It will be easier to get all the OS creators to normalize new line to one thing. Then pick a text delimiter that is reserved solely for delimiting, like say '|'.
Versioning is marketing. This is just the latest Coke Zero. Anything public facing is marketing. I remember when marketing got ahold of memory and disk size in the 1980s Then it was CPU size. Size matters. As someone once quipped, "If winning dosen't matter then why do they keep score?" Micrsoft can't release annually and Apple iOS can. That's a score. Marketing is about selling the sizzle and not the steak and versions sizzle. Forget trying to make public meaning out of them. Sales can sell bigger is better.
It is interesting to consider what happened to Browser as OS market. It is also interesting to consider with what happened to OLPC, one laptop per child, initiative. If all one does is use a device as a web browser then it doesn't matter what that device is. Browser games are gaining traction. As a Linux developer I use Linux as my primary OS and have Windows 10 loaded as a VirtualBox VM but the inverse would be easily doable if my brain fell out of my head and I decided to become a Windows developer. Windows is trying really hard to walk the tight line of making Linux run well for server applications natively in Windows but not for a Linux desktop or web browser. What I'm getting at here is that how users think about these things could easily break a market-changing usage in the next ten years.
When I see these kinds of takes on movie quality dropping I typically encounter the impact CGI has had over time. I was surprised that you did not similarly decry the impact of CGI on cinema and the over reliance on it.
This disease has a striking resemblance to the history of Lyme's disease transmitted by ticks. The symptoms last for years. The original bacteria is treated with antibiotics and cleared up. Ongoing treatment of antibiotics can help with the symptoms. Just as with Lyme's disease, the scientific community has been dismissive of patients suffering with long term affects.
The sad part of this is that we've know these kinds of trends were going to happen since the advent of the computer and automation. Computing and automation leave the average physical and intellectual ability behind. Someone born in the last 20 years could be forgiven for thinking that Science Fiction is only about dystopian stories of despair. Why? Because one cornerstone of SciFi is that the average IQ is worth less every day and is being replaced by technology. Those left behind will revolt. This easily explains Trump's appeal. Average people are feeling more irrelevant ever day. Trump is proof that even the worst of con men can tap into that despair. Andrew Yang ran his Presidential campaign in part on this theme, but UBI does nothing for helping people feel relevant or in control of their lives. The title of this article could have easily been, "Silicon Valley thought the US was its future, now things have changed." The disaffected are only becoming more disaffected every day because those in the technological advancement industries don't care.
In a cultural perspective emotional investment is commensurate with tradition, norms and mores. That is human nature that any endeavor will take on the trappings of our evolutionary heritage. Programming languages are no different. Taboos and other tribal patterns apply. It doesn't do the computing community any favor pretending this is just about learning.
American politics has regressed on a scale of civilized to tribal. This is something we can all intuit and I think articles like this are going to become more common place. How do humans overcome base nature to become civilized? This is poorly understood. Religion wants to take all the credit. People like Stephen Pinker point to the Enlightenment being responsible and Enlightenment under attack today is civilization under attack. The fact our culture is coarsening into ever larger degrees of tribalism is disturbing. Computer science will not be able to stay out of the fray. Nor will any human endeavour.
Most senior engineers I know are key men. The have the corporation by the short curlies and, uhhh, dealing with the key men egos is something everyone has to put up with.
Words like "senior" and "principle" engineer reflect more on company being hostage to coding expertise than reflect competence beyond coding. I'm trying to think of senior or principle engineer who gave two whits about "beyond coding". Coming up blank here.
In large corporations pay is tied to title and often times titles are handed out simply to pay someone not to look elsewhere and it has nothing to do with anything else.
Unregretted Attrition Rate assumes managers can tell the difference between a bad employee and a good employee. My experience is that 90% of managers don't have that skill.
Life is a feedback loop. What this means is if they hire to fire then the dead weight is not going anywhere, just the people who were hired to be fired and the problem is worse.
