5 ms·

Such a long-winded way of saying, "Get off my lawn! …kids these days." Having been in the industry for 30 years and alive long enough to run programs for 45, I

by ttfkam 3y ago

Such a long-winded way of saying, "Get off my lawn! …kids these days." Having been in the industry for 30 years and alive long enough to run programs for 45, I can point to innumerable examples of badly written shareware games. Hell, I can give examples of then-AAA games where you learned to avoid certain patterns because they would either crash or grind to a crawl for extended periods of time. Then there are the business apps that used janky proprietary storage formats and silently lost data, sometimes piecemeal and sometimes in whole. Crashes for a time in many apps was normal. Advice was just to remember to save often so you didn't lose as much when it did happen. How long did we use RCS and CVS and Subversion before modern alternatives like Bitkeeper, Mercurial, Git, et al. entered the scene? You're telling me Visual SourceSafe was deeper knowledge than Fossil? We have some of the best programmers alive today. And the worst. That's what happens when the talent pool keeps getting larger. It's not a trend of quality; it's just a furthering of the mainstream.

mjburgess 3y ago
There's nothing in your comment that really makes much contact with his views. I think he sees peak software in the 80s, with often terminal interfaces and highly reliable systems; or with arcade machines and the like. In the era where your disk may include the operating system your program ran on, rather than relying on one present (etc.). 30 years is exactly the length of time he's talking about; software jumped off a cliff in the 90s, not after. So when you talk about "modern" version control being a comparsion between git and sourcesafe, i think you're exactly trapped making comparisons in the "crap vs. terrible" era of software
- ttfkam 3y ago
  45 years absolutely includes the 1980s. Entirely includes the 1980s. And it's not like the 70s had universally phenomenal assembly or BASIC being written. Computing wasn't better when processors were doing 1,000 operations per second. They were just doing less. Today, developers have to contend with attack vectors early developers would have been utterly baffled by. In the 1980s for the vast majority, they weren't coding in an actively hostile environment just to make a todo list app. When you connected via acoustic coupler, there wasn't a single thought to whether you'd be actively port scanned within 30 seconds. We literally can't use operating systems from earlier decades without erecting rigid firewalls to isolate them first. ANYTHING network aware more than 20 years old (and often newer) would be compromised within 60 seconds of connecting directly to the internet. The only reason 1980s computers weren't absolutely wrecked with viruses and worms was because you had to buy your software from a brick and mortar shop and install it from floppies. (And even then they had occasional supply chain attacks.) Programmers in the 70s and 80s were complaining about how "kids these days" used C instead of having the intimate knowledge of assembly and even binary that they had. How C programmers just took the easy way out without caring about efficiency and precious CPU cycles. Same energy. And the same fallacious conclusions. Software developers don't change. The environments they have to code to do. Growing pains and maturity, not lack of skill or commitment. For the record, RCS was 1982. CVS arrived a decade later in the 90s and was obviously better. SVN in the 2000s was better than CVS. There is no metric where RCS and SCSS before it (1973) were superior examples of software.
  - shuaafaaajdn 3y ago
    I mean, if you literally did what you said then that would mean using telnet and not encrypting your traffic in which case or course you are going to be compromised...that was not designed for networks that were open and accessible to the public. I'm not sure you have made a point that at all addresses anything Jonathon said. You've constructed a straw man version of the arguments in favor of less abstraction, and more like older systems, which is rarely intended to mean using exactly the same network protocols from the 1980s. And at the time, those old programmers that criticized programming in C vs. Assembly were objectively correct. It was true that hand written assembly was significantly more efficient until very recently, as in I've seen common examples of such a thing well into the 21st century, and there still exist many cases where that is true. In the 80s and 90s it was the norm, and understood by most everybody (including the Unix developers despite having transitioned to C) that optimizing compilers could not compete in truly performance sensitive contexts. This did not really begin to change until everyone began to consolidate on x86. Until then, people were just willing to make the sacrifices but you couldn't have your cake and eat it too.
