4 ms·

A lot of those "successful" examples have teams of battle-scarred engineers dealing with all the failures of those ideas. Control loops running away to infinity

by yuliyp 2y ago

A lot of those "successful" examples have teams of battle-scarred engineers dealing with all the failures of those ideas. Control loops running away to infinity or max/min bounds, a cache that can't recover from a distributed failure, corrupted live-migrated state, bursts causing overload at inconvenient times, spurious anomaly-detection alerts informing you of all the world's holidays, etc. Underneath all of those ideas is a tangle of complexity that almost everyone underestimates.

NBJack 2y ago
I think that's fair: the success stories are very rarely "yay, we did it!" but much more often "this single change was the sole focus of a team/multiple teams for X months, and the launch/release/fix was considered a culmination of a significant investment of resources".
api 2y ago
I know I'm not alone in this, but after doing this for more than 20 years I can't shake the idea that we are doing it wrong -- meaning programming. Is it really this nit-picky, brittle, and hard? The brittleness is what gets me. In physical mechanical and even analog electrical systems there are tolerances. Things can almost-work and still work for varying degrees of work. Software on the other hand is unbelievably brittle to the point that after 50 years of software engineering we still really can't re-use or properly modularize code. We are still stuck in "throw it away and do it over" and constantly reinventing wheels because there is no way to make wheels fit. The nature of digital means there are no tolerances. The concept isn't even valid. Things fit 100% or 0%. We keep inventing languages. They don't help. We keep inventing frameworks. They don't help. We keep trying "design patterns" and "methodologies." They don't help. If anything all the stuff we invent makes the problem worse. Now we have an ecosystem with 20 different languages, 50 different runtimes, and 30 variants of 5 OSes. Complexity goes up, costs go up, reusability never happens, etc. I remember for a while seeing things like the JVM and CLR (the VM for C# and friends) as a way out-- get away from the brittle C API and fully compiled static native code and into a runtime environment that allowed really solid error handling and introspection. But that paradigm never caught on for whatever reason, probably because it wasn't free enough. WASM is maybe promising.
- wakawaka28 2y ago
  >The brittleness is what gets me. In physical mechanical and even analog electrical systems there are tolerances. Things can almost-work and still work for varying degrees of work. I think you are misrepresenting how flexible software is versus hardware. Mechanical and electrical systems have tolerances but if you go outside those tolerances, the whole system can be destroyed. Nothing like that is common in software. Worst-case outcomes might be like "the performance isn't as good as we want" or "this code is difficult to work with." Software components are very flexible compared to anything physical, even in the worst cases. >We are still stuck in "throw it away and do it over" and constantly reinventing wheels because there is no way to make wheels fit. The nature of digital means there are no tolerances. The concept isn't even valid. Things fit 100% or 0%. I don't know how one can look at the amazing array of libraries out there and conclude that we have no reuse. Sometimes people build their own solutions because they need something very simple and the libraries are too big to be worth importing and learning in those circumstances. That's not a flaw in the libraries. It's human nature. >We keep inventing languages. They don't help. We keep inventing frameworks. They don't help. We keep trying "design patterns" and "methodologies." They don't help. If anything all the stuff we invent makes the problem worse. Now we have an ecosystem with 20 different languages, 50 different runtimes, and 30 variants of 5 OSes. Complexity goes up, costs go up, reusability never happens, etc. All of this is too pessimistic. These tools do help. Exactly how many languages do you think we should have? Do you think exactly one group is going to develop for each use case and satisfy everyone? >WASM has its uses but I can't escape the idea that it's like "let's build a VM and carry all the shortcomings of C into it." I'm not a web guy but this sounds silly. It's not meant to be written directly. Complaining about shortcomings of WASM is literally like complaining about shortcomings of assembly language. It's not intended for human consumption, in modern times.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    There's probably more tendency to be sloppy in software because "we can always fix it in post." But absolutely, with hardware, if you don't get it right--especially with heavy construction or modern electronics, you're going to have to rip a lot out and start over.

by yuliyp 2y ago

NBJack 2y ago

I think that's fair: the success stories are very rarely "yay, we did it!" but much more often "this single change was the sole focus of a team/multiple teams for X months, and the launch/release/fix was considered a culmination of a significant investment of resources".

api 2y ago

I know I'm not alone in this, but after doing this for more than 20 years I can't shake the idea that we are doing it wrong -- meaning programming. Is it really this nit-picky, brittle, and hard? The brittleness is what gets me. In physical mechanical and even analog electrical systems there are tolerances. Things can almost-work and still work for varying degrees of work. Software on the other hand is unbelievably brittle to the point that after 50 years of software engineering we still really can't re-use or properly modularize code. We are still stuck in "throw it away and do it over" and constantly reinventing wheels because there is no way to make wheels fit. The nature of digital means there are no tolerances. The concept isn't even valid. Things fit 100% or 0%. We keep inventing languages. They don't help. We keep inventing frameworks. They don't help. We keep trying "design patterns" and "methodologies." They don't help. If anything all the stuff we invent makes the problem worse. Now we have an ecosystem with 20 different languages, 50 different runtimes, and 30 variants of 5 OSes. Complexity goes up, costs go up, reusability never happens, etc. I remember for a while seeing things like the JVM and CLR (the VM for C# and friends) as a way out-- get away from the brittle C API and fully compiled static native code and into a runtime environment that allowed really solid error handling and introspection. But that paradigm never caught on for whatever reason, probably because it wasn't free enough. WASM is maybe promising.

wakawaka28 2y ago
>The brittleness is what gets me. In physical mechanical and even analog electrical systems there are tolerances. Things can almost-work and still work for varying degrees of work. I think you are misrepresenting how flexible software is versus hardware. Mechanical and electrical systems have tolerances but if you go outside those tolerances, the whole system can be destroyed. Nothing like that is common in software. Worst-case outcomes might be like "the performance isn't as good as we want" or "this code is difficult to work with." Software components are very flexible compared to anything physical, even in the worst cases. >We are still stuck in "throw it away and do it over" and constantly reinventing wheels because there is no way to make wheels fit. The nature of digital means there are no tolerances. The concept isn't even valid. Things fit 100% or 0%. I don't know how one can look at the amazing array of libraries out there and conclude that we have no reuse. Sometimes people build their own solutions because they need something very simple and the libraries are too big to be worth importing and learning in those circumstances. That's not a flaw in the libraries. It's human nature. >We keep inventing languages. They don't help. We keep inventing frameworks. They don't help. We keep trying "design patterns" and "methodologies." They don't help. If anything all the stuff we invent makes the problem worse. Now we have an ecosystem with 20 different languages, 50 different runtimes, and 30 variants of 5 OSes. Complexity goes up, costs go up, reusability never happens, etc. All of this is too pessimistic. These tools do help. Exactly how many languages do you think we should have? Do you think exactly one group is going to develop for each use case and satisfy everyone? >WASM has its uses but I can't escape the idea that it's like "let's build a VM and carry all the shortcomings of C into it." I'm not a web guy but this sounds silly. It's not meant to be written directly. Complaining about shortcomings of WASM is literally like complaining about shortcomings of assembly language. It's not intended for human consumption, in modern times.
- ghaff 2y ago
  There's probably more tendency to be sloppy in software because "we can always fix it in post." But absolutely, with hardware, if you don't get it right--especially with heavy construction or modern electronics, you're going to have to rip a lot out and start over.