It has been my experience that most programming terms end up being business or marketing driven if they gain much traction. My pet peeve at one time is API. This term contains the word "interface", meaning external code will interface with your code. However, business calls everything an API and it means a unit of software work from their perspective. Probably the goofiest one is AI. When people say they are using AI it doesn't tell me anything. What is a VM? Python, Perl and other interpreted languages are said to run in a VM. Isn't a container a VM? A container is just host OS VM. I remember when VMWare only had host OS VMs until they came out with the Hypervisor VM, ESXi. Docker is a brand of container and both are VMs. The point is that it is human nature that any word that becomes popularized will take on business and marketing purposes. You just have to roll with it unless one is expressly carrying out technical communication, then clarity of definition does matter.
Genetic engineering is something that does not get taken into account in these dystopian predictions. Humans can learn to accelerate the evolutionary process as well as reconstitute extinct species. This is especially true if we consider the rate of technological change and that natural evolution moves at a snail pace.
Long before it was ML it was called data mining. The textbook example is Walmart discovered that men buying diapers rewarded themselves with beer so Walmart created endcaps with beer and diapers. What the textbook didn't say is whether the cost in millions putting the data warehouse together ever was matched by the extra money made putting beer with diapers. Data mining was a fad long before ML co-opted its throne. A human eyeballing data has a better chance of finding these kind of new trends. Where ML weighs in us with fine tuning known trends such as with auto pilot, voice recognition, facial recognition, etc. Even then ML is only as good as the things being tuned.
Money rules software no less than any other industry. Sometimes I think the hubris of software is meritocracy and efficacy rules software. Sure... Software is prone to the tower of Babel, not invented here, tribalism, and greed that permeates all human endeavors. There are islands of productivty just like any other capitalist domain. Software is not special in its place in human endeavors but its practioners like to think they are beyond the mundane aspects of our nature. At times it is cute, but mostly just droll.
Fortune magazine predicted this back in 1992. They did a study that correlated the growth of developers graduating from college was either flat or linear. The growth of computing needs was exponential. The end result of would be an exponential decrease in discipline in software as amateurs, hackers, trades people and what not necessarily fill the void. There is no other outcome. The challenge is for those areas such as military arsenals, power grids, healthcare and other safety domains to firewall off from the undisciplined masses and enforce discipline. However, Fortune pointed out that capitalism doesn't reward safety when its cheaper to hire good lawyers and litigate. So Fortune also predicted an explosion in tort and tort lawyers. Verner Vinge wrote about this in his novels. He supposed that rationalization will ensue and that undisciplined code will be seen as security through obscurity, a Gordian knot of convolution. One possible scenario is more-or-less Skynet were a few computing centers replace millions of devices. This makes sense from a capitalism perspective and governments can a few tightly controlled central services. So those are the choices given human nature. What's not a choice is an increase in discipline because, you know, human nature.
IDEs are amber and throw away effort. All the break points, data integration and what not is thrown away after the bug is fixed. Further this IDE effort is not shared between developers. Log debugging is reusable out of the gate. Log debugging can easily be promoted to a production statement if deemed important. IDE developers it seems to me need to work on how all the time and energy IDE developers spend on a bug can be generalized to the point these things can be shipped with the code itself. Until then it is throw away work trapped in the amber of the IDE.
There is a dimension that gets overlooked in these discussions: tests. Every bug should start with a mind set to create a new test: unit, integration, or end-to-end. These are regression tests. Now, whether the test is needed or not is a decision that will fall out the bug fix. There is a distinct difference between the skill of debugging and skill of writing tests. I focus most of my efforts in writing test code. Someday perhaps IDEs will be the test platform for all the test types. That's not today though. The question in my mind is not print debugging versus IDE, but test code debugging versus ad-hoc debugging. IDEs encourage ad hoc debugging because once a bug is fixed, the test code needs to be written from the ground up, a step this is often left out due to time limits. I debug in test code and when the debugging is done the test is written. This applies to new code as well and mirrors the paired programming notion of starting new development using test code.
Most people commenting on human nature have no formal education in it. A good place to start is Steven Pinker's, "The Blank Slate, The Modern Denial of Human Nature." Claiming everyone should find something easy is a blank slate statement.
