12 ms·

I yet ~30 years later we're still predominantly hacking stuff together with python.

by Guthur 3y ago

dekhn 3y ago
I believe there's an entire section in Deepness In The Sky about how future coders a million years from now are still hacking stuff together with python.
- Guthur 3y ago
  We have better tools they're just apparently too hard for us to use, yet some how in the same thought we think we can create anything remotely like intelligence, very odd cognitive dissonance.
  - dekhn 3y ago
    it does not seem odd to me at all that we could create intelligence, and even possibly loving grace, in a computer. I'm not sure why there would be cognitive dissonance- sure, my tools may be primitive, but I can also grab my chisel and plane and see that it's similar in form to chisel and plane from 2000 years ago (they look pretty much the same, but these days they're made of stronger stuff). I can easily imagine a Real Programmer 2000 years from now looking back and thinking that python, or even a vacuum tube, is merely a simplified version of their quantum matter assembler.
- shagie 3y ago
  There were programs here that had been written five thousand years ago, before Humankind ever left Earth. The wonder of it—the horror of it, Sura said—was that unlike the useless wrecks of Canberra’s past, these programs still worked! And via a million million circuitous threads of inheritance, many of the oldest programs still ran in the bowels of the Qeng Ho system. Take the Traders’ method of timekeeping. The frame corrections were incredibly complex—and down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth’s moon. But if you looked at it still more closely…the starting instant was actually about fifteen million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind’s first computer operating systems.
  - kbutler 3y ago
    Love that reference to the Unix epoch, and the all-too-human misassociation with a seemingly more appropriate event.
    - ethbr1 3y ago
      Archaeology focuses on the things that were important to past humans. It seems impossible that, given current economic trajectories, there won't be software archaeology in the future.
      - ajb 3y ago
        Seems quite possible that the the present will seem to future archeologists like an illiterate dark ages, between civilisations from which paper records, that last long enough for them to find, are preserved.
      - viraptor 3y ago
        We already have software archaeology today. People who are into software preservation track down old media, original creators, and dig through clues to restore pixel-perfect copies of abandonware. It's only going to get bigger / more important with time if we don't concentrate on open standards and open source everywhere.
        soulofmischief 3y ago
        And it's sad that many archivists have to break the law in order to secure the longevity of important cultural works. Our abusive relationship with modern commercialism has disintegrated the value of art, folklore and tools, both in the eyes of consumers and producers, and we no longer as a society seek to preserve the greatest works of today's most cutting-edge mediums. It's quite a sad state of affairs, which will only be mourned with increasing intensity as time marches on and curious researchers try to piece together the early days of the internet and personal computing.
        johnnymorgan 3y ago
- brainbag 3y ago
  I remember a sci-fi book where they were talking about one of the characters hacking on thousand-year-old code, but I could never remember what book it was from. Maybe this was it and it's time for a reread.
  - shagie 3y ago
