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Finally, a chance to say what I really think about computers! I feel that the majority of time working with computers is not actually computing numbers (additi

Finally, a chance to say what I really think about computers! I feel that the majority of time working with computers is not actually computing numbers (addition, subtraction, multiplication) but LOGISTICS. Logging into systems, Moving data around in memory and between servers, into registers for a function call, to and from a REST API, installing packages, finding dependencies, chaining together library functions.

pipo234 3y ago
+1. So often we conceptualize in terms of tasks, phases, states, processes. And then ultimately you discover it is all about data flow, an rarely about the algorithm.
laxd 3y ago
> I feel that the majority of time working with computers is not actually computing numbers (addition, subtraction, multiplication) but LOGISTICS. I think this was figured out in the 50's, when IBM started making mainframes for businesses - made for data processing and management rather than crunching numbers which was the focus of machines made at universities. Also, in norwegian and I guess other european languages. We call them, directly translated, "data machines" rather than computers.
- yurishimo 3y ago
  In Dutch the word is "computer" also, but English is the bastard child between Dutch and French while Dutch is already a bit of a bastard child from German. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  - laxd 3y ago
    I was confident that at least the germans would back me here, after all they got words like taschenrechner. But according to my dictionary they call it computer. Danish seems like 30% english nowadays, so I can't count on them. At least swedes call it "dator" which I guess is in the right spirit.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - john61 3y ago
      There is the German word "Rechner" for Computer but nowadays it is seldom used.
    - prennert 3y ago
      It's the same origin, just different base language. It's about computation, not data, in both English and German. It's interesting that Norwegian and Swedish are putting the emphasis on data instead.
WinLychee 3y ago
Rich Hickey actually has spoken about this on numerous occasions! So much of what we really do in programming is move data around, why not have data as first-class citizen in your programming?
- samsquire 3y ago
  Thank you. I am working on an idea for programming that the primitive is literally moving things around in a grid. In a spreadsheet the formula is hidden behind a cell. And in most programming languages we write instructions and the state is implied - you don't see the state unless the program writes it out. In this design you see the state and all objects at all times. The idea is that the instruction is generated from the movement. https://replit.com/@Chronological/DynamicTables https://replit.com/@Chronological/DynamicTables Try clicking "100" and move it into the JSON below. At the moment I've implemented movement and JSON -> table. You can move things between fields in the JSON. You can rewind states of the top grid by clicking the instruction. The plan is to put operations and API calls on the screen so you can move things into them, and their results shall go back into the grid.
  - WinLychee 3y ago
    Oh I see, you will quite literally "move" the data by pointing and clicking / visualizing the transfer of data. That's brilliant!
- tenebrisalietum 3y ago
  Isn't that what OOP is? Methods contain code, objects contain code and data, and invocations of code are primarily in reference to data.
  - WinLychee 3y ago
    Well, in Clojure at least, data is a generic thing you structure your program around, and is not hidden inside a class coupled to behavior. This is safely enabled by immutable values as a default. The standard library and ecosystem consists of generic functions operating on that immutable data. This is very liberating as you do not run into a combinatorial explosion of incompatible types that need to be marshaled to work together. Generally you have 3 kinds of things in Clojure: associations (maps), sets (uniqueness), and order (lists/vectors).
cameronh90 3y ago
Not just computers. Life is mostly just moving things around. From the highest levels like shipping and waste management down to the lowest levels like data processing. Once you have what you need in the right place, in most cases, the job is nearly done. The corollary is that if you get smarter about how you move things around, you can make serious efficiency improvements.
mrweasel 3y ago
Your thinking reminds me of the work of a friend of mine. He's an AWS consultant and builds thing like AWS thinks you should. Some of the things he comes up with, chaining services together, with a sprinkle of lambda functions, it's Rube Goldberg machines all the way down. A user logs in to a javascript app, hosted in an S3 bucket, authentication is handled by Cognito, the user gets a upload form, once their files is uploaded to S3, a lambda triggers an ECS container to spin up, some processing, output is sent to SQS where a service hosted on EKS picks up the processed data .... AND SO ON. Rube Goldberg machines, all of it.
- monktastic1 3y ago
  Exactly the term I had in mind: Rube Goldberg. And it gets so much worse than the examples you've given. Trying to shoehorn all the leaky abstractions together across the dozens or hundreds of pieces of technology I use every day from different vendors and open-source projects, with each interaction having hundreds of arcane failure modes, is absolutely soul-sucking. I'm impressed by the people who still do it, regardless of how much they earn for doing so.
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  > it's Rube Goldberg machines all the way down On another context, you have some processed data on the backend, and an infinitely customizable software system on the frontend... How do you keep them both in sync? And yeah, it is by converting your data into a programing language; parsing it again; resolving incompatibilities; turning it into the presentation language; letting the user interact with the presentation representation; converting it back into the programing language; sending it back into the backend... But then you don't want a round trip on every single interaction, so you convert your backend code into the frontend language, so it deals directly with the presentation code... and it goes on. Oh, on the backend side you have an application and a data layer, both using different languages and data representation; so you do all that dance again there... Oh, and now we want several independent layers between those too, so be prepared to do all of that again and again. At some point we decided on the wrong abstractions for our mainstream architectures.
- dennis_jeeves1 3y ago
makingstuffs 3y ago
100% this. I always dabbled as a dev since becoming fascinated with coding and computing as a kid in the 90s. Went into a career in audio engineering in my 20s and switched to development about 4 years ago. People ask how I found the switch and the truth is that it was very simple. The main principle of audio engineering is ‘signal’ flow, replace the word ‘signal’ with ‘data’ and you’re like 90% of the way there. Follow the data, all we are doing is moving it around and manipulating it here and there. No different to a raw stem from the DI of a guitar passing through a big old analogue console.
dv_dt 3y ago
Getting up to the point of doing the thing usually takes more time than the thing itself. that’s true in a lot of endeavors. Are you in a physical factory assembling product? The production and assembly time end to end is often a fraction of the time and effort spent putting everything in place to run the assembly.
throwawaaarrgh 3y ago
80% of the time spent on construction is moving materials from one place to another
- JimtheCoder 3y ago
  Is that why whenever I see some roadwork or construction getting done in a big city, all the workers are just standing around, chatting? They're waiting for the construction materials to arrive?
  - justsomehnguy 3y ago
    These guys are too cheap to bother with JIT logistics.
tenebrisalietum 3y ago
Any media being seen, watched or heard depends on a lot of computing.
amelius 3y ago
Yes, there's a reason why software engineers are often compared to plumbers ...
agumonkey 3y ago
very much so, and it scales with network and time i work in a courthouse, they had to use all versions of IE and firefox due to unmaintained application locks the lack of subtle ergonomics make people do more work on computer than on paper if you remember the old electronic calculator versus abacus, it's the same logic, or lack thereof, by the time you've changed context (session expired ? how to change app, how to change tab, gathered data from the client, tried filling it 7 times in various forms, your 1960 self is already finished filling in the form with a smile) there's probably a greenspun variant for this

