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“I hate almost all software” — Ryan Dahl

• william42 15y ago
  The problem is that the simple and quick solution has to be hacked around when the problem set changes and that's how we get all these hacks.
  • 5hoom 15y ago
    Too true. It sometimes feels like programming is about trying to glue a bunch of hacks together creating yet another hack. Then someone standardises said conglomeration of hacks. Repeat.
  • gruseom 15y ago
    A thousand times no. It's what we do when the problem set changes that causes trouble. We only ever respond one way: by agglutinating more code with the old. Compound this a few times and you have irreversible complexity. It's what would happen in a neighborhood if you called garbage "construction material" and only ever piled it up all around you. The solution is to delete nearly as much code as we write. Put differently, the solution is small programs, ruthlessly pursued. The reason we don't do this is that it's totally absent from (nearly all) software culture -- absent as in blank stares and why-you-talk-crazy-talk if you bring it up -- and by far the number one determinant of what people do is what other people do. There are a few points of light. Chuck Moore and Arthur Whitney come to mind. From everything I've heard, their programs are small enough not to have these problems. And in case anyone is wondering "If this is so much better how come we don't all work that way?" - the answer to that conundrum hit me the other day: sample size. Statistically speaking, it's never been tried.
    • keithpeter 15y ago
      Thanks for the Arthur Whitney reference, I had not previously been aware of his work although I fiddled about with APL to teach maths years ago and have always liked the 'executable notation' idea. http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1531242 http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1531242 BC Is that advice you would give to practitioners: to throw out more? AW Yes, but in business it's hard to do that. BC Especially when it's working! AW But I love throwing it all out. It strikes me (as a non-programmer) that Moore and Whitney are working in well defined problem spaces. 'The art of the soluable' by Peter Medawar springs to mind (about scientific method).
      • gruseom 15y ago
        I'm glad you looked that up. More people need to know about Whitney. I wish he would open-source his work so we could learn from it. But why do you say they are working in well-defined problem spaces? No more well-defined than most, I would have thought. Certainly Moore was a pioneer of iterative development and evolving a program (and notation) in the direction of the problem. That's why he invented Forth in the first place. Edit: Oh, having looked up the Medawar reference I realize you probably mean "well-defined problem space" in the way a mathematician would: a problem space narrow enough to be effectively studied but rich enough to produce meaningful results. Certainly most software projects do not start out in such a space. On the other hand, we don't try to learn enough about our problems to find such spaces. We merely add code. One might almost say we excrete it.
        • keithpeter 15y ago
          Sorry, yes, I'm not a coder. Whitney is dealing with financial data sets of impressively huge sizes but he (to my limited knowledge) clearly understands the structure of the data and a range of queries at a deep level. Moore looks as if he his devising the hardware to run the code!
• sausagefeet 15y ago
  I don't get it? If he really hates the situation so much, why did he choose a language that makes it notoriously difficult to write quality software in and chose a concurrency style that is notoriously difficult to reason about?
  • abi 15y ago
    Your claim that JavaScript is "notoriously difficult to write quality software in" is unsubstantiated. Which language in your opinion makes it easy to write quality software in?
    • derefr 15y ago
      By the definition given in the article (just solve the user's problem, don't build a tower of abstractions): Forth.
    • rbranson 15y ago
      People only like JavaScript because they know it. Yes, it's more productive than Java because it's (barely) functional, but I personally believe the renewed love for JavaScript is mostly Stockholm Syndrome.
      • deleted 15y ago
        [deleted]
      • tom_b 15y ago
        I wonder if JavaScript is mainly loved for its frameworks and libraries? Without jQuery, node.js, etc., how many people would be singing its praise?
        • Jach 15y ago
          I believe since Java 6 (possibly 5), the JDK has come bundled with a minimal installation of Rhino which runs JS on the JVM. How many people actively use that? It's not hard to get going, 5 or less lines of code to start running a JS file and it will run everywhere with JRE >6. But there's no jQuery, etc. It's a somewhat nicer way to work with Java since you aren't forced into I-don't-care-about-it-exception-catching hell and Map<Map<Map<...>>> madness, but compared to Jython or Clojure it doesn't match up. You can get a headless jQuery working with Rhino, though it's not as simple as it should be.
• randall 15y ago
  Call it a noob mistake... but I recently wrote my own MVC framework on top of Express... and ended up never writing the app I originally intended to use it to write. I think a few months ago, this wouldn't have made sense to me, but now I totally get what he's saying. On my new app, I'm still using express to do most of the connect-ey stuff, but i've definitely decided that most MVC-ey frameworks are a premature optimization (for me). I'd rather just start with node + express, add in whatever DB I need (Redis / Mongo preferably) and build small and progressively. My lesson learned... would love to hear other opinions.
  • pyrotechnick 15y ago
    noob mistake There is very little value in trying to draw generalisations from past experiences when it comes to deciding whether to use a framework, and if so, which framework to use. Unless you're reinventing the wheel, each project will front you with a unique set of challenges. More often than not, with a framework, these problems are awkwardly solved with code written by other people to solve other people's problems. In my opinion all of this has less to do with what's trying to be achieved than it does with what you personally want to take away from the experience. If your motivation is to make money quickly to feed your family then you would be silly not to jump on something like Rails and ride on the shoulders of giants. On the other hand, if you want to become the most proficient programmer you can become then this path will probably lead you astray. A quick look around the internet reveals both tiny projects that fail, as well as enormous projects that succeed, on full-stack frameworks such as Rails. Needless to say if you're hacking on node you are of the latter category; The developer striving to broaden her horizons by exposing herself to the news and unknowns. This won't help you learn to work in a team on a large project. It wil not teach you to control complexity. In fact, it will probably lead you to believe you're learning all these things when you're in fact becoming comfortable with the complete opposite (working alone, hacking in anything, anywhere you feel like). Generalisations really piss me off. I whole-heartily encourage anyone who is open-sourcing node.js code to continue doing so. Even if it is Yet-Another MVC framework. Just take note of what ry is getting at here by keeping it mean and lean.
• limeblack 15y ago
  Agreed software is often way to complicated, especially Linux at some parts. Ultimately we are developing the software because of one simple thing. The user.
• _sh 15y ago
  Hear hear! As a software developer, my trade is a ghetto awash with all manner of amateur-hour charlatans and language silos that are tantamount to pistol-whipped lock-in (I'm looking at you node.js). If you take a step back, the entire ecosystem of 'software development' is a chattering tower of Babel, all sound and fury, signifying nothing. Programming languages, their frameworks, their libraries, their petty concerns are a mere vanity folly, riddled with re-invention, abstraction arcana, and deus-ex-machina hoopla. We have lost our way, straying so far from the path of the UNIX philosophy such that I must now 'whole-stack' an application instead of using the pipe character. A pox on the whole damned lot of it! Some days I just despair of all the time I've wasted bustling and jostling, crushed by the sweaty masses in the ghetto. But if I'm honest with myself, I must confess I love it too. I love my programming languages, my libraries, the eight different ways I know to full-text search, to regex, to parse, to lock, to async. I love the smell and heat of the coal-face, the futility of it all. Stockholm Syndrome indeed!