    Continuing on from the sibling comment about the 0 second... So behind all the top-level interfaces was layer under layer of support. Some of that software had been designed for wildly different situations. Every so often, the inconsistencies caused fatal accidents. Despite the romance of spaceflight, the most common accidents were simply caused by ancient, misused programs finally getting their revenge. “We should rewrite it all,” said Pham. “It’s been done,” said Sura, not looking up. She was preparing to go off-Watch, and had spent the last four days trying to root a problem out of the coldsleep automation. “It’s been tried,” corrected Bret, just back from the freezers. “But even the top levels of fleet system code are enormous. You and a thousand of your friends would have to work for a century or so to reproduce it.” Trinli grinned evilly. “And guess what—even if you did, by the time you finished, you’d have your own set of inconsistencies. And you still wouldn’t be consistent with all the applications that might be needed now and then.” Sura gave up on her debugging for the moment. “The word for all this is ‘mature programming environment.’ Basically, when hardware performance has been pushed to its final limit Basically, when hardware performance has been pushed to its final limit, and programmers have had several centuries to code, you reach a point where there is far more significant code than can be rationalized. The best you can do is understand the overall layering, and know how to search for the oddball tool that may come in handy—take the situation I have here.” She waved at the dependency chart she had been working on. “We are low on working fluid for the coffins. Like a million other things, there was none for sale on dear old Canberra. Well, the obvious thing is to move the coffins near the aft hull, and cool by direct radiation. We don’t have the proper equipment to support this—so lately, I’ve been doing my share of archeology. It seems that five hundred years ago, a similar thing happened after an in-system war at Torma. They hacked together a temperature maintenance package that is precisely what we need.” “Almost precisely.” Bret was grinning again. “With some minor revisions.” “Yes, which I’ve almost completed.”
- taneq 3y ago
  At times I've adopted the term Programmer-at-Arms for what my job occasionally turns into. :D And as a sibling poster mentions, the whole thing with the epoch is a great nod to software archeology.
AlienRobot 3y ago
We'll still be hacking stuff with python when the singularity comes. It will be ultra high tech alien stuff that we can't hack or understand, only AI can, and the tech will look like magic to us, and most will not be able to resist the bait of depending upon this miraculous technology that we can't understand or debug.
- hnlmorg 3y ago
  We (as a species) already depend upon lots of miraculous technology that we (as individuals) cannot understand nor debug. Even as IT professionals this is true. How many developers these days can debug a problem in their JavaScript runtime or Rust developers track down a bug in their CPU? There’s so much abstracted away from us that few people can fully grasp the entire stack their code executes. So those outside of tech don’t even stand a chance understanding computers. And that’s just focusing on IT. I also depend on medical equipment operated by doctors but have no way of completely understanding that equipment nor procedure myself. I drive a car that I couldn’t repair. Watch TV that I didn’t produce beamed to me via satellites that I didnt built nor fire into space. Eat food that I didn’t grow. We are already well past the point of understanding the technology behind the stuff that we depend upon daily.
  - salawat 3y ago
    This is the most intellectually lazy take I've ever seen, and I truly wish people would stop throwing up their hands and giving in. You can absolutely peel back the layers with enough will. At least assuming anti-consumer cryptography/malicious toolmaking is not employed.
    - taneq 3y ago
      Some day you’ll realise that “could conceptually understand this” is a wildly different beast to “should invest the time and energy to understand this.” There are too many layers to too many different systems to understand everything that currently exists, let alone keep up with every new development. Like it or not, the age of universal experts is over. We all must pick our battles.
bamboozled 3y ago
A lot of it's running on DNS too ;)

