Chicken and Egg Problem (2000) | Hacker News Reader

Chicken and Egg Problem (2000)

joelonsoftware.com

58 pointspcr91030319 comments

On the topic of platform switches, I thought Apple handled the ARM switch very well!

I was initially hesitant when my current employer handed me an M1 MacBook for software development (typical web and tools dev). I wanted to request for a last gen Intel Mac instead.

6 months later I realized that I haven’t yet had any major issues with doing web development, or using most tools. Rosetta 2 handles most x86-64 software well with a little startup delay, and the list of native ARM software is still growing.

The initial 2 months were painful only because the existing developers and tools were all x86-64 and no one else had an M1 Mac. There was no formal IT team and so I don’t think they thought about platform compatibility etc. I had to look for alternatives, workarounds, compile from source, but this phase went better and lasted shorter than I expected.

Combined with the lower cost and higher performance of the M1 platform it’s a no brainer for organizations.

> I thought Apple handled the ARM switch very well!

I wonder how many of the greybeards who worked on the PowerPC -> X86 transition or even the 68k -> PowerPC transition they still had around to help guide that? Does anybody (technical in this sort of way) stay at Apple for 17 or 30 years respectively?

Meanwhile, Microsoft has maintained backward binary compatibility for ages.

Is it in the same way? Impressions of the Surface Pro X seem to be less than stellar in terms of compatibility and performance in comparison to the M1 MacBooks. I’ve used Windows PCs for much longer than I’ve had Macs, and I don’t seem to recall Windows going through such a large platform move like OSX did with PowerPC > Intel and then macOS with Intel > ARM.

which ironically really hurt their ARM adoption. Apple devs already know the rules are going to change on them whenever apple feels like it, so people aren't as stubborn about it. Of course I don't think that strategy would have worked for microsoft to begin with

Which turned out to be more trouble than it’s worth. Many applications are now on the web and web devs breaks api compatibility all the damn time. Nobody seems to care about it that much

Got a chuckle out of this.

"Jon Ross, who wrote the original version of SimCity for Windows 3.x, told me that he accidentally left a bug in SimCity where he read memory that he had just freed. Yep. It worked fine on Windows 3.x, because the memory never went anywhere. Here’s the amazing part: On beta versions of Windows 95, SimCity wasn’t working in testing. Microsoft tracked down the bug and added specific code to Windows 95 that looks for SimCity. If it finds SimCity running, it runs the memory allocator in a special mode that doesn’t free memory right away."

How many of us had to hardcode those one off "if" blocks to handle an annoying special case and get the damned thing shipped. Maybe the section has a nice TODO comment that stays in the repo for posterity. No one wants to take the effort to clean it up lest there be a hidden dependency somewhere that would break.

This is something governments are ignoring en masse when they build their digital identities and data exchanges. Nobody gets on your bandwagon unless there’s already people on it. And even if you make adoption mandatory, the usage will take time to ramp up so you need to suffer through years of mockery of your compulsive device being useless. But there’s no other way to get there.

> DOS was popular because it had software from day one. And it had software because Tim Paterson had thought to include a CP/M compatibility feature in it, because way back in the dark ages somebody was smart about chicken and egg problems.

Good to see this idea being applied to break MS's own stranglehold on the market with Wine/Proton making Windows games work on Linux with minimal fuss.

My favorite post on the subject is by apenwarr:

https://apenwarr.ca/log/20201227

Search for the "Chicken-egg problems" heading

> every month, millions of credit card companies mail out zillions of bills to consumers in the mail. People write paper checks, stuff them in trillions of envelopes, and mail them back. The envelopes are put in big boxes and taken to countries where labor is cheap to be opened and processed.

Is this really how it works in 21st century America? Everything I get billed for here in the UK I get an email bill and the payment just comes out of my bank account directly without any manual work on my part, presumably highly automated at the other end, too.

Credit card, mortgage, council tax, bills for water and electricity - there is nothing I pay manually and certainly not with a piece of paper.

This article is from 2000.

Ah whoops, not sure how I missed that!

This is funny!

That comes at the right time to help me understand why Deno puts in a Node compatibility mode [^1] all of a sudden. Truck loads of eggs, or chickens depending on your view.

[^1]: https://github.com/denoland/deno/issues/12295

[2000]

Egg

The world has moved on, all you need now is a web browser for your operating system.

Hence ChromeOS.

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