  • danssig 15y ago
    You had me until "straying so far from the path of the UNIX philosophy". UNIX is a huge part of the problem IMO. Worse is better. Systems like Linux are the enemy of progress because while they suck horribly, they work much better than some alternatives (not to mention any naMeS) and at least as good as others so why spend time actually doing things right? There is so much more that could be done with operating systems in any direction you want to go. I'm thankful that doing things on my iPad doesn't involve messing with command lines. But for when I want hackability I'd rather have what a Lisp machine could have become than a silly way to do functional programming in shell.
    • RyanMcGreal 15y ago
      Maybe the real problem isn't that UNIX/Linux suck, but rather that these are extremely hard problems and there are no easy solutions.
      • danssig 15y ago
        But UNIX/Linux does suck and few are going to work on these extremely hard problems because UNIX/Linux are good enough.
• supersillyus 15y ago
  Something something Plan 9 something something.
  • SimHacker 15y ago
    Something something stewing in their own juices for too long something something.
  • uriel 15y ago
    The people who created Plan 9 (and Unix) this days are working on something that has a better chance of blowing a hole through the huge mess that is modern software: Go ( http://golang.org http://golang.org ) I might be naive, but Go is the only thing that has given me some hope for the future of software development in recent times, it means there is a chance that maybe some day I will be able to write software in an environment and with tools that are not byzantine hideously insane piles of layers gratuitiously complex crud. Hell, with Go you completely bypass even libc (but unlike Plan 9, you still can take advantage of the hardware and software support of existing operating systems/kernels, that sadly are an unavoidable mess, which is one of the things that made it impossible to adopt in practice).
    • throwaway32 15y ago
      dont worry, GO will accrue its own layers of gratuitiously complex crud with time, indeed it already is.
      • uriel 15y ago
        If anything Go has become simpler and has removed crud since it was introduced. And that is precisely what gives me hope, Go is going against the trend of almost every other language.
    • throwaway32 15y ago
      dont worry, GO will accrue its own layers of gratuitiously complex crud with time, indeed it already has.
• sciurus 15y ago
  My interpretation of what Ryan is saying: Programming languages, libraries, and linux distributions are more complex than they should be. When you use them in your products, you contribute to the problem. When you're thinking about them, you're wasting your time because your users don't care about your tools. One day we'll decide it's easier to throw them all out and start over. Overall, I don't agree with this. Complexity arises because what we want to do is complicated. I don't think there's a way around that. Sometimes too much cruft builds up in an area, but that leads to redesigns of specific components. For example, client-side configuration of LDAP and Kerberos has been unreasonably complex for a long time. That didn't lead to people ditching them, that lead to https://fedorahosted.org/sssd/ https://fedorahosted.org/sssd/. It's likely that one day we will decide it's best to replace LDAP, just like was done with NIS. However, it won't mean we have to throw out all of linux. The "users don't care" argument doesn't appeal to me. I don't care what tools the architects used when they designed my apartment building, but if learning some complex math and geeking out over slide rules enabled them do it, I'm all for it. Being told there's something wrong with me because I've changed the settings in my text editor is insulting.
• typicalrunt 15y ago
  It's nice to hear someone well-respected say this, as I've been saying this for years and yet I get frowns from senior managers and programmers. I don't like magic in programming, yet nowadays there seems a move (especially in Ruby with the [over]use of method_missing) that encourages it.
  • ericb 15y ago
    I love magic! Every level of abstraction above binary code, from assembly, to C, to Ruby, to Rails DSL's--each works by creating magic incantations that let you run larger functionality with a new shorter series of magic words. Are you really against magic, or is it that you are against black magic (which I would classify as leaky abstractions)? http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.htm...
    • cousin_it 15y ago
      Sometimes the new magic incantation is longer than the old incantations it was based on, though. And slower. And harder to understand. And buggier. And doesn't expose important functionality, so you invent roundabout ways to access it. And when you put several abstractions on top of each other, you will eventually get all these problems combined. For example, try to draw a single black pixel on the screen... using JavaScript, or better yet, some language that compiles to JavaScript. How long would that take you? How many lines of code? How fast does it run? How much memory used by all subsystems combined? How many system calls involved? In assembly language that would be one instruction. And don't tell me that drawing single pixels is unimportant. I can show you any number of hackers who would create extremely cool webapps if drawing a pixel took one assembly instruction.
      • stan_rogers 15y ago
        Do not confuse the language with the environment in which it runs. The difficulty with pixel-poking isn't with JavaScript, it's with the environment. Give it another environment that allows the language direct access to the window (rather than to a DOM node nestled deep withing the bowels a parse tree which then needs to be rendered by a completely separate engine) then the difficulty would vanish. JavaScript may most typically run in a browser context, but the browser context is not JavaScript.
• kwamenum86 15y ago
  Thank you for pointing out the elephant.
• knieveltech 15y ago
  Holy shit, it isn't just me! I've been muttering for years to coworkers, colleagues and random acquaintances that elegance cannot be obtained by adding an additional layer of complexity, yet modern developers seem absolutely enamored of the kind of vile unnecessary complexity that comes with layered abstractions.
  • thewisedude 15y ago
    I couldn't agree more. In software engineering, I have seen people read books on design patterns and use it EVERYWHERE possible. Even the most simplest and straightforward development work is matched to a pattern and implemented as a design pattern. I think there should be a rule that says if your feature or a particular problem that you are trying to solve does not exceed XYZ lines of code, then it should never be implemented as a design pattern. Yet to determine XYZ. I would guess XYZ = 200?
    • knieveltech 15y ago
      tl;dr Get off my lawn! Right. Because current attitudes are that if you aren't developing everything purely object oriented with a design pattern or five using nosql for your data store you're a fucking imbecile. I shit you not I've seen a coworker spend half a day adding 800+ lines of get() and set() methods to a 150 line email script. The truly bizarre part is, it's not like he's stupid, or fresh out of school. The guy's a certifiable genius with six or seven years of industry experience under his belt. This kind of cargo cult bullshit is, in my opinion, the single largest recurring (recursive?) problem in our industry. Unfortunately this isn't a new problem. Every generation of programmers finds some set of development concepts to enshrine as the gospel.
• jfb 15y ago
  I am struggling to think of a single piece of software that I interact with in my day-to-day life that brings me pleasure. I suppose Emacs comes closest, but it's a hideous pile of hacks and YHWH help you if you want to get into the internals to start paying back the massive amount of technical debt. tsort. There we go. I don't hate tsort. pbcopy and pbpaste.
  • dkersten 15y ago
    I am struggling to think of a single piece of software that I interact with in my day-to-day life that brings me pleasure Games, a game delivery system like steam or perhaps vlc for playing my favorite music, but even then, its the music that makes me happy, not the program playing it... Ont he other hand, there is a lot of software that I actually hate.
    • jfb 15y ago
      I special case games because I play them on consoles and therefore have compartmentalized them as appliance functions, and not the massively complex pieces of software that they are. The list of software that I actively despise, however, is finite, but unbounded.
  • neilk 15y ago
    The iPhone is a miracle the size of a deck of cards. A lot of the standard apps are a joy to use. (The annoyances arise more from the business side than the nature of the software or the device itself.) I'm not an iPad user but it makes a lot of people pretty happy. Chrome is usually a pleasure to use. Firefox used to be that way, and they are starting to regain my trust again. I feel good about using Firebug as well. Skype has some irritations, but for the most part it's still marvelous to open up a video chat to fucking Zanzibar whenever I feel like it. vim is not always easy, but wow is it rock solid. Upgrading Debian works very well for me at least, thanks to the miracle of apt-get. Debian itself, well, it's not winning usability awards, but still....