I yet ~30 years later we're still predominantly hacking stuff together with python.

by Guthur 3y ago

I yet ~30 years later we're still predominantly hacking stuff together with python.

I believe there's an entire section in Deepness In The Sky about how future coders a million years from now are still hacking stuff together with python.

Guthur 3y ago
We have better tools they're just apparently too hard for us to use, yet some how in the same thought we think we can create anything remotely like intelligence, very odd cognitive dissonance.
- dekhn 3y ago
  it does not seem odd to me at all that we could create intelligence, and even possibly loving grace, in a computer. I'm not sure why there would be cognitive dissonance- sure, my tools may be primitive, but I can also grab my chisel and plane and see that it's similar in form to chisel and plane from 2000 years ago (they look pretty much the same, but these days they're made of stronger stuff). I can easily imagine a Real Programmer 2000 years from now looking back and thinking that python, or even a vacuum tube, is merely a simplified version of their quantum matter assembler.
shagie 3y ago
There were programs here that had been written five thousand years ago, before Humankind ever left Earth. The wonder of it—the horror of it, Sura said—was that unlike the useless wrecks of Canberra’s past, these programs still worked! And via a million million circuitous threads of inheritance, many of the oldest programs still ran in the bowels of the Qeng Ho system. Take the Traders’ method of timekeeping. The frame corrections were incredibly complex—and down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth’s moon. But if you looked at it still more closely…the starting instant was actually about fifteen million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind’s first computer operating systems.
- kbutler 3y ago
  Love that reference to the Unix epoch, and the all-too-human misassociation with a seemingly more appropriate event.
  - ethbr1 3y ago
    Archaeology focuses on the things that were important to past humans. It seems impossible that, given current economic trajectories, there won't be software archaeology in the future.
    - ajb 3y ago
      Seems quite possible that the the present will seem to future archeologists like an illiterate dark ages, between civilisations from which paper records, that last long enough for them to find, are preserved.
    - viraptor 3y ago
      We already have software archaeology today. People who are into software preservation track down old media, original creators, and dig through clues to restore pixel-perfect copies of abandonware. It's only going to get bigger / more important with time if we don't concentrate on open standards and open source everywhere.
      - soulofmischief 3y ago
        And it's sad that many archivists have to break the law in order to secure the longevity of important cultural works. Our abusive relationship with modern commercialism has disintegrated the value of art, folklore and tools, both in the eyes of consumers and producers, and we no longer as a society seek to preserve the greatest works of today's most cutting-edge mediums. It's quite a sad state of affairs, which will only be mourned with increasing intensity as time marches on and curious researchers try to piece together the early days of the internet and personal computing.
      - johnnymorgan 3y ago
brainbag 3y ago
I remember a sci-fi book where they were talking about one of the characters hacking on thousand-year-old code, but I could never remember what book it was from. Maybe this was it and it's time for a reread.
- shagie 3y ago
  Continuing on from the sibling comment about the 0 second... So behind all the top-level interfaces was layer under layer of support. Some of that software had been designed for wildly different situations. Every so often, the inconsistencies caused fatal accidents. Despite the romance of spaceflight, the most common accidents were simply caused by ancient, misused programs finally getting their revenge. “We should rewrite it all,” said Pham. “It’s been done,” said Sura, not looking up. She was preparing to go off-Watch, and had spent the last four days trying to root a problem out of the coldsleep automation. “It’s been tried,” corrected Bret, just back from the freezers. “But even the top levels of fleet system code are enormous. You and a thousand of your friends would have to work for a century or so to reproduce it.” Trinli grinned evilly. “And guess what—even if you did, by the time you finished, you’d have your own set of inconsistencies. And you still wouldn’t be consistent with all the applications that might be needed now and then.” Sura gave up on her debugging for the moment. “The word for all this is ‘mature programming environment.’ Basically, when hardware performance has been pushed to its final limit Basically, when hardware performance has been pushed to its final limit, and programmers have had several centuries to code, you reach a point where there is far more significant code than can be rationalized. The best you can do is understand the overall layering, and know how to search for the oddball tool that may come in handy—take the situation I have here.” She waved at the dependency chart she had been working on. “We are low on working fluid for the coffins. Like a million other things, there was none for sale on dear old Canberra. Well, the obvious thing is to move the coffins near the aft hull, and cool by direct radiation. We don’t have the proper equipment to support this—so lately, I’ve been doing my share of archeology. It seems that five hundred years ago, a similar thing happened after an in-system war at Torma. They hacked together a temperature maintenance package that is precisely what we need.” “Almost precisely.” Bret was grinning again. “With some minor revisions.” “Yes, which I’ve almost completed.”
taneq 3y ago
At times I've adopted the term Programmer-at-Arms for what my job occasionally turns into. :D And as a sibling poster mentions, the whole thing with the epoch is a great nod to software archeology.

AlienRobot 3y ago

We'll still be hacking stuff with python when the singularity comes. It will be ultra high tech alien stuff that we can't hack or understand, only AI can, and the tech will look like magic to us, and most will not be able to resist the bait of depending upon this miraculous technology that we can't understand or debug.

hnlmorg 3y ago
We (as a species) already depend upon lots of miraculous technology that we (as individuals) cannot understand nor debug. Even as IT professionals this is true. How many developers these days can debug a problem in their JavaScript runtime or Rust developers track down a bug in their CPU? There’s so much abstracted away from us that few people can fully grasp the entire stack their code executes. So those outside of tech don’t even stand a chance understanding computers. And that’s just focusing on IT. I also depend on medical equipment operated by doctors but have no way of completely understanding that equipment nor procedure myself. I drive a car that I couldn’t repair. Watch TV that I didn’t produce beamed to me via satellites that I didnt built nor fire into space. Eat food that I didn’t grow. We are already well past the point of understanding the technology behind the stuff that we depend upon daily.
- salawat 3y ago
  This is the most intellectually lazy take I've ever seen, and I truly wish people would stop throwing up their hands and giving in. You can absolutely peel back the layers with enough will. At least assuming anti-consumer cryptography/malicious toolmaking is not employed.
  - taneq 3y ago
    Some day you’ll realise that “could conceptually understand this” is a wildly different beast to “should invest the time and energy to understand this.” There are too many layers to too many different systems to understand everything that currently exists, let alone keep up with every new development. Like it or not, the age of universal experts is over. We all must pick our battles.

bamboozled 3y ago

A lot of it's running on DNS too ;)