago
Programming languages are software products like everything else in the industry, they either stagnate or evolve.
- HPsquared 6y ago
  As in biological evolution, the parts with the most "breaking changes" tend to remain quite stable.
- acp2020 6y ago
  Then what happened to C?
  - WJW 6y ago
    C has been evolving, there are C89, C90, C99, C11 and C17 standards and a new one is in the make.
    - Chris_Newton 6y ago
      But the last version with major changes was C11, nearly a decade ago. Even that was almost entirely backward-compatible, other than a few very specific cases like removing the inherently dangerous `gets` function from the standard library. And even that removal followed formal deprecation several years earlier, and widespread advice not to use it at all for many years before that. Put another way, while the C language has evolved, you can still compile C code written several decades ago using modern tool chains with an excellent chance of having it work immediately or at worst needing some very minor changes. It’s depressing that some of the comments in today’s discussion are praising Clojure because code often still works after 5 years. Obviously that is itself a good thing, but is only 5 years now a remarkably long time for code to still work?
      - pjmlp 6y ago
        Actually no, because C11 has removed features from C89 and C99, while C17 has done some UB "improvements".
fergie 6y ago
"you can charge [a MacBook Pro] using any of the 4 USB-C ports, but you really should only ever charge it from the right side." ...wait what?
- Jtsummers 6y ago
  https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/363933 https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/363933 That link discusses it. Seems there's a heat issue when charging on the left side which results in an impact on performance.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- PedroBatista 6y ago
  “You’re holding it wrong”
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  I wish Apple added a warning to the charging icon when using one of the wrong ports. Or just little marks next to the USB ports that charges the best to label them as "super charging ports".
zokier 6y ago
Does anyone have experience using one of the more formal method oriented languages (e.g. Idris, Agda, F* etc) as their "daily driver" language, i.e. using them for general purpose programming, for any extended period? I'm dreaming that by focusing on correctness one could reduce the maintenance churn that then can lead to various other spurious changes. But I don't know if any of those languages are really suitable to "real world" use, nor if they really provide such dramatic reduction of bugs that one would hope for.
- exdsq 6y ago
  My colleagues use Agda but only for things like protocols or core features, Haskell is better for general purpose code
- nanagojo 6y ago
  Idris is actually a general purpose language unlike the rest you listed.
  - zokier 6y ago
    Agda might be bit borderline, but any particular reason why you consider F* less general purpose than Idris? It's own intro says > F* (pronounced F star) is a general-purpose functional programming language with effects aimed at program verification I haven't used either, so that's why I'm asking. Certainly going by their marketing F* seems very practical oriented, fusing common sensibilities from F# with formal methods
tannhaeuser 6y ago
I don't think the rant about Ubuntu Unity is fair. If anything, Ubuntu 18.04/20.04 LTS releases based on Gnome shell are serious regressions in so many ways (FF not opening new windows on top, std menu missing wtf, etc etc) that I'm considering something KDE-based next.
- fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
  Yeah, I think Unity happened because of Gnome 3? Gnome 2 EOLed and Canonical didn’t like Gnome 3.
  - beagle3 6y ago
    Unity happened mostly because Canonical was betting on convergence - which neither Gnome2 nor Gnome3 were practical for. Supposedly, it’s also super nice on mobile and tablet, I didn’t get a chance to try. If you want gnome 2, Mint is still maintaining it as MATE and it’s in the Ubuntu repositories.
  - bregma 6y ago
    There are a number of reasons why Unity happened, all of them good. Difficulties getting Gnome 2 changes upstream, differences in vision between the Ubuntu desktop needs and the Gnome developers, and delivery date issues with Gnome 3 were among some of the reasons, yes. There was a very vocal minority of shouties in various forums that spewed their venemous hate at Unity but by and large most people who tried it really liked it and I still get very positive feedback from non-technical users even today when they find out I was heavily involved in that project. The criticism levied in the feature article is the same tired old one that boiled down to "I didn't like it because it wasn't the Microsoft Windows I used when I was first learning." There is always a certain merit to the "all change is bad" argument, but since it's entirely based on visceral reaction and not technical merit or rational discourse, it can be difficult to use to convince others without appearing petulant.
    - fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
      I'm mostly sympathetic to the decision to leave Gnome: I myself abandoned KDE after the 3 -> 4 transition and then Gnome after the 2 -> 3 transition. I just never found the Unity desktop pleasant to use, so I ended up running tiling window managers for a while.
dgellow 6y ago