    • bsergean 15y ago
• stephenjudkins 15y ago
  On one hand, I agree with him. The software ecosystems we work in have a whole lot of needless and incidental complexity. I could go on and on about the insanely and overly complicated things that developers -- especially ones like Ryan Dahl -- have to deal with all the time. On the other hand, it's arrogant for one to think that he or she could do it that much better than the next guy. Writing efficient, maintainable, and "simple" software requires adding layers of indirection and complexity. You have to use your best judgment to ask whether the new layer you're adding will make things ultimately cleaner and simpler for future generations of programmers, or will hang like a millstone around their necks for years to come. Let's try a little thought experiment: go back a few decades to the early 80s. Propose to build node.js as a tool to make it much easier for developers to write real-time network applications. You'll need to design a prototype-based dynamic language, itself an extremely difficult (and dare I say complicated) task. The implementation will need a garbage-collector, a delicate, complicated, and cumbersome piece of code to write. To make it acceptably fast, you'll need to write a JIT, which traces and profiles running code, then hot-swaps out JITted routines without missing a beat. You'll need to write a library which abstracts away event-based IO, like the "libev" node.js uses. That will require kernel support. Frankly, even forgetting about relative CPU power at the time, I think you'd be laughed out of the room for proposing this. All of these things, for production systems, were extremely speculative, "complicated" things at the time they were introduced. People can't predict the future, and they obviously have difficulty predicting what tools will become useful and simple, and which will become crufty tarpits of painful dependencies and incidental complexity. No one in 1988 could say "a dynamic, prototype-based, garbage-collected language paired with a simple event model will allow developers to create simple real-time network applications easily in 2011". Many of them probably had high hopes that C++ templates would deliver on the same vision by then. But, instead, we have Boost. Further, it's extremely arrogant of Dahl to create a dichotomy between those who "just don't yet understand how utterly fucked the whole thing is" and those, like him, with the self-proclaimed power of clear vision to see what will help us tame and conquer this complexity. Who knows, maybe in 15 years we'll be saddled with tons of crufty, callback-soup, unreliable node.js applications we'll all have to maintain. I don't think James Gosling envisioned the mess that "enterprise Java" became when he designed the initial simple language. Most developers do many of the things he cites, like adding "unnecessary" hierarchies to their project, because they believe it will help them in conquering complexity, and leave something simple and powerful for others to use down the line.
• jQueryIsAwesome 15y ago
  This may be the right place to say it: PHP... i love you!
  • patrickc 15y ago
    troll, perhaps? gave me a laugh
    • jQueryIsAwesome 15y ago
      The post is about how a programmer thinks that there is a lot of things that are more complicated than those should be; and even use web development as an example. PHP is a programming language with a lot of native functions to do things in the web that would be a lot harder otherwise... So, what is the trolling here? The lack of serious tone in the comment?
• rbranson 15y ago
  Rich Hickey really nailed the definitions of "complex" and "easy" and "simple" so well in his Strange Loop talk this year. Too bad there's only notes available right now: http://blog.markwshead.com/1069/simple-made-easy-rich-hickey/ http://blog.markwshead.com/1069/simple-made-easy-rich-hickey...
  • smtf 15y ago
    Fantastic. Thanks for that. Any idea if the whole talk is going to make it online soon? I'd be very interested in watching it.
    • rbranson 15y ago
      They shot videos of all of the talks. They took their sweet time getting them up last year though.
    • Alexandervn 15y ago
      This sounds great indeed. Would love to watch the video of this talk.
• tom_b 15y ago
  But isn't it neat how shit still works? Never fails to amaze me what users will do with a software tool. I've seen experienced devs and support staff run a C program written to parse some weird data against another data set in the vain hope that it would parse the new data set into something usable. I've seen MBAs who could barely tell you what a variable is write visual basic macros in Excel to do hardcore data management. Game devs who almost seemed to frickin' think in OpenGL. It is a big ball of mud (turtles all the way down, eh?), but on a good day, I listen to a hacker talk about finally getting that little piece of code beat into submission and it's very satisfying just to see that gleam in their eye.
  • regularfry 15y ago
    Shit still works in spite of the software stack, not because of it. Just how much reliance we put on autoconf really makes me shudder.
• jon6 15y ago
  The real problem is that tools and libraries are incredibly unforgiving. Not only do you have to understand 10-15 different technologies to make your project work, but you need to understand them all extremely well which is a huge barrier to entry. I don't know a whole lot about rails, so this is conjecture, but I imagine this is why ruby on rails is so popular: you don't need to know very much to get it going.
• tmsh 15y ago
  Increasingly, the key is to main orthogonality towards your problem solving (like an eagle) within the decaying confines of a semi-bloated (often mostly educational in terms of what not to do) ecosystem. Which means rewriting crufty pieces of your stack when certain thresholds occur. 'There will come a point where the accumulated complexity of our existing systems is greater than the complexity of creating a new one' -- is something that happens in motion, iteratively, and which you do when you have time at all levels of the evolution that we call development. Anyway, that's my two cents. Nice others are on the same wavelength, I think.
  • mturmon 15y ago
    People don't think of software ecosystems as quasi-organic things. To be regarded the same way as a long relationship with a cranky friend, maintaining an aging specimen tree, or a historic house. Do you cut the branch off, or just prune it back a little?
• click170 15y ago
  This reads too much like a rant for my liking. I get why complexity is disliked(/feared?) by some people, but unless you've got a better workable solution that you're ready for me to try out, your rant is just noise to me. I've often found myself begrudged by the complexity of a piece of software, but that doesn't make me think we should throw the entire program out. How about we make it easier to use instead?
  • david927 15y ago
    He's saying we've become the proverbial frog in the boiling water. The inability to abstract well has made any medium-to-large software project a Rube Goldberg contraption. You may not mind it -- but you should. Because it's silly. Because it's stupid. And recognizing that fact is the first step towards our recovery.
    • click170 15y ago
      I do notice the growing complexity in the systems around me, I just wish more people would present solutions instead of just gawking at problems. Pointing your finger and making noise will draw attention to the issue, but isn't likely to fix it on it's own.
• sciurus 15y ago
  Things Ryan Dahl hates: dbus /usr/lib Boost ioctls SMF signals volatile variables prototypal inheritance C99 dpkg autoconf LD_LIBRARY_PATH /usr zombie processes bash tab completion dynamic linking static linking glib the details of programming languages formatting source code configuring window managers configuring editors unicode directory hierarchies
  • deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  • pyrotechnick 15y ago
    Don't forget node.js -- "Node is fucked too. I am also one of these people adding needless complexity."
  • bobbyi 15y ago
    He lost me at tab completion
  • david927 15y ago
    As he should. These things are all stupid. They're monstrously stupid minutiae that you shouldn't have to know about unless the abstraction somehow leaks. What he's saying is, "Where are better abstraction mechanisms?" And that's a tremendously important question (whether you get it or not).
    • ericHosick 15y ago
      I really agree with this. There are better abstraction mechanisms.
