4 ms·

To be fair this "worse is better" thing permiates all aspects of tech: c++, java, python, wasteful text based protocols...

by nsonha 5y ago

ThouYS 5y ago
in the case of python: "better is better" ;)
- nine_k 5y ago
  As in "very slow though flexible is better".
  - utunga 5y ago
    I get why you are saying an interpreted language is slow but given that people use python to orchestrate most compute intense (AI) and data-heavy (data science) work, it obviously does a pretty excellent job of being pretty 'fast' in practice - ie offloading the 'slow' bits to dedicated code.
- nsonha 5y ago
  as it stands right now, python is more complex and has worse type system comparing to typescript. It has all of javascript warts and more (those confusing underscore methods, GIL, pyproject.toml is only now standardized). The good things about python have nothing to do with the language, it's the ecosystem and standard library (which is still not as good as, say, java's). So I'm not quite sure why people say javascript THE LANGUAGE is bad, but python the language is "better".
PebblesHD 5y ago
> wasteful text based protocols… Until you’re the unfortunate person trying to debug an API deployment where the team behind the API decided to use ‘much more efficient protobuffs’ making them entirely unreadable and impossible to troubleshoot. Modern processors and networks are fast enough to allow us to spend a few extra bytes making protocols easy to work with as well as ‘efficient’, and I’d argue that at scale, those ‘efficient’ protocols waste probably 100x more developer time troubleshooting than their text based counterparts. YMMV.
- KnobbleMcKnees 5y ago
  This sounds like a tools problem though. Bytes and hex aren't readable until you decide then to characters and use a text renderer to display the. I can't imagine this isnt possible with protobuf and the right debugging tools (though it's not my area of expertise)
  - matteotom 5y ago
    Sometimes you just want to dump the bytes that are going over the wire. Sure you could pipe the output to a protobuf parser, but then you'd need to make sure the output of tcpdump or ngrep or whatever is what the parser expects. As an example, I needed to track down why some service traffic was getting misrouted, and I found the problem by tcpdumping the traffic and realizing one service was silently corrupting a header value - I could have added more debug logs to either service, but that would have taken a lot longer to implement and deploy. Personally I'd rather stick with the simpler protocol until someone runs the numbers and finds something more efficient would improve performance or save money by a significant enough amount.
    - nsonha 5y ago
      > until someone runs the numbers and finds something more efficient would improve performance or save money by a significant enough amount This argument must be the ultimate defense in code review. The thing is, we have the field of theoretical computer science and things like big O so that we can reason about code without having to do benchmarks about every little thing, because that's impossible in practice. Regarding protocols, I'd argue that the most important thing for them is to be efficient, at least when IO is still the biggest bottleneck of computing. The other comment already points out debug being a tooling problem.
    - kasey_junk 5y ago
      One of the biggest culture shock moments when I came back to the web world after spending time in high performance environments was how many resources web applications were willing to waste on parsing and sending terribly inefficient wire formats. I’ll never understand why we’d make the trade off of making crazy inefficient human readable protocols for talking between computers instead of learning wire shark.

To be fair this "worse is better" thing permiates all aspects of tech: c++, java, python, wasteful text based protocols...

by nsonha 5y ago

To be fair this "worse is better" thing permiates all aspects of tech: c++, java, python, wasteful text based protocols...

ThouYS 5y ago

in the case of python: "better is better" ;)

nine_k 5y ago
As in "very slow though flexible is better".
- utunga 5y ago
  I get why you are saying an interpreted language is slow but given that people use python to orchestrate most compute intense (AI) and data-heavy (data science) work, it obviously does a pretty excellent job of being pretty 'fast' in practice - ie offloading the 'slow' bits to dedicated code.
nsonha 5y ago
as it stands right now, python is more complex and has worse type system comparing to typescript. It has all of javascript warts and more (those confusing underscore methods, GIL, pyproject.toml is only now standardized). The good things about python have nothing to do with the language, it's the ecosystem and standard library (which is still not as good as, say, java's). So I'm not quite sure why people say javascript THE LANGUAGE is bad, but python the language is "better".

PebblesHD 5y ago

> wasteful text based protocols… Until you’re the unfortunate person trying to debug an API deployment where the team behind the API decided to use ‘much more efficient protobuffs’ making them entirely unreadable and impossible to troubleshoot. Modern processors and networks are fast enough to allow us to spend a few extra bytes making protocols easy to work with as well as ‘efficient’, and I’d argue that at scale, those ‘efficient’ protocols waste probably 100x more developer time troubleshooting than their text based counterparts. YMMV.

KnobbleMcKnees 5y ago
This sounds like a tools problem though. Bytes and hex aren't readable until you decide then to characters and use a text renderer to display the. I can't imagine this isnt possible with protobuf and the right debugging tools (though it's not my area of expertise)
- matteotom 5y ago
  Sometimes you just want to dump the bytes that are going over the wire. Sure you could pipe the output to a protobuf parser, but then you'd need to make sure the output of tcpdump or ngrep or whatever is what the parser expects. As an example, I needed to track down why some service traffic was getting misrouted, and I found the problem by tcpdumping the traffic and realizing one service was silently corrupting a header value - I could have added more debug logs to either service, but that would have taken a lot longer to implement and deploy. Personally I'd rather stick with the simpler protocol until someone runs the numbers and finds something more efficient would improve performance or save money by a significant enough amount.
  - nsonha 5y ago
    > until someone runs the numbers and finds something more efficient would improve performance or save money by a significant enough amount This argument must be the ultimate defense in code review. The thing is, we have the field of theoretical computer science and things like big O so that we can reason about code without having to do benchmarks about every little thing, because that's impossible in practice. Regarding protocols, I'd argue that the most important thing for them is to be efficient, at least when IO is still the biggest bottleneck of computing. The other comment already points out debug being a tooling problem.
  - kasey_junk 5y ago
    One of the biggest culture shock moments when I came back to the web world after spending time in high performance environments was how many resources web applications were willing to waste on parsing and sending terribly inefficient wire formats. I’ll never understand why we’d make the trade off of making crazy inefficient human readable protocols for talking between computers instead of learning wire shark.