pipo234 3y ago

+1. So often we conceptualize in terms of tasks, phases, states, processes. And then ultimately you discover it is all about data flow, an rarely about the algorithm.

laxd 3y ago

> I feel that the majority of time working with computers is not actually computing numbers (addition, subtraction, multiplication) but LOGISTICS. I think this was figured out in the 50's, when IBM started making mainframes for businesses - made for data processing and management rather than crunching numbers which was the focus of machines made at universities. Also, in norwegian and I guess other european languages. We call them, directly translated, "data machines" rather than computers.

yurishimo 3y ago
In Dutch the word is "computer" also, but English is the bastard child between Dutch and French while Dutch is already a bit of a bastard child from German. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- laxd 3y ago
  I was confident that at least the germans would back me here, after all they got words like taschenrechner. But according to my dictionary they call it computer. Danish seems like 30% english nowadays, so I can't count on them. At least swedes call it "dator" which I guess is in the right spirit.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - john61 3y ago
    There is the German word "Rechner" for Computer but nowadays it is seldom used.
  - prennert 3y ago
    It's the same origin, just different base language. It's about computation, not data, in both English and German. It's interesting that Norwegian and Swedish are putting the emphasis on data instead.

WinLychee 3y ago

Rich Hickey actually has spoken about this on numerous occasions! So much of what we really do in programming is move data around, why not have data as first-class citizen in your programming?