    • Jach 15y ago
      It may be a good question, but asking it and then ignoring it by not throwing out ideas for discussion is almost as useless as not asking it at all. e.g. regarding volatile: http://www.bluebytesoftware.com/blog/2010/12/04/SayonaraVolatile.aspx http://www.bluebytesoftware.com/blog/2010/12/04/SayonaraVola...
    • 15y ago
• Goladus 15y ago
  This is just raw pessimism, you could rant like this about anything. I hate all cars, especially my own. I hate that heavy, dangerous, gas-guzzling honda civic with an over-sensitive brake pedal and enormous, completely pointless blind spots over both shoulders. I hate filling it up with gas, which is expensive, smelly, and bad for the environment. I hate the dishes that I have to wash every day after I use them. I hate my Aeron chair that I sit in all day long. I hate peeling grapefruit. I hate the sound of my central air conditioning fan powering up. I hate how I'm either sore from working out or depressed from not working out. There's nothing wrong with a rant now and again but let's recognize it for what it is. Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.
  • thehotdon 15y ago
    Software really is sort of a special case though. Most of the problems you mentioned are at least partially caused by the constraints and resources of our physical environment. However, the complexity of software is almost entirely generated by human ineptitude. The one exception might be complexity caused by necessary optimization for hardware limitations, which would in fact explain some of problems cited in the blog post.
    • aidenn0 15y ago
      Unix (for example) was most certainly designed around the constraints of hardware at the time. Furthermore it is a physical limitation for how much software you can write (and have it work) if you can get something that "mostly works" by building on top of yesterday's cruft then you do it, since the alternative is starting over from scratch and not being able to finish.
    • JVirissimo 15y ago
      Time is a constraint and mental effort is a resource of our physical environment.
      • polynomial 15y ago
        > mental effort is a resource of our physical environment. One of the more intriguing comments I've seen on HN. Care to elucidate?
• robbles 15y ago
  To some degree, I can agree with Ryan here that a lot of software these days is unnecessarily complex. However, I also think that his view is biased because he works on a project that is responsible for a great deal of abstraction. The average Javascript developer using node.js DOES NOT have to "deal with DBus and /usr/lib and Boost and ioctls and SMF and signals and volatile variables and prototypal inheritance and _C99_FEATURES_ and dpkg and autoconf", because Ryan and other node.js devs already have thought about it for them, and introduced a helpful and practical layer of abstraction on top of all this complexity. As a result of having to think about it all day, every day however, it's understandable that Ryan would despise this kind of stuff. On the other hand, as a web developer that uses the result of his hard work, I am not affected by it at all, so the complexity of my work is substantially reduced.
  • david927 15y ago
    The complexity of your work (as I assume a web developer) is substantially reduced to only HTML, CSS (and its various implementations on various browsers), Javascript, the modeling language you use, the framework you use, the database, SQL, ... Should I go on? It's all shit. Not just what he deals with.
• corysama 15y ago
  I'd be interested in Dahl's (or your) opinion of Alan Kay's STEPS project in this context. "For example, essentially all of the standard personal computing graphics can be created from scratch in the Nile language in a little more than 300 lines of code. Nile itself can be made in little over 100 lines of code in the OMeta metalanguage, and optimized to run acceptably in real-time (also in OMeta) in another 700 lines. OMeta can be made in itself and optimized in about 100 lines of code." http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2010004_steps10.pdf http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2010004_steps10.pdf and, btw: https://github.com/tristanls/ometa-js-node https://github.com/tristanls/ometa-js-node
  • eterps 15y ago
    I am also interested in what others think of this project, I don't understand why this project isn't more popular.
    • loup-vaillant 15y ago
      http://vpri.org/videos/yahiko_mem_video.html http://vpri.org/videos/yahiko_mem_video.html (21:40 to 24:15) Most people won't change their mind about anything, unless everyone else already did. Therefore, (Kay concludes at 24:00), truly new ideas take at least 30 years to become popular. STEPS is too young. At this pace, wait for at least 20 years.
    • ippisl 15y ago
      In order to make some project popular, you need to show it's powerful in doing REAL work. Ruby on rails did it for ruby. Paul Graham's success and writing did help lisp. Is there some similar proof for ometa ?
  • loup-vaillant 15y ago
    This bit isn't the most impressive. Self-compiling languages are worthless until they implement something else. And it happen that IS (OMeta + Javascript + Nile), does implement more than itself. On top of it, they implemented: - TCP-IP in 200 lines. Current C implementation use 10Kloc (50 times more). - Most of Cairo's functionality in 500 lines. And it's fast enough. Cairo on the other hand weighs about 40Kloc. (Again, about 50 times more code.) And that's for functionality they couldn't scrap altogether, or merge those with similar capabilities. For instance, you don't want to send emails, or publish a web page, or print a PDF, or, goodness forbid, a Word document. You just want to handle a fucking document. Send it, publish it, whatever, this is all glorified text (you do need the glorification, though). The bottom line is, Alan Kay and his team rule.
• swah 15y ago
  I hate how concrete just doesn't dry instantaneously, and also how you have to mix the right proportions of each thing to get the stuff working.
  • wladimir 15y ago
    Good analogy, it reminded me of teen angst. The Livejournal version of this rant would have been: "I hate how the world is so complicated, with relationships and stuff and politics and law and technology, why don't people in this time just behave simple. Animals have done so for millions of years, and the only thing that matters is that things are simple and understandable to me. I don't care about history and mathematics why, ohhh why doesn't the world simply do what I want !!!" Software needs to be complicated because the tasks that it performs are complicated. The only way human programmers can deal with this is abstraction on abstraction on abstraction. This will only becomes worse as software handles more "real world" things such as formerly hardware tasks. Unnecessary software complexity is added due to maintenance, where the maintainers added extra complexity because they weren't able to integrate the changes into the current design and/or didn't understand it well enough. Probably a better job could be done with better tools/documentation in this case. Not by ranting at developers though. His rant about UNIX is crazy. Any full-featured operating system necessarily is complex under the hood. If something randomly doesn't work in his favorite OS he also has to spend hours googling, diving into obscure settings managers, etc.
  • david927 15y ago
    But we can build big buildings. Large projects tend to fall in on themselves.
• roxtar 15y ago
  Complex BAD. Simple GOOD. Move on with your lives.
• rboyd 15y ago
  Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.
• mcantor 15y ago
  It would be ironic if the "just solve the fucking problem, damn the details" attitude espoused in this post is the reason everything is so fucking complicated. (I honestly am not trying to imply that that is the case; I'm just musing.)
  • narag 15y ago
    I've got the impression that the attitude is more like "carefully mind the details, so your users don't have to and they can just solve their fucking problem". If you program tools for other programmers, your users are also programmers, but don't assume they have your same background and are willing to mess with the same problems as you. Designing and programming a tool that abstract the details from users is not more difficult, but it's very tedious. Just giving out meaningful and accurate error messages has a huge effect.
• Detrus 15y ago
  Is it because there are so many programmers? Doesn't he hate that a 50,000 LOC VM linked to C++ libraries is more popular than a 8,000(?) LOC language that solves the same problems and more? It doesn't matter for most end users but it sucks to be the one to deal with V8's GC, lack of continuations, design by committee language, etc. But there are more bodies in his corner, dealing with that complexity.