  - mjburgess 3y ago
    You can pattern match these concerns to "kids these days" all you wish. But there are these days. There are days when the kids are doing it worse; and to imagine their arent is foolish. These are the days when your operating system is hostile to you, sells your data and injects adds into its basic operation. These are the days when the main distribution channel of software is HTTP with dynamic memory languages which require build systems to deploy. These are the days when people read a book and think themselves jnr engineers. It is all well and good deploying your cynicism in this fashion, thinking yourself wise, but in the end your view is just another old wives tale. The tale of "the elder shouting at clouds" is just the tale of the eldar shouting at eldars shouting at clouds. If one analyses the world with such infantile aproximations, one will finds oneself likewise dumb. You aren't engaging with the quite serious catastrophe that has become modern software development. It is hard to imagine software engineers of the 70s and 80s, though imperfect, doing with modern technology what we do with it. The Linus Torvalds of the world, the jblows, the K&Rs, and so on -- are people born of a culture of ruthless simplicity. Award the 70s with the technology of today and it's a hard sell to suppose that group really invents React, the HTTP stack, and so on. The inability to see this is the real naivity here. Cheap cynicism doesnt win you any point
- mcphage 3y ago
  > I think he sees peak software in the 80s, with often terminal interfaces and highly reliable systems; or with arcade machines and the like. Everybody think their childhood was a golden age when everything was better… part of growing up is realizing that things just seemed better because you weren’t aware of the problems. Jonathan Blow was born in 1971, he wasn’t doing in-depth code quality reviews in the 80s.
  - saltcured 3y ago
    I think he was at UC Berkeley at a time in the 90s and dropped out into industry when he would have been exposed to a rosy, elitist, R&D tilted view of programming. Where one might both hear myths and have social contact with some 70s-80s giants. This would be very different experience than someone bumping around in the equivalent of b2b/enterprise software of that era...
  - pshirshov 3y ago
    Well, I have a vast collection of retro machines. In many aspects things were definitely better. First of all, everything was orders of magnitude simpler.
    - ttfkam 3y ago
      I don't recall adults in 1980s considering the advent of arcade games to be "definitely better" or "orders of magnitude simpler." Every generation establishes a new baseline for "normal". Older generations always think they're wrong and complain about what has been lost, usually ignorant of many things gained along the way. You will find accounts in ancient Greek writings about the younger generation lacking. https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/28169/what-is-the-oldest-authentic-example-of-people-complaining-about-modern-times-an#45976 https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/28169/what-is-th...
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IndrekR 3y ago
> How long did we use RCS and CVS and Subversion before modern alternatives like Bitkeeper, Mercurial, Git, et al. entered the scene? For Subversion, about a year.
- agilob 3y ago
  Not really, a company that adopted SVN early, stayed with it for 10 more years until it was clear that git is the way and they were struggling to find people willing to work with SVN.
  - IndrekR 3y ago
    Still using SVN here along with git. Not for coding, but storing CAD/EDA data. Large file support is the key here. Git LFS unfortunately is not very good and as soon as your repos grow into tens of gigabytes, git is not very fast anymore.
    - jiveturkey 3y ago
      My first (and only) IT role in an EDA shop (both mech and electrical), one of my first asks was to get an SVN server running. I was like what? You sure? Yes, they were sure.