> There is probably some truth to the idea that many newcomers will go for the latest features. However, on the flip side, I’ve been wondering if there can’t be a competitive edge in designing a language that is minimalistic, stable and slow to evolve by design. That's exactly how I see Go, and why I personally use it, even though it has clear limitations and can be frustrating at time. And the language get quite a lot of hate because of these choices and their consequences. Minimalistic often means that you have to implement your own solution for some common problems, and/or write a good amount of boilerplate. Stable means that you don't change things that much over time, even if trends are shifting and new patterns/paradigms are developed, so you're potentially losing people and/or powerful technics (you also avoid the ones that haven't been proven yet and will potentially be seen as harmful in the future). On the other hand you have the real benefits of having something small that you can easily keep in your mind, a tool that won't impact your maintenance budget, you can learn it once and then can be good for years without feeling the need to catch up all the time with newest changes and ideas. That's quite relaxing IMHO.
- tuatoru 6y ago
  > > a language that is minimalistic, stable and slow to evolve by design. The upper case languages. C, AWK, SQL, COBOL, FORTRAN (yes yes I know the latter two like to be written in mixed case these days). Also Ada ... hmm, perhaps not so minimalistic. And Scheme.
  - de_watcher 6y ago
    ARNOLD C?
- christophilus 6y ago
  Agreed. Also, Clojure. It’s one of the most stable languages I know of that is actively developed. It’s refreshing to install a 5 year old library and have it just work. In many cases such libraries aren’t abandoned; they’re just done. That’s a rarity in other languages I use.
  - 6y ago
tuatoru 6y ago
> In software and hardware design, the things that we should be the most wary about breaking, are the interfaces that people rely on. And yet the big boys just can't help themselves. I've been doing a bit of work with Google Sheets the last few months, and even in that time the user interface has changed a few times. Only in small ways, will be the offered excuse. People are not just playing with this software, they're trying to use it. Usually as a minor component of some workflow where other things occupy working memory and attention.
orestis 6y ago
Obligatory Clojure plug :) Most, if not all, code from 5 years ago runs with no changes whatsoever. The stewards of Clojure heavily advocate and practice “stable” development where backwards compatibility is a requirement. Combined with the famous JVM compatibility means that the whole enterprise is a very stable foundation for building stuff.
mark_l_watson 6y ago
In 2005 I wrote a little rant about ancient software [1]. The idea is that far in the future there would be very stable software that had not seen changes in centuries. [1] https://markwatson.com/blog/2005/08/04/ancient-software.html https://markwatson.com/blog/2005/08/04/ancient-software.html
- machello13 6y ago
  A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge also mentioned this — it's a scifi book that takes place in space thousands of years from now, but the foundations of the computer systems are many of the same libraries in use today.
baylessj 6y ago
A minor nit, the author references MX Linux as being the most popular Linux distribution currently when that is not truly the case. Yes, MX Linux receives the most page views on DistroWatch [1], but that does not directly correlate to actual users or downloads. I'm still looking for a clear set of data showing the market share of various Linux distributions, but everything I have found so far points to Ubuntu still being the most popular distro. MX Linux is growing in popularity, sure, but it's certainly not a runaway winner in the market. 1 - https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=mx https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=mx
megameter 6y ago
Here are the three principles I currently all believe mesh together in discussing stable foundations. 1. Sustainability 2. Chaos 3. Reorganization Programming in the large has a natural ecosystems quality to it. It resists standardization and falls into patchworks easily. So I have come around to the idea that one should embrace the change and discover points of stability by accident. The sustainable part happens when the system survives chaos and is sufficiently flexible to be reorganized - i.e. there is a benchmark for passing the test. Long story short, it doesn't come easily by design. Designing small and designing to retarget your output are good ideas, because that reduces two forms of change cost. But we trip over the problem of having immediate solutions at the cost of complexity and single-use implementation. Designing for extension turns your system into a platform, which gives it a definite kind of lifespan and ability to address new problems. I worked with Go for a while and gradually got fed up with the accumulation of little issues. I have come to the conclusion that Haxe - and most transpiled languages - do the job of sustainability better than Wirthian languages, actually, because being retargetable allows your code some insulation from platform changes. The intent is preserved, and the bulk of breaking changes occur outside the compiler tooling. A cost is paid in having to debug multiple times and often at a distance from the original source, and in having imperfect access to platform features, but this is a much smaller thing than having a codebase with hidden dependencies, which is a thing that constantly sneaks into native code systems, and a thing that makes VM language runtimes grow over time.