• ender7 15y ago
  I've been tempted to write rants like this before. Ryan's point seems particularly centered around Unix, which makes sense. My experience of trying to get stuff done in Unix has taught me that it is a really powerful, extremely well-thought-out way to waste my fucking time. All of it. Down the fucking toilet, and for stuff I don't give a shit about. Every single goddamn thing I try to accomplish while setting up a server involves a minimum of 1 hour of googling and tinkering. Installing PHP? Did you install it the right way? Did you install the special packages that make it secure and not mastadon slow? You want to create a daemon process? Hope you found the right guide! Setting up a mail sever? Kill yourself. For some people, this is not the case. They have spent multiple decades breathing in the Unix environment, and are quite good at guessing how the other guy probably designed his system. And they don't mind spending the majority of their productive hours tinkering with this stuff. But I don't have time. I don't care. I don't have time to read your 20-page manual/treatise on a utility that doesn't explain how to actually use the thing until page 17. I don't want to figure out why your project doesn't build on my machine because I'm missing some library that you need even though I have it installed but some bash variable isn't set and blah blah blah blah. The problem with Unix is that it doesn't have a concept of a user. It was not designed that way. It was designed for the people who programmed it. Other pieces were designed for the people who programmed them. If you are using a piece that you built, then you are a user. Otherwise you are a troublesome interloper, and the system is simply waiting in a corner, wishing you would go away. And yet...we put up with it. Because there isn't a better option. Because it's our job. Because we'd rather just bull through and get things done than spend an infinite amount of time fixing something that isn't fixable. Life sucks, but NodeJS is pretty cool.
  • clark-kent 15y ago
    Unix is very easy if you take time to learn it. Most things behave the same way.
    • knieveltech 15y ago
      Demonstrably untrue based on two and a half decades of experience. At least chasing lib dependencies for 18 hours during the config/make/make install process is mostly a thing of the past.
• akent 15y ago
  He had me until the last paragraph... "if you spend time configuring your window manager or editor..." If you don't take the time to configure your editor properly I do not want to collaborate with you on anything. Ever.
  • backprojection 15y ago
    If there was a 'proper' way to configure your editor, then that proper way would be the default.
    • Despite 15y ago
      The implication is 'proper for you'. One size fits all ... doesn't. But everyone should shape his tools to fit himself.
    • jamesbritt 15y ago
      If there was a 'proper' way to configure your editor, then that proper way would be the default. There's a proper way to tailor a suit, but no one expects an off-the-rack suit to fit everyone. Some people want computers and software to be just like household appliances, but seem oblivious to the rants people have about appliances (stupid settings, no way way to config, lowest-common-denominator, one-size-firs-none, yadda yadda yadda). Yeah, I get pissed at computers and software at times, but other times I'm awestruck at just what amazing things we can do. Overall, we're winning.
    • thwarted 15y ago
      "proper" in this context is how you configure it, not how it is configured. (That seems like it should have a "confucius say" or something prefixing it).
• astrofinch 15y ago
  And yet nontrivial things can be built in 48 hours. The results of modern software development speak for themselves. One of the biggest things I learned from reading a few chapters of The Mythical Man–Month was what software development used to be like.
• ww520 15y ago
  Making things simple takes a lots of work. Things are complex because the problems are complicated. That's why you got paid the big bucks.
• pyrotechnick 15y ago
  Somebody needs a hug...
• barrkel 15y ago
  This is hopelessly naive. The reason that the whole stack of a solution isn't in proportion to the problem it solves is that we have more than one problem, and the only way to scale our manpower to all these problems is share some of the common bits in the solutions. This sharing creates new abstraction boundaries, increases the number of concepts and moving parts, and there are lots of compromises involved in reusing a common part compared with crafting something small and simple specific to the task at hand. But if you didn't do this, you'd have lots of duplication of similar, but not quite identical work, like a pre-industrial society; a massively inefficient use of human labour.
  • sofal 15y ago
    You're absolutely right of course, but I don't think this is hopelessly naive, especially coming from such a respected developer. I see it more as a nice, bite-sized rant that lets off some steam, makes us laugh at ourselves, and has a nice bite of truth to it. I see it as cathartic rather than ignorant.
    • barrkel 15y ago
      I still think it's immature. It takes time before you accept these kinds of things, the larger part of the world outside your control, that you only become properly aware of as you get older; fighting against it is like fighting against the tide. Fixing the systemic inefficiencies can only be done incrementally, but this rant literally suggests flushing the whole thing down the toilet at some point, and that's just childish. You can't pause the world while you rebuild everything; it would take far too long to get to something better than what you're trying to replace. You can only repair one or two things at a time, and hopefully leave the world better for it; but the mindset espoused in the rant is more likely to result in a half-baked start on something new, but abandoned when the scope of the whole problem is fully perceived.
      • nightski 15y ago
        I don't know, there may come a time. If we were to replace the current system, then yes that would be impossible/waste of time. But what if an architecture came about built on AI? Maybe quantum computing? DNA based computers? Eventually there will be new hardware platforms that force the very change you are dismissing. Even if it is 25-50 years from now which is a blink of an eye in the grand scheme of things.
• statictype 15y ago
  I think I disagree with what he's saying here. When someone takes pride in their craft and craftmanship, that care and thoughtfulness tends to bubble up to the surface for users. You can see the difference between a chair made by hand by a carpenter who wanted to make the perfect chair and one made by a carpenter who wanted to get it over with. Now on the other hand, you have two extreme ends: 1) The 'architect' who creates 4 layers of class hierarchies and factory-factories 2) And the guy who doesn't indent his code and types all of it in notepad.exe I guess the key is to take pride and put thoughtfulness into what you do without losing sight of the fact that there's a end-user at the end who needs to use your work.
• abalone 15y ago
  Nice drunk post.
• wickedchicken 15y ago
  Ever go through somebody's code, see some weird construct, go "this person is an idiot!," rewrite it, and find some edge case bug that the original code was written to handle? The original author had many of the same ambitions as you, and you relearned all the same lessons she did -- the hard way. Recognizing and curtailing this impulse leads you toward enlightenment.
  • deleted 15y ago
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  • epo 15y ago
    If the original programmer fixed some edge case and didn't bother to flag this in the code by means of comments then they worse than an idiot, they are incompetent. As would be the second programmer if they neglected any such comments which were there.
    • cbs 15y ago
      >If the original programmer fixed some edge case and didn't bother to flag this in the code by means of comments then they worse than an idiot, they are incompetent If every reason for every fix based on an unanticipated logic path was commented, there would be 10x more comments than code.
• skrebbel 15y ago
  I can't relate to this at all. I hardly ever run into the problems he describes. I usually just start Visual Studio, create a project, import some NuGet packages and off I go. (No, that wasn't a "my framework/platform is better"-rant - JVM IDEs + Maven can do essentially the same thing) Point is, I don't even know what autoconf is, and I like to keep it that way. Only a tiny fraction of us have to make Node/Java/.NET/Ruby+Rails+Rack+etc. All the rest can just go and solve problems. These tools really do abstract away from accumulated platform complexity. They add a little on their own (like $NODE_PATH), but that's on the platform level too, the level i don't care about anyway. I have npm, you know.