by ttfkam 3y ago

mjburgess 3y ago

There's nothing in your comment that really makes much contact with his views. I think he sees peak software in the 80s, with often terminal interfaces and highly reliable systems; or with arcade machines and the like. In the era where your disk may include the operating system your program ran on, rather than relying on one present (etc.). 30 years is exactly the length of time he's talking about; software jumped off a cliff in the 90s, not after. So when you talk about "modern" version control being a comparsion between git and sourcesafe, i think you're exactly trapped making comparisons in the "crap vs. terrible" era of software

ttfkam 3y ago
45 years absolutely includes the 1980s. Entirely includes the 1980s. And it's not like the 70s had universally phenomenal assembly or BASIC being written. Computing wasn't better when processors were doing 1,000 operations per second. They were just doing less. Today, developers have to contend with attack vectors early developers would have been utterly baffled by. In the 1980s for the vast majority, they weren't coding in an actively hostile environment just to make a todo list app. When you connected via acoustic coupler, there wasn't a single thought to whether you'd be actively port scanned within 30 seconds. We literally can't use operating systems from earlier decades without erecting rigid firewalls to isolate them first. ANYTHING network aware more than 20 years old (and often newer) would be compromised within 60 seconds of connecting directly to the internet. The only reason 1980s computers weren't absolutely wrecked with viruses and worms was because you had to buy your software from a brick and mortar shop and install it from floppies. (And even then they had occasional supply chain attacks.) Programmers in the 70s and 80s were complaining about how "kids these days" used C instead of having the intimate knowledge of assembly and even binary that they had. How C programmers just took the easy way out without caring about efficiency and precious CPU cycles. Same energy. And the same fallacious conclusions. Software developers don't change. The environments they have to code to do. Growing pains and maturity, not lack of skill or commitment. For the record, RCS was 1982. CVS arrived a decade later in the 90s and was obviously better. SVN in the 2000s was better than CVS. There is no metric where RCS and SCSS before it (1973) were superior examples of software.
- shuaafaaajdn 3y ago
  I mean, if you literally did what you said then that would mean using telnet and not encrypting your traffic in which case or course you are going to be compromised...that was not designed for networks that were open and accessible to the public. I'm not sure you have made a point that at all addresses anything Jonathon said. You've constructed a straw man version of the arguments in favor of less abstraction, and more like older systems, which is rarely intended to mean using exactly the same network protocols from the 1980s. And at the time, those old programmers that criticized programming in C vs. Assembly were objectively correct. It was true that hand written assembly was significantly more efficient until very recently, as in I've seen common examples of such a thing well into the 21st century, and there still exist many cases where that is true. In the 80s and 90s it was the norm, and understood by most everybody (including the Unix developers despite having transitioned to C) that optimizing compilers could not compete in truly performance sensitive contexts. This did not really begin to change until everyone began to consolidate on x86. Until then, people were just willing to make the sacrifices but you couldn't have your cake and eat it too.
- mjburgess 3y ago
  You can pattern match these concerns to "kids these days" all you wish. But there are these days. There are days when the kids are doing it worse; and to imagine their arent is foolish. These are the days when your operating system is hostile to you, sells your data and injects adds into its basic operation. These are the days when the main distribution channel of software is HTTP with dynamic memory languages which require build systems to deploy. These are the days when people read a book and think themselves jnr engineers. It is all well and good deploying your cynicism in this fashion, thinking yourself wise, but in the end your view is just another old wives tale. The tale of "the elder shouting at clouds" is just the tale of the eldar shouting at eldars shouting at clouds. If one analyses the world with such infantile aproximations, one will finds oneself likewise dumb. You aren't engaging with the quite serious catastrophe that has become modern software development. It is hard to imagine software engineers of the 70s and 80s, though imperfect, doing with modern technology what we do with it. The Linus Torvalds of the world, the jblows, the K&Rs, and so on -- are people born of a culture of ruthless simplicity. Award the 70s with the technology of today and it's a hard sell to suppose that group really invents React, the HTTP stack, and so on. The inability to see this is the real naivity here. Cheap cynicism doesnt win you any point
mcphage 3y ago
> I think he sees peak software in the 80s, with often terminal interfaces and highly reliable systems; or with arcade machines and the like. Everybody think their childhood was a golden age when everything was better… part of growing up is realizing that things just seemed better because you weren’t aware of the problems. Jonathan Blow was born in 1971, he wasn’t doing in-depth code quality reviews in the 80s.
- saltcured 3y ago
  I think he was at UC Berkeley at a time in the 90s and dropped out into industry when he would have been exposed to a rosy, elitist, R&D tilted view of programming. Where one might both hear myths and have social contact with some 70s-80s giants. This would be very different experience than someone bumping around in the equivalent of b2b/enterprise software of that era...
- pshirshov 3y ago
  Well, I have a vast collection of retro machines. In many aspects things were definitely better. First of all, everything was orders of magnitude simpler.
  - ttfkam 3y ago
    I don't recall adults in 1980s considering the advent of arcade games to be "definitely better" or "orders of magnitude simpler." Every generation establishes a new baseline for "normal". Older generations always think they're wrong and complain about what has been lost, usually ignorant of many things gained along the way. You will find accounts in ancient Greek writings about the younger generation lacking. https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/28169/what-is-the-oldest-authentic-example-of-people-complaining-about-modern-times-an#45976 https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/28169/what-is-th...

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IndrekR 3y ago

> How long did we use RCS and CVS and Subversion before modern alternatives like Bitkeeper, Mercurial, Git, et al. entered the scene? For Subversion, about a year.

agilob 3y ago
Not really, a company that adopted SVN early, stayed with it for 10 more years until it was clear that git is the way and they were struggling to find people willing to work with SVN.
- IndrekR 3y ago
  Still using SVN here along with git. Not for coding, but storing CAD/EDA data. Large file support is the key here. Git LFS unfortunately is not very good and as soon as your repos grow into tens of gigabytes, git is not very fast anymore.
  - jiveturkey 3y ago
    My first (and only) IT role in an EDA shop (both mech and electrical), one of my first asks was to get an SVN server running. I was like what? You sure? Yes, they were sure.