9 ms·
The Night Watch (2013) [pdf]
- lechuga 11y agoslightly over the top but awesome.
- xiaq 11y agoI have seen this reposted a lot of times, but I reread it every time. It is simply amazing.
- cbsmith 11y agoRead this with high "NoSQL Bane" expectations... ...was still overwhelmed.
- Animats 11y agoThat's so 1970s systems programming. We've made progress since then. For one thing, now you usually have enough computers to have a test environment.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- weland 11y ago> The systems programmer has written drivers for buggy devices whose firmware was implemented by a drunken child or a sober goldfish This accurately describes my experience lately. I knew those goldfish weren't to be trusted. Edit: > “Why would someone write code in a grotesque language that exposes raw memory addresses? Why not use a modern language with garbage collection and functional programming and free massages after lunch?” Here’s the answer: Pointers are real. They’re what the hardware understands. Somebody has to deal with them. You can’t just place a LISP book on top of an x86 chip and hope that the hardware learns about lambda calculus by osmosis. This accurately describes my experience every time I click on a HN topic about Rust.
- AceJohnny2 11y agoLook, osmosis is a verified scientific fact! It's bound to work at some point! We've just got to adjust some simple parameters... <tightens clamp on chip-book assemblage>
- kibwen 11y ago> This accurately describes my experience every time I > click on a HN topic about Rust. Hm? Rust doesn't have garbage collection, let alone free massages. It does have pointers and it does have raw memory access. Like C++14, it's thoroughly a systems language with a few functional niceties floating around.
- andrewflnr 11y agoI think the joke is about people criticizing Rust for having pointers, etc.
- weland 11y agoTHANK YOU! I'm in the Go camp myself (largely because I speak Unix and with Pike being involved it was inevitable) but I've read a lot on Rust and have been procrastinating learning it for about two years now. It's a very interesting language. Has a lot of helpful constructs. I'm quite convinced it's a better systems language than C++. However, every time something about Rust or Heartbleed hits the net, people flock around and dream of a world of Rust where Bad Stuff can't happen because Rust doesn't let you write programs that do Bad Stuff. Indeed, Rust doesn't let you write C++-branded Bad Stuff in Rust. Real life, however, leads me to believe that Rust-branded Bad Stuff will be trivial to write in Rust, and it is not the panacea that everyone hopes it is. It won't just magically make systems programming better and safer. People somehow managed to have buffer overflows in firmware written in that hideous form of Pascal that had the length of the array as part of the type, so foo(int x[10]) only compiled if you passed it an array of ten ints. They'll manage to write shitty, unsafe code in Rust, too. Edit: > let alone free massages. If you know of a language with free massages please share that information with me because I definitely want to learn it :-). I'm not nitpicking, it's just such a funny typo!
- ahomescu1 11y agoHe has written 6 of these and they're all available on his page (scroll down to the line on the USENIX online magazine): http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/mickens/ http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/mickens/
- rhgraysonii 11y agoI've always enjoyed his papers. They carry their own brand of absurdity/hilarity. Here are some others I've seen posted in the past [pdf warning]: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/mickens/nestofhornets.pdf http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/mickens/nestofhor... http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/mickens/thisworldofours.pdf http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/mickens/thisworld... http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/mickens/thesaddestmoment.pdf http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/mickens/thesaddes...
- kelvin0 11y agoCan't stop laughing... this guy synthesizes pure comedy gold with a touch of absurdity and a lot of cynicism.
- joslin01 11y agoVery witty and fun read on the importance of system engineers. If I had to choose a tl;dr: I’m glad that people are working on new kinds of bouncing icons because they believe that humanity has solved cancer and homelessness and now lives in a consequence-free world of immersive sprites. That’s exciting, and I wish that I could join those people in the 27th century. But I live here, and I live now, and in my neighborhood, people are dying in the streets. It’s like, French is a great idea, but nobody is going to invent French if they’re constantly being attacked by bears. Do you see? SYSTEMS HACKERS SOLVE THE BEAR MENACE.
- zorbadgreek 11y agoJames recently announced he is leaving Microsoft Research to be a professor at Harvard. I can't wait to see what the Harvard University Press thinks of him.
- seanmcdirmid 11y agoHe will be missed.