  • dasil003 15y ago
    You're not doing system programming. On a platform-related side note: if you're not using UNIX then it's going to be pretty hard to run into the described issues. When you go with a proprietary developer platform like Visual Studio you are outsourcing a lot of little headaches to Microsoft whose job it becomes to make your life easier. The problem is if Microsoft decides to drop their clue off in the weeds somewhere you have to either start writing pleading letters to Ballmer or make a huge jump to some other platform. In UNIX you suffer a steady string of little headaches, but you have the open source ecosystem to back you up, so with enough persistence there is almost nothing that you can't solve.
    • skrebbel 15y ago
      Thanks at least for responding. The other thumb-downers were too much in a hurry to, apparently. I know I'm not doing system programming. My point is that a very small minority of programmers is doing system programming. And if you're not part of that minority, software isn't at all as bad as Dahl describes. In fact, it got super many enablers for free, without many corresponding headaches, over the last 10 years or so. There are a lot of real decent high level tools. Most of the Java ecosystem is open source, btw, and it has comparably easy high level tools as Visual Studio / .NET. Eclipse and NetBeans are real decent and open source, and so are Maven and all tooling for the cool JVM languages (i.e. not Java). I don't think my point applies to proprietary platforms like .NET only. In fact Node is quickly becoming an equally cool platform. Big load of open source libraries, robust and dependable core engine, thriving community, excellent package management, etc. Nothing there to hate. I daresay Ryan Dahl hates software for us so we don't have to.
• KirinDave 15y ago
  This has all the signatures of a bad day barfed out as incoherent rage on a keyboard. I've been there, and I can day with the auhtority of experience: Ryan Dahl will regret this post for years to come.
  • david927 15y ago
    That's because you have simply no idea what he's talking about. Alan Kay once said, "Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves."
    • arethuza 15y ago
      I'm pretty sure Egyptian pyramids are made of fairly substantial chunks of stone, probably weren't built by slaves and as they are nearly 5000 years old they surely must have rather a lot of structural integrity. NB I've been to the center of Khafra's pyramid at Giza and I'm pretty sure that I wouldn't have done this if it hadn't exhibited rather a lot of structural integrity.
      • david927 15y ago
        So... you're defending that type of architecture? Reading these other comments here, you're not alone it seems. No wonder we're in the mess we're in. Why bother looking for constructs like the arch? You want a big building? Just pile rocks in a heap. PS. yes, yes, yes, there is irony in Dr. Kay's quote in that the Giza pyramids are of almost magical construction. He meant it metaphorically.
        • KirinDave 15y ago
          Wait... what? Dude, the invention of the arch was a big deal, and it came later. Forgive the Egyptians for their inability to do calculus; they were still thinking of shapes in terms of knotted rope. The great irony of this conversation and its genesis is that it comes from the author of a server-side programming platform who's good points include, "No new techniques required, you already know javascript" and that touts a decades-old cooperative-multitasking approach as "simple" when the end result for the programmer is anything but.
• david927 15y ago
  I'm shocked that about 90% of comments are bashing Ry. If it's not obvious to you that writing software sucks, it's because you haven't swallowed the red pill. You are not enlightened. What he says disturbs you and discomforts you because you've built your life on the blue pill notion that writing software is supposed to look something like this -- that memorizing the minutiae is justified and even somehow noble. You're tempted to criticize because someone told you growing up that you're a unique little snowflake and your opinion is worthwhile whether it's qualified or not. This is Ry. And his sentiment is echoed by the greats, like Alan Kay and others. Listen for a second (and you can't listen if you're already babbling your unintelligible knee-jerk response).
  • klez 15y ago
    Thanks, Morpheus Durden
    • david927 15y ago
      You're welcome. Actually, the snowflake thing was Bill Hicks before it was Tyler Durden. And, OK, I was a bit hard, but I can't stand the Oprah Effect: here is an important, deep topic, now let's ask some unqualified, uninformed people for their opinion. I browsed the comments and only saw a litany of shallow, and frankly stupid, replies. Since when did HN become Reddit? Which then begs: Is it time for me to go?
      • klez 15y ago
        Obviously jocking (and I must admit I don't know who Bill Hicks is). Anyway, I see your point.
        • david927 15y ago
          No worries. Cheers.
• praptak 15y ago
  'On the chosen day, the young and inexperienced programmer realizes that what he has constructed is simply a different collection of rubbish, mud and offal than that used by the previous tower. 7. Codethulu looks on, and says: "Now you have become one of us."' http://codethulu.org http://codethulu.org
• mkramlich 15y ago
  I think his rant is both brilliant and incredibly naive and confused. Let me explain. He's right about the fight against unnecessary complexity. He's right about how ultimately the enduser's experience is king. But he's objecting to a lot of the complexity that lies behind that UX facade. Because that's exactly what that UX is: a facade. It's an abstraction. And one that sometimes leaks. The iPhone is loved because of it's UX. But inside, behind the screen, it's not a box of mostly empty air and perhaps a little magical fairy who blows kisses and VOILA! the UX is delivered. It doesn't work like that. There are moving parts, both physical and virtual, a lot of them, that must be complex because they have real world constraints they MUST satisfy which your own mental model or messy subconscious human desires don't have to satisfy. The little girl wants a pony and SHE WANTS IT RIGHT NOW, DADDY! But her father lives closer to reality. He can't just wave a magic wand and give her a pony. It takes time. It takes money. You have to find a pony. Get it. Where do you keep it? Who feeds it? Shelters it? Can we afford it? Or are we just going to let it starve after the little girl gets bored playing with it? These are all the niggling little details that lie around the edges and behind the scenes when trying to satisfying this little girl's desire for a pony immediately. It is good to satisfy and deliver a desired experience. It is dumb and naive to think it only takes the wave of a magic wand or the press of a button. Yes we can provide a button you can press to make that pony appear. We can. That's just straightforward engineering and entrepreneurship. But there's going to be a lot of complexity and ugly moving parts, some with sharp edges, or unpleasant chemical properties, or esoteric technical jargon, under the hood, to make that button press deliver.
• strmpnk 15y ago
  While I sympathize with the general frustration, this sort of rant gets us nowhere. It's sad to see such a brilliant mind lost in rage. Systems programming has always been the code that most people won't tackle because the problems are ugly (thus the label systems programming). I really dislike autotools but I am not really up to resolving that problem, so I'll leave it to those that do. Pretty simple conclusion. When people with the guts to go in and replace these tools come around, I try to support them, but bashing others doesn't magically make that happen. The claim that people who build on top of these systems are making problems worse. You could say the same thing about the users of that software then. There should be no hate for the act of construction. Destructive negativity is just a waste of time unless you want to lead people somewhere to construct again, and this post doesn't do much but hate. I'd favor suggestion over damnation. Don't hate people for building, encourage them to build something better!
  • gruseom 15y ago
    Well, as Bakunin said, the passion for destruction is also a creative passion. This isn't really rage and hate. You're taking the words too literally. It's the frustration of being able to feel clearly that there ought to be a simpler way, that there is a simpler way, while at the same time being caught in a sticky spider web and unable to do much about it. You know what I bet is driving this? The realization that Node.js itself has turned out way too complicated. It ought to be a nice library to provide non-blocking I/O and networking APIs to V8 apps. Now it's becoming Rails at one end and an operating system at the other. (I don't mean to pick on Node. It's valuable and I use it. My point is that we are all the sorcerer's apprentice, and runaway complexity will always be the default unless ruthlessly counteracted. It wasn't counteracted in Node's case, and since Ryah is a true hacker I imagine that he has the taste to know it. Indeed he says as much in the OP.)
