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Software is the antithesis of that philosophy. The word I hear most from developers when evaluating an approach: easy. Not simple, but easy. Then comes all the

Software is the antithesis of that philosophy. The word I hear most from developers when evaluating an approach: easy. Not simple, but easy. Then comes all the memorized patterns, a laundry list of tools, thousands of dependencies, and their favorite pet framework they cannot live without. You take any of that bullshit away the immediate response is some form of crying or hostility. Most things in software are never that challenging, but then that is a matter of perspective. Everything is challenging the moment an adult comes in and cuts off the nonsense.

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
I ran a shop, that, when we were finally disbanded, after 27 years, the person with the least tenure had a decade. Our work was far from easy. It was developing cross-platform image processing pipelines in C++. Lots of whacky stuff, like leveraging hardware threading, cache optimization, etc. Each engineer had strengths in various areas, and we were able to work together to develop some stuff that worked nicely (it wasn't always packaged especially well, by the application implementation team, but our stuff was great). We were a US shop that fed into a Japanese organization, and the Japanese wouldn't even acknowledge my engineers, until they had been there at least a year. I'm not really a fan of "Programming by Dependency." I understand that it can allow relatively unskilled and inexperienced programmers to create some pretty ambitious works, but I feel the cost in quality, performance, resource usage, licensing, and future maintainability are too high, in many cases.
dasil003 5y ago
Software is the antithesis of that philosophy? Or did you mean Silicon Valley Hypergrowth and Billionaire-worship Culture is the antithesis of that philosophy? Because it strikes me that software can be many things, it's primary attribute of course being malleability.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  I feel they were being sarcastic.

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

I ran a shop, that, when we were finally disbanded, after 27 years, the person with the least tenure had a decade. Our work was far from easy. It was developing cross-platform image processing pipelines in C++. Lots of whacky stuff, like leveraging hardware threading, cache optimization, etc. Each engineer had strengths in various areas, and we were able to work together to develop some stuff that worked nicely (it wasn't always packaged especially well, by the application implementation team, but our stuff was great). We were a US shop that fed into a Japanese organization, and the Japanese wouldn't even acknowledge my engineers, until they had been there at least a year. I'm not really a fan of "Programming by Dependency." I understand that it can allow relatively unskilled and inexperienced programmers to create some pretty ambitious works, but I feel the cost in quality, performance, resource usage, licensing, and future maintainability are too high, in many cases.

dasil003 5y ago

Software is the antithesis of that philosophy? Or did you mean Silicon Valley Hypergrowth and Billionaire-worship Culture is the antithesis of that philosophy? Because it strikes me that software can be many things, it's primary attribute of course being malleability.

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
I feel they were being sarcastic.