lmm 6y ago

Software development just isn't mature enough yet. A bug-free, stable version of an IDE from 10 years ago would be much less pleasant to work with than the flaky version with all the features that have been invented in the intervening years.

pjmlp 6y ago
Delphi, C++ Builder vs Visual C++. Visual C++ 6.0 vs Visual.NET Visual Studio 2010 vs Visual Studio 2015
beagle3 6y ago
Visual c++ 6 circa 1998 was the pinnacle of responsive IDEs, and was more responsive in 2000 on 2000 hardware than the the visual studio 2013 o last used in 2015 - are new versions any better, or so you still wait a couple of seconds when pressing “run” just for the IDE to figure out that no compiling needs to be done?
- mrkeen 6y ago
  Yes, so much this. My thoughts on Eclipse the entire time I used it was "why can't this be as fast and reliable as VB6?"
  - beagle3 6y ago
    It is ridiculous. In 2015, when I had to port something to Windows, I was so frustrated by the IDE speed that I was doing “make ; make test” outside instead - only using the ide when I needed the debugger. (I had makefiles from Linux, I would probably have been to lazy to create them if I didn’t)
  - fomine3 6y ago
    I refuse to use the VB6 IDE that truncates characters from variable viewer.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
I know of several programmers still running Visual Studio 6 because of how much more pleasant it is to work with than any modern VS version due to its responsiveness. That's without it even being bug free.

pjmlp 6y ago

Programming languages are software products like everything else in the industry, they either stagnate or evolve.

HPsquared 6y ago
As in biological evolution, the parts with the most "breaking changes" tend to remain quite stable.
acp2020 6y ago
Then what happened to C?
- WJW 6y ago
  C has been evolving, there are C89, C90, C99, C11 and C17 standards and a new one is in the make.
  - Chris_Newton 6y ago
    But the last version with major changes was C11, nearly a decade ago. Even that was almost entirely backward-compatible, other than a few very specific cases like removing the inherently dangerous `gets` function from the standard library. And even that removal followed formal deprecation several years earlier, and widespread advice not to use it at all for many years before that. Put another way, while the C language has evolved, you can still compile C code written several decades ago using modern tool chains with an excellent chance of having it work immediately or at worst needing some very minor changes. It’s depressing that some of the comments in today’s discussion are praising Clojure because code often still works after 5 years. Obviously that is itself a good thing, but is only 5 years now a remarkably long time for code to still work?
    - pjmlp 6y ago
      Actually no, because C11 has removed features from C89 and C99, while C17 has done some UB "improvements".

fergie 6y ago

"you can charge [a MacBook Pro] using any of the 4 USB-C ports, but you really should only ever charge it from the right side." ...wait what?