    • strmpnk 15y ago
      It's not Ryan's passion I'm critical about. It's the fact that he's blasting anyone who doesn't fit in his view of right as "you don't understand how fucked the whole thing is." That's quite an ego to assume anyone who doesn't agree must be ignorant.
• gabi38 15y ago
  What he has against BOOST?if any, Boost helps eliminating deps. Without it one would need to use multiple libs from different places to achieve common things like shared pointers etc. Not to mention most of it is just header files.
• jvehent 15y ago
  This is what happens when developers want to do sysadmin. Come on guys, we, sysadmin, spent as much time learning our job as your learned coding. If we would be trying to code, we would be lost and pissed off. That's why we don't do it. The OS is not wrong, what is wrong is you imagining that every system should be as simple as "right click / start". If you want that, take the Heroku/<you PaaS here> route and you'll be happy. But the day you have 5000 customers connecting at the same second and your environment collapses because you don't have the flexibility to tune it, don't come crying.
  • tedjdziuba 15y ago
    Seriously. This whole thread smells of butthurt software developers who just found out that Linux is hard because it doesn't have a Mac GUI on top of it.
• MortenK 15y ago
  I really wouldn't know about the specific Unix related points, but his frustration is easily recognized in my current work on MS enterprise applications. The actual solution is a desktop client and a web application used for simple CRUD purposes, each with around 10 screens / pages. We have a huge suite of tests. We have a large amount of different layers. Gigantic amounts of interfaces inheriting from interfaces, and being passed around as parameters. Partial classes, with implementation spread out all around the application. Everything grandly designed according to design patterns, and every piece of code positioned in the smallest possible unit. Everything in the front end is a user control. In theory this gives us extreme extensibility, flexibility and code reuse. From an academics stand point, it's well designed according to best practice. In reality, it is completely and utterly obfuscating the actual code that get things done. Adding another db field to the UI requres modification of data-access layer, business object layer, changes to 2-3 different types of interfaces, additional code to a type conversion class, initialization code in the front-end, additional display logic to a user control, extra custom validation logic etc etc. I really feel with the author, and can unfortunately confirm it's often the same shit no matter what software you are dealing with.
• adabsurdo 15y ago
  as far as unix is concerned, i would say a huge part of the complexity of those systems comes from insisting that dependencies be installed, and shared, system-wide. This approach comes from a time when disk space was very expensive. Hence the need for those super-complex make/configure/install/apt stacks, LIBRARY_PATH, etc. IMO you could simplify things a lot with a distro that only shared, say, the kernel/module/libc layer, plus a package management system. Beyond that, each packages would manage its dependencies, and install them under its own root directory - so you have only the package maintainer to blame if something is missing. This would give an application much more control in how to configure itself. It would also have the added benefit of super simple uninstall - just delete the app's directory, just like on osx.
  • danssig 15y ago
    Yes, OS X got this very right. It's really nice when some big library gets upgraded I don't have to worry that half the applications of my system have to be simultaneously upgraded.
• andos 15y ago
  It's only fair that we, developers, start suffering a little from the poor state of system software usability after inflicting so much pain on our users.
• alok-g 15y ago
  "Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler" - Einstein. Amen! >> There will come a point where the accumulated complexity of our existing systems is greater than the complexity of creating a new one. When that happens all of this shit will be trashed. Amen! (Include with complexity above the complexities of real life like project schedules, time-to-market, ..., ultimately economics.) Ryan claims that the systems are still complex, which suggests that the accumulated complexity (including project schedules) has NOT exceeded the complexities of creating a new one in general. Having said this, what is Ryan really saying that tells us something we did not know before! A tacit aspect of the whole argument is that the people are intelligent enough to judge complexity to make rational decisions, and would be able to find a simple solution when creating a new one when even with all the new understanding gained with experience, the new solution will still be very complex (just simpler than the existing one). This is to an extent analogous to the rational market hypothesis, and that I doubt to be true. Next Ryan may propose a new system that will be written from scratch to satisfy his no-overly-complex goal. Only to find that the new software runs on the top of existing hardware which is immensely complex. Oh, then he thinks about developing hardware again too. Only to find that hardware development is immensely complex (EDA tools for example). Oh, then he thinks about developing them again too. He now concludes that the accumulated complexity hasn't yet become too high after all. After taking all of that into account and if that is not complex by itself, find something intermediate level (say a programming language) that has less complexity at that level (going deeper would increase complexity) and build something on the top of it. But isn't this what all of us already do?
• chibea 15y ago
  Isn't he dismissing culture with his rant? Culture as the currently common way to do and describe things? He seems to imply that there could be an easier, more straight-forward way to describe things in some more common language. And that while he doesn't give any evidence how the current ways are overly complex. Of course, there is broken or outdated software, and some things were crap from the start. Of course, there are always concrete things to improve but you won't get anywhere by dismissing all of it and starting anew. For me, understanding the current state as part of our culture and our humanity and improving gradually on it, has guided me well in the past.
• rubergly 15y ago
  I really don't understand how "configuring a text editor" implies that "you don't understand that the only thing that matters in software is the experience of the user". Good user experiences can only be written if you haven't customized your text editor to be more efficient?
  • aboodman 15y ago
    I interpret it this way: As programmers, it is easy for us to get wrapped up in the act of programming, and to forget about the point of programming: to solve problems as quickly, cheaply, robustly, and maintainably as possible. Software development is all about tradeoffs, and some amount of environment configuration is undoubtedly a good thing. Just like some abstractions are good, some design patterns are good, etc. But you have to be honest with yourself about whether the investment you are making learning and building additional complexity is really paying dividends, or if it's just fun to play with. An alternate interpretation is that nobody should need to configure an editor. Editors should work already. It's 2011. If you like doing this and don't see that you should be spending your time more productively, you are part of the problem.
• emehrkay 15y ago
  I could imagine the hoops that he has to jump through to get things working correctly under both windows and *nix environments
• parfe 15y ago
  I'm not sure why people expect software beyond Solitaire, Pidgin or Thunderbird to be any easier to configure or maintain than, say, changing the spark plugs in your car. Or harder yet, diagnosing the issue as the spark plugs to begin with. Cars have been around for a hundred years and they can still present a challenge to even highly skilled and trained mechanics. Manage your expectations when you try to do something you aren't an expert in and you won't be disappointed.
• josiahq 15y ago
  "The only thing that matters in software is the experience of the user." Amen.
• divtxt 15y ago
  [mild rant] Usability discussions like this invariably fill me with rage because of how oblivious and dismissive some of the comments are. They might as well say: No Wireless. Less Space Than A Nomad. Lame. You'd think people would know better after 10 years & $350B in market cap!
