5 ms·

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. Compu

by 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
- ttfkam 3y ago
  Linus wrote the first draft of the Linux kernel as a college student in late 1991. 19-NINETY-1 Linux is 100% a product of the 90s and after, and is one of the biggest software quality success stories of all time. It has only improved since then. Initial public release of PostgreSQL, the best open source database around today, was 1996. It has only improved since then. The C spec was improved from C89 to C99. Implementations appeared for C89 in the 1990s, and both were notable improvements over original K&R. First release of Python in 1991. Improving steadily since then. The web browser is arguably the single most impressive app of all. Graphical layout and executable from network-loaded resources. It is THE killer app of the internet. As far as the average person in the world is concerned, if browsers disappeared, the world would stop. The security scrutiny browsers have received have exceeded ANY other pieces of software that have ever existed, and multiple browsers have been independently created. Blender: 1994. Improving since then. Games have never been more technically sophisticated, visually impressive, environmentally immersive, and narratively deep as they are today. I do have a soft spot for Star Control II, but again that was released in 1992. This isn't cynicism. This is an honest appraisal of my lived history of computing.

by ttfkam 3y ago

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

ttfkam 3y ago
Linus wrote the first draft of the Linux kernel as a college student in late 1991. 19-NINETY-1 Linux is 100% a product of the 90s and after, and is one of the biggest software quality success stories of all time. It has only improved since then. Initial public release of PostgreSQL, the best open source database around today, was 1996. It has only improved since then. The C spec was improved from C89 to C99. Implementations appeared for C89 in the 1990s, and both were notable improvements over original K&R. First release of Python in 1991. Improving steadily since then. The web browser is arguably the single most impressive app of all. Graphical layout and executable from network-loaded resources. It is THE killer app of the internet. As far as the average person in the world is concerned, if browsers disappeared, the world would stop. The security scrutiny browsers have received have exceeded ANY other pieces of software that have ever existed, and multiple browsers have been independently created. Blender: 1994. Improving since then. Games have never been more technically sophisticated, visually impressive, environmentally immersive, and narratively deep as they are today. I do have a soft spot for Star Control II, but again that was released in 1992. This isn't cynicism. This is an honest appraisal of my lived history of computing.