Jtsummers 6y ago
https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/363933 https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/363933 That link discusses it. Seems there's a heat issue when charging on the left side which results in an impact on performance.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
PedroBatista 6y ago
“You’re holding it wrong”
908B64B197 6y ago
I wish Apple added a warning to the charging icon when using one of the wrong ports. Or just little marks next to the USB ports that charges the best to label them as "super charging ports".

zokier 6y ago

Does anyone have experience using one of the more formal method oriented languages (e.g. Idris, Agda, F* etc) as their "daily driver" language, i.e. using them for general purpose programming, for any extended period? I'm dreaming that by focusing on correctness one could reduce the maintenance churn that then can lead to various other spurious changes. But I don't know if any of those languages are really suitable to "real world" use, nor if they really provide such dramatic reduction of bugs that one would hope for.

exdsq 6y ago
My colleagues use Agda but only for things like protocols or core features, Haskell is better for general purpose code
nanagojo 6y ago
Idris is actually a general purpose language unlike the rest you listed.
- zokier 6y ago
  Agda might be bit borderline, but any particular reason why you consider F* less general purpose than Idris? It's own intro says > F* (pronounced F star) is a general-purpose functional programming language with effects aimed at program verification I haven't used either, so that's why I'm asking. Certainly going by their marketing F* seems very practical oriented, fusing common sensibilities from F# with formal methods

tannhaeuser 6y ago

I don't think the rant about Ubuntu Unity is fair. If anything, Ubuntu 18.04/20.04 LTS releases based on Gnome shell are serious regressions in so many ways (FF not opening new windows on top, std menu missing wtf, etc etc) that I'm considering something KDE-based next.

fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
Yeah, I think Unity happened because of Gnome 3? Gnome 2 EOLed and Canonical didn’t like Gnome 3.
- beagle3 6y ago
  Unity happened mostly because Canonical was betting on convergence - which neither Gnome2 nor Gnome3 were practical for. Supposedly, it’s also super nice on mobile and tablet, I didn’t get a chance to try. If you want gnome 2, Mint is still maintaining it as MATE and it’s in the Ubuntu repositories.
- bregma 6y ago
  There are a number of reasons why Unity happened, all of them good. Difficulties getting Gnome 2 changes upstream, differences in vision between the Ubuntu desktop needs and the Gnome developers, and delivery date issues with Gnome 3 were among some of the reasons, yes. There was a very vocal minority of shouties in various forums that spewed their venemous hate at Unity but by and large most people who tried it really liked it and I still get very positive feedback from non-technical users even today when they find out I was heavily involved in that project. The criticism levied in the feature article is the same tired old one that boiled down to "I didn't like it because it wasn't the Microsoft Windows I used when I was first learning." There is always a certain merit to the "all change is bad" argument, but since it's entirely based on visceral reaction and not technical merit or rational discourse, it can be difficult to use to convince others without appearing petulant.
  - fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
    I'm mostly sympathetic to the decision to leave Gnome: I myself abandoned KDE after the 3 -> 4 transition and then Gnome after the 2 -> 3 transition. I just never found the Unity desktop pleasant to use, so I ended up running tiling window managers for a while.

dgellow 6y ago

> There is probably some truth to the idea that many newcomers will go for the latest features. However, on the flip side, I’ve been wondering if there can’t be a competitive edge in designing a language that is minimalistic, stable and slow to evolve by design. That's exactly how I see Go, and why I personally use it, even though it has clear limitations and can be frustrating at time. And the language get quite a lot of hate because of these choices and their consequences. Minimalistic often means that you have to implement your own solution for some common problems, and/or write a good amount of boilerplate. Stable means that you don't change things that much over time, even if trends are shifting and new patterns/paradigms are developed, so you're potentially losing people and/or powerful technics (you also avoid the ones that haven't been proven yet and will potentially be seen as harmful in the future). On the other hand you have the real benefits of having something small that you can easily keep in your mind, a tool that won't impact your maintenance budget, you can learn it once and then can be good for years without feeling the need to catch up all the time with newest changes and ideas. That's quite relaxing IMHO.