• brianshumate 15y ago
  When discussing this with a colleague, I was reminded of: http://neugierig.org/content/unix/ http://neugierig.org/content/unix/
• peterwwillis 15y ago
  Unix software was created by developers, mainly for developers. They honestly don't care if it's hard to set up. I'm not justifying it, i'm just explaining it. Operating Systems make all of this much simpler by setting it up for you. Try to use only what they give you and you will go a lot farther with less effort. Buck the system and you're in for a world of hurt. There's a better way to go about it. It's called: PAY FOR YOUR SOFTWARE. Then you might get support too. You want it for free, you bet your ass it's going to be painful to use. By the way, I don't know who this Ryan Dahl guy is, but it strikes me as very naive to consider that groking the entire inner-workings of the complete organization of an operating system - from the development tools to make it to the execution and use of its applications - should somehow be simple for anyone. I wonder if he'd bitch that the kernel is hard to modify without affecting another component, or that different versions of software may not have been written to be completely backwards compatible with one another? This is the real world. This shit is complicated because it evolved that way. It's almost infinitely flexible and powerful and gives you everything you need to do what you have to do - and you complain that it's complex? Grow up.
• Hisoka 15y ago
  Having just wasted a day trying to install ImageMagick (with no success), I have to agree. I just want to freaking resize images, I don't give a DAMN about installing prerequisites or dynamically linking so and so. I just want a simple API that I call to resize image with a width and height.
• charlieok 15y ago
  I think part of the problem is that many of these issues are left to "distributions" and "repositories". Some guy releases a library or application, then it gets packaged one way into .debs, another way into .rpms, another into macports. Maybe the author does this work, maybe more likely distribution maintainers do it. Or in the world of a specific programming language, there is a similar story with a language specific packaging system. Maybe it gets packaged as a gem, or a jar, or an egg, or a module, or maybe the new node package manager. Often, installing a package involves spreading its contents around. Some of it goes in /var, some goes in /opt, some goes in /etc. Who knows where else? Many of the reasons for the unix directory layout don't apply for most people today. How many people even know what those directories' purposes are? How many have actually read the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard document? Typically, those directories were established so that sysadmins could save storage space by sharing files between sets of machines (the word "share" seems to have about a dozen different meanings in these discussions). So you slice it one way so that machines with different architectures can "share" the contents of /usr/share, and you slice it another way so that things that change can be backed up more often, so they get thrown together in /var (and then you can mount /usr read-only!) Most of these considerations are not worth the effort for most people. I think they are outdated. We don't generally have these directories mounted on separate partitions. We just back up the whole damn hard drive when we need a backup. Here's an idea: a package should be a directory tree that stays together. Each programming language should not have its own separate packaging system. A package should be known by the url where the author publishes it. That author should also declare his/her package's dependencies by referring to other packages by their urls. Then you don't need dependency resolution systems that function as islands unto themselves (one for debian, another for node etc). Software is published on the web, in things like git or mercurial or subversion repositories. These have conventions for tagging each version. The conventions are gaining adoption (see semver.org for example) but not fast enough. Some middle layers just add friction to the process: distributing tarfiles, distributing packages to places like rubygems or cpan or npmjs.org. Developers usually want the source straight from the source anyway -- users might as well use a setup that very closely mirrors developers'. If you want to add a package into your system, the only piece of information you should need is the url for the project's main repository, with an identifier for the exact release you need. That's a naming system shared by the entire web. If there are issues, that information can go from the user directly to the author, with no layers in between. Apple has a great install/uninstall process for many applications: you move them to the applications folder, or you drag them out of the applications folder into the trash. We need to strive for this level of simplicity. Deployed software should have the same structure as the package distributed by the developer, in almost all cases.
• dtbx 15y ago
  But this is what we have, and I am Candid, so I believe that this is the best possible world. What does the author of this essay wants? A mind-reading machine? I RTFM, so I don't complain. In my archlinux netbook there is plenty of room for creativity, and amazement, and fun. I love what I have. Besides of that, is free, and I can hack it.
• thewisedude 15y ago
  I dont think he hates software....he seems to hate the unnecessary steep learning curve that he is faced with when he is out to do something simple with an existing platform like unix. I think this argument is perfectly sound. As a software developer, there are times when I wanted to do something simple using a particular framework, and I was faced with a steep learning curve to achieve it. Note here that I was not trying to use the fanciest features of the framework, but the most simplest of it.
• kelnos 15y ago
  This pisses me off a bit, actually. Basically, he's ripping on every developer who ever wrote any code. Ok, I'm sure there are a few he'd be happy with, but his comments do sound all-encompassing. And then he somehow tries to make it "better" by ripping on himself, too, saying he's a part of the problem. Um, no, being self-deprecating in the same way that you're insulting everyone else does not magically make it ok for you to insult everyone else. I've been using Linux (and a couple UNIXes on and off) for a little over 10 years. So I can get around a UNIX-like system pretty well. A lot of things are easy, and a lot of things aren't. Saying that it's somehow someone's fault is ridiculous. Claiming that all software developers are collectively lazy or don't care about user experience just doesn't hold up. The funny thing is that he works in a position that naturally involves some difficult stuff. Let's say my favorite language to write software in is called XYZ. Say it's super easy, intuitive, concise, performant, and the method for compiling/deploying/distributing the end result of your hard work is trivial. In all ways, this system is just beautiful to work with. Great, but I'll bet you the guy who wrote all the development tools and runtime for XYZ had to do a lot of difficult work to make that possible. Dahl is building a runtime for web applications. Unless he's writing it in some high-level language, it's not going to be easy. Supporting every platform he wants to support isn't going to be easy. User interfaces should be as simple as they can be, but often that requires a lot of complexity under the hood. Go down even farther. Let's think about our basic building blocks. Transistors. Hgih and low, ones and zeroes. It's a very simple interface. You construct logical operations by using NAND, NOR, NOT, etc. gates, which are built from transistors. Also simple. But the next step for our modern computer is... well... the microprocessor. And while it's made up of these incredibly simple building blocks, the combination of them is extraordinarily complex. So the interface into that mess is also not the most friendly thing to work with: a machine instruction set. So we build things on top of that to make it successively easier: assembly language, C, Ruby. And the tools that come along with this are only as good as the technologies they're built on. Tradeoffs must be made to be portable. Yes, all this is a huge mess that "we" have collectively invented over the past 30-50 years or so, but it's simply not possible to go back to the 1970s, know exactly where we're going to be in the 2010s, and design the perfect system, even with foreknowledge. The current state of computing is a product of the evolution of our technology. Often that means doing the best you can today, and hoping for something better tomorrow.
• grammaton 15y ago
  I think this rant is striking such a chord because it exploits a well known, if not widely acknowledged predisposition among developers - the breathtaking quickness with which we assume that the other guy is an idiot. Not that we don't understand the problem or that this solution addresses things we aren't aware of, but that the other guy is stupid and shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a compiler. I can see Dahl doesn't like complexity, but has it ever occurred to him that software is complex because it solves complex problems?
• johnwatson11218 15y ago
  One thing that would help me out would be if new documentation could point out which parts of a system are needlessly complicated and which parts are needed for the system to function. If a book or document could just say "This part of the tool is waaaay too complicated because the original developers envisioned this evolving differently. These are the good parts that you should spend time learning". I think Douglas Crockford called this "subsetting". A big challenge when approaching a new technology is deciding which parts to invest in.
• dramaticus3 15y ago
  GNU is Not Unix