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I think computation is still converging. It is too new to be expected to abide to universal standards. Cars, for instance have been around for over a century an

I think computation is still converging. It is too new to be expected to abide to universal standards. Cars, for instance have been around for over a century and they are still subject to change in standards, mainly because of safety and efficiency, just like software, but to a different degree. We should, however, have these kinds of discussion because I don't think we should outsource this debate to corporations. But this shouldn't take the tone of contempt and resentment towards what we already have.

pdimitar 6y ago
The problem is financial incentives. I am not paid to devise such universal tooling. It's also a huge undertaking and much harder than all of my everyday's work. It's exploratory work that has the potential to revolutionize huge chunks of the programming area. And I don't want to only be paid an average salary for it. But... an excellent salary (above-average, maybe even above-high) would motivate me and no, I won't try to copyright that work and mooch off it for billions until I hit 80. As I said: incentives. Many companies expect programming to be like installing a kitchen sink yet are unwilling to pay to commoditize the activity.
- gchamonlive 6y ago
  I think this is part of the problem, yes, but the root is more fundamental in my opinion. Even if you had a lot of financial support, how would you go about implementing the standards and transformations described in the article? Who would adopt it? Maybe in the context of a company this could reap benefits and become a case study. Or in a partnership between many companies there could arise such applications. But they would still be locked to a niche. That is why I think even with financial support, the problem is maturity, or lack thereof. You could argue that once a large enough group adopted practices that proved to be effective in reducing maintenance time and complexity, that others would follow, but that stops being a matter of pure financial support and starts being a matter of adoption and convergence, pointing once again to maturity of the ecosystem. And another aspect of maturity, standardization and sanitization is that it comes at a cost to diversity, which in turn has benefits of its own, like new ideas and technology. This is kind of the balance between exploration and exploitation we see in training neural networks. I think software is in the transitioning phase from exploration to exploitation and we are living it.
  - pdimitar 6y ago
    Oh, I am with you on this as well. My point is that we never get to the point where network effects (or lack thereof) is the problem to solve. Since nobody is financing the work we simply never get to find out if a proposed external tool would be accepted by the community or not. That's the disappointing part. We never had the problem to begin with. IMO if you make such a tool for something extremely popular like Python or Javascript and then start pivoting upwards from there, people will be coming to you. There are a lot of deficiencies in the everyday work of the programmer to this day.
    - gchamonlive 6y ago
      This is indeed a massive undertaking. Beyond this point I can only speculate, but it is really interesting to have these kinds of debates.
- machiaweliczny 6y ago
  IMO goverments should invest into such stuff

pdimitar 6y ago

The problem is financial incentives. I am not paid to devise such universal tooling. It's also a huge undertaking and much harder than all of my everyday's work. It's exploratory work that has the potential to revolutionize huge chunks of the programming area. And I don't want to only be paid an average salary for it. But... an excellent salary (above-average, maybe even above-high) would motivate me and no, I won't try to copyright that work and mooch off it for billions until I hit 80. As I said: incentives. Many companies expect programming to be like installing a kitchen sink yet are unwilling to pay to commoditize the activity.

gchamonlive 6y ago
I think this is part of the problem, yes, but the root is more fundamental in my opinion. Even if you had a lot of financial support, how would you go about implementing the standards and transformations described in the article? Who would adopt it? Maybe in the context of a company this could reap benefits and become a case study. Or in a partnership between many companies there could arise such applications. But they would still be locked to a niche. That is why I think even with financial support, the problem is maturity, or lack thereof. You could argue that once a large enough group adopted practices that proved to be effective in reducing maintenance time and complexity, that others would follow, but that stops being a matter of pure financial support and starts being a matter of adoption and convergence, pointing once again to maturity of the ecosystem. And another aspect of maturity, standardization and sanitization is that it comes at a cost to diversity, which in turn has benefits of its own, like new ideas and technology. This is kind of the balance between exploration and exploitation we see in training neural networks. I think software is in the transitioning phase from exploration to exploitation and we are living it.
- pdimitar 6y ago
  Oh, I am with you on this as well. My point is that we never get to the point where network effects (or lack thereof) is the problem to solve. Since nobody is financing the work we simply never get to find out if a proposed external tool would be accepted by the community or not. That's the disappointing part. We never had the problem to begin with. IMO if you make such a tool for something extremely popular like Python or Javascript and then start pivoting upwards from there, people will be coming to you. There are a lot of deficiencies in the everyday work of the programmer to this day.
  - gchamonlive 6y ago
    This is indeed a massive undertaking. Beyond this point I can only speculate, but it is really interesting to have these kinds of debates.
machiaweliczny 6y ago
IMO goverments should invest into such stuff