tuatoru 6y ago
> > a language that is minimalistic, stable and slow to evolve by design. The upper case languages. C, AWK, SQL, COBOL, FORTRAN (yes yes I know the latter two like to be written in mixed case these days). Also Ada ... hmm, perhaps not so minimalistic. And Scheme.
- de_watcher 6y ago
  ARNOLD C?
christophilus 6y ago
Agreed. Also, Clojure. It’s one of the most stable languages I know of that is actively developed. It’s refreshing to install a 5 year old library and have it just work. In many cases such libraries aren’t abandoned; they’re just done. That’s a rarity in other languages I use.
- 6y ago

tuatoru 6y ago

> In software and hardware design, the things that we should be the most wary about breaking, are the interfaces that people rely on. And yet the big boys just can't help themselves. I've been doing a bit of work with Google Sheets the last few months, and even in that time the user interface has changed a few times. Only in small ways, will be the offered excuse. People are not just playing with this software, they're trying to use it. Usually as a minor component of some workflow where other things occupy working memory and attention.

orestis 6y ago

Obligatory Clojure plug :) Most, if not all, code from 5 years ago runs with no changes whatsoever. The stewards of Clojure heavily advocate and practice “stable” development where backwards compatibility is a requirement. Combined with the famous JVM compatibility means that the whole enterprise is a very stable foundation for building stuff.

mark_l_watson 6y ago

In 2005 I wrote a little rant about ancient software [1]. The idea is that far in the future there would be very stable software that had not seen changes in centuries. [1] https://markwatson.com/blog/2005/08/04/ancient-software.html https://markwatson.com/blog/2005/08/04/ancient-software.html

machello13 6y ago
A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge also mentioned this — it's a scifi book that takes place in space thousands of years from now, but the foundations of the computer systems are many of the same libraries in use today.

baylessj 6y ago

A minor nit, the author references MX Linux as being the most popular Linux distribution currently when that is not truly the case. Yes, MX Linux receives the most page views on DistroWatch [1], but that does not directly correlate to actual users or downloads. I'm still looking for a clear set of data showing the market share of various Linux distributions, but everything I have found so far points to Ubuntu still being the most popular distro. MX Linux is growing in popularity, sure, but it's certainly not a runaway winner in the market. 1 - https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=mx https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=mx

megameter 6y ago

Here are the three principles I currently all believe mesh together in discussing stable foundations. 1. Sustainability 2. Chaos 3. Reorganization Programming in the large has a natural ecosystems quality to it. It resists standardization and falls into patchworks easily. So I have come around to the idea that one should embrace the change and discover points of stability by accident. The sustainable part happens when the system survives chaos and is sufficiently flexible to be reorganized - i.e. there is a benchmark for passing the test. Long story short, it doesn't come easily by design. Designing small and designing to retarget your output are good ideas, because that reduces two forms of change cost. But we trip over the problem of having immediate solutions at the cost of complexity and single-use implementation. Designing for extension turns your system into a platform, which gives it a definite kind of lifespan and ability to address new problems. I worked with Go for a while and gradually got fed up with the accumulation of little issues. I have come to the conclusion that Haxe - and most transpiled languages - do the job of sustainability better than Wirthian languages, actually, because being retargetable allows your code some insulation from platform changes. The intent is preserved, and the bulk of breaking changes occur outside the compiler tooling. A cost is paid in having to debug multiple times and often at a distance from the original source, and in having imperfect access to platform features, but this is a much smaller thing than having a codebase with hidden dependencies, which is a thing that constantly sneaks into native code systems, and a thing that makes VM language runtimes grow over time.