Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

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Clearly some people just don't care about that sort of thing. Look at the popularity of Jupyter notebooks, Julia, etc.

There just isn't much forcing people to engage in good software development and operational strategies. Sometimes there are regulations in the field (PCI, HIPAA), sometimes adversaries force care (state sponsored attacks on Google), but that's kind of rare. The usual forcing function is a competitor that delivers features faster than you. In that case, maybe "live programming" is worth a look. I've never seen "less bugs" on a product comparison sheet, for example.

(It's a contentious view, and I'm personally not a fan. I like it for software I'm sitting in front of, like Emacs, but hate it for things that need to run unattended on their own, which is like everything except text editors. And "less bugs" is a big selling point for me personally. Every bug I run into consumes time that I'd rather spend elsewhere. But, not everyone sees it that way.)

>I've never seen "less bugs" on a product comparison sheet, for example.

Those show up, your sales department just uses the more formal names for the actual customer demands that “less bugs” encodes.

That will look like some combination of

• “We have an SLA for an annual 99.9xx% uptime and average sub x00 latency!” (so if a bug causes significant annual reduction in service, your business gets penalized),

• ”We guarantee regulatory compliance!” (so if a bug or business use causes regulatory issues, it’s your ass on the line),

• “We guarantee 24/7 same day chat or email support!” (so if a bug causes an outage, they have a warm body they can yell at, demand an explanation for their customers, and ask questions)

• “We guarantee backups, data redundancy, and worldwide data replication!” (so if a bug blows up one of your data centers somewhere, or the intern fat-fingers an accidental deletion of the production user database, the customer doesn’t even notice something went wrong)

• “We guarantee API backwards compatibility or a service maintenance guarantee until 20xx!” (So you’re forced to fix bugs, and the bug isn’t ‘your PM team might try to #KilledByGoogle’ the service you invested in building infrastructure on.)

Teams that believe in the health, care, and security of their design are far better equipped to offer the above valuable terms to customers to gain competitive business advantage, and teams with bad engineering hygiene are likely to be scared off.

> Look at the popularity of Jupyter notebooks, Julia, etc.

Neither of these (inherently) have the kind of "live programming" environment that the original comment was talking about.

Jupyter notebooks have a different reproducibility problem though, with how easy it is to create hidden state. But they're not intended to be used in production at all anyway, so the problem mainly affects pedagogical and information sharing use cases.

Julia with the Revise.jl package installed and loaded comes kinda close to the live programming model - but the state is always preserved in the source file necessarily with Revise (and it's a development tool too, not one loaded in production). Since you mentioned it alongside Jupyter, maybe you meant the Pluto notebook for Julia? There too the state is always preserved, both in terms of packages (with Julia's usual Manifest file) and in terms of your code (no hidden state like Jupyter, since it's a reactive notebook).

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