samsquire 3y ago
Thank you. I am working on an idea for programming that the primitive is literally moving things around in a grid. In a spreadsheet the formula is hidden behind a cell. And in most programming languages we write instructions and the state is implied - you don't see the state unless the program writes it out. In this design you see the state and all objects at all times. The idea is that the instruction is generated from the movement. https://replit.com/@Chronological/DynamicTables https://replit.com/@Chronological/DynamicTables Try clicking "100" and move it into the JSON below. At the moment I've implemented movement and JSON -> table. You can move things between fields in the JSON. You can rewind states of the top grid by clicking the instruction. The plan is to put operations and API calls on the screen so you can move things into them, and their results shall go back into the grid.
- WinLychee 3y ago
  Oh I see, you will quite literally "move" the data by pointing and clicking / visualizing the transfer of data. That's brilliant!
tenebrisalietum 3y ago
Isn't that what OOP is? Methods contain code, objects contain code and data, and invocations of code are primarily in reference to data.
- WinLychee 3y ago
  Well, in Clojure at least, data is a generic thing you structure your program around, and is not hidden inside a class coupled to behavior. This is safely enabled by immutable values as a default. The standard library and ecosystem consists of generic functions operating on that immutable data. This is very liberating as you do not run into a combinatorial explosion of incompatible types that need to be marshaled to work together. Generally you have 3 kinds of things in Clojure: associations (maps), sets (uniqueness), and order (lists/vectors).

cameronh90 3y ago

Not just computers. Life is mostly just moving things around. From the highest levels like shipping and waste management down to the lowest levels like data processing. Once you have what you need in the right place, in most cases, the job is nearly done. The corollary is that if you get smarter about how you move things around, you can make serious efficiency improvements.

mrweasel 3y ago

Your thinking reminds me of the work of a friend of mine. He's an AWS consultant and builds thing like AWS thinks you should. Some of the things he comes up with, chaining services together, with a sprinkle of lambda functions, it's Rube Goldberg machines all the way down. A user logs in to a javascript app, hosted in an S3 bucket, authentication is handled by Cognito, the user gets a upload form, once their files is uploaded to S3, a lambda triggers an ECS container to spin up, some processing, output is sent to SQS where a service hosted on EKS picks up the processed data .... AND SO ON. Rube Goldberg machines, all of it.

monktastic1 3y ago
Exactly the term I had in mind: Rube Goldberg. And it gets so much worse than the examples you've given. Trying to shoehorn all the leaky abstractions together across the dozens or hundreds of pieces of technology I use every day from different vendors and open-source projects, with each interaction having hundreds of arcane failure modes, is absolutely soul-sucking. I'm impressed by the people who still do it, regardless of how much they earn for doing so.
marcosdumay 3y ago
> it's Rube Goldberg machines all the way down On another context, you have some processed data on the backend, and an infinitely customizable software system on the frontend... How do you keep them both in sync? And yeah, it is by converting your data into a programing language; parsing it again; resolving incompatibilities; turning it into the presentation language; letting the user interact with the presentation representation; converting it back into the programing language; sending it back into the backend... But then you don't want a round trip on every single interaction, so you convert your backend code into the frontend language, so it deals directly with the presentation code... and it goes on. Oh, on the backend side you have an application and a data layer, both using different languages and data representation; so you do all that dance again there... Oh, and now we want several independent layers between those too, so be prepared to do all of that again and again. At some point we decided on the wrong abstractions for our mainstream architectures.
dennis_jeeves1 3y ago

makingstuffs 3y ago

100% this. I always dabbled as a dev since becoming fascinated with coding and computing as a kid in the 90s. Went into a career in audio engineering in my 20s and switched to development about 4 years ago. People ask how I found the switch and the truth is that it was very simple. The main principle of audio engineering is ‘signal’ flow, replace the word ‘signal’ with ‘data’ and you’re like 90% of the way there. Follow the data, all we are doing is moving it around and manipulating it here and there. No different to a raw stem from the DI of a guitar passing through a big old analogue console.

dv_dt 3y ago

Getting up to the point of doing the thing usually takes more time than the thing itself. that’s true in a lot of endeavors. Are you in a physical factory assembling product? The production and assembly time end to end is often a fraction of the time and effort spent putting everything in place to run the assembly.

throwawaaarrgh 3y ago

80% of the time spent on construction is moving materials from one place to another

JimtheCoder 3y ago
Is that why whenever I see some roadwork or construction getting done in a big city, all the workers are just standing around, chatting? They're waiting for the construction materials to arrive?
- justsomehnguy 3y ago
  These guys are too cheap to bother with JIT logistics.

tenebrisalietum 3y ago

Any media being seen, watched or heard depends on a lot of computing.

amelius 3y ago

Yes, there's a reason why software engineers are often compared to plumbers ...

agumonkey 3y ago

very much so, and it scales with network and time i work in a courthouse, they had to use all versions of IE and firefox due to unmaintained application locks the lack of subtle ergonomics make people do more work on computer than on paper if you remember the old electronic calculator versus abacus, it's the same logic, or lack thereof, by the time you've changed context (session expired ? how to change app, how to change tab, gathered data from the client, tried filling it 7 times in various forms, your 1960 self is already finished filling in the form with a smile) there's probably a greenspun variant for this