I think the author is way to generous to the PERL community and the drama of PERL 6. I think the toxicity that eventually led to Larry Wall bowing out is being replicated in Python and Guido leaving. I left PERL for Python in the mid-2000s because it was clear with the Parrot engine and other misguided notions by the PERL bullies that the PERL leadership was bent. Now that Guido is out it will be interesting to see how long Python retains its perch. I think the demise of PERL would have been vastly different if Larry Wall hadn't been forced out.
Materials can be traced to point of origin, especially nuclear active material. There is no such tracing with software. A checksum only guarantees that two things have equal software. It does not say the difference of origin between the two.
The only thing I will say is that this would not meet my personal code review standards for logging. Rule number one is never put functional calls in a logging statement, only log static data. As optimistic as one might be that the 'ic' has no side effects, the most conservative approach is to never put anything that interacts with run-time behavior in a log statement. This is especially good practice when working in many code bases in many languages. If one gets comfortable with something like say 'ic' that has no side effects when wrapping function calls then one may assume this out of habit when interacting with other such utilities, other languages. The conservative approach is best in my experience and that is to never insert run-time code in log statements and only log static data.
Party on! I applaud this effort. As a UI/UX engineer I can say that there is no one debugging UI/UX experience to fit all. Of course there is the active/passive division between active debugging and logging. There are further usability divisions in both of those. As this is a passive/logging debugging scheme I'm sure there are those in the passive debugging community who will find this helpful, if not vocal.There is no one size fits all when it comes to usability although 99.9999% of software built only presents one usability experience and only begrudgingly provide the disabled community access as an after thought. A fairly significant percentage of the population is color blind and yet web sites still overly rely on red. Yby. You be you. The bane of all usability is one size fits all. Well met! We need more, not less, usability options.
Bills of Materials work with hardware because origins can be tracked. Good luck tracking the origin of electrons. I worked in manufacturing for a company the dealt solely with MilSpec (Military Specification). Crates sent to Nuclear Power plants had to X-Rayed on the shipping dock and then again at the receiving dock. If the X-Rays differed in any questionable way the shipment was rejected. However, most supply chains are not that paranoid. In the 1980s there was a grade eight bolt scandal for a satellite that blew up in space because the manufacturer substituted plain steal to make more money. More recently the BOM did nothing to protect the Bay Area Bridge where once again bolts as well as rods were specified of one quality and delivered as another. The bolts and rods are still in the new span because taking them out would require tearing it down again. But the builder assures us things are fine, wink wink, nod nod.
https://www.courthousenews.com/34m-settlement-reached-for-de...
A better discussion is about what happened in the late 1980s and lasted until the dotcom bust: empowerment. The empowerment movement was in some sense inspired by Just In Time (JIT) manufacturing. The idea presented simply is to harness the power, or empower, line workers to halt the assembly line when line workers saw a defect. Chains were installed on factory floor assembly lines and line workers would pull the chain when they saw quality defects. This is called total quality control, or TQC. Everyone is empowered to be do quality control and thus TQC. There is a lot more too it but that's the gist. The Harvard professor who invented JIT couldn't get Americans to buy into his idea and had to finally find adoption in Japan. Thus Japan's rise in car and electronic quality and ability to cut costs by having less defects. Empowerment took on many other flavors eventually where Tom Peters of FedEx fame empowered delivery drivers to change schedules and do other things to make delivery times. Empowerment then went into quality of life overall with on campus gyms, on campus day care, bagel fridays etc. The hay day was the 1990s where it seems a new management book every week came out promoting new ways to empower employees and to upgrade management processes with such things as open door policies. But, and here's the but, Americans love tyranny. They always have. The so called captains of industry were never much interested in the power sharing that the word empowerment implies and after the dotcom bust in 2000 the empowerment trend was soon on the defensive. S** rolls downhill, cajoling, and other forms of tyranny are what American management know and love. And that's where things have returned. Management of 2021 has more in common with the late 1970s than the late 1990s. Do as your told reigns king. Know your place. The elephant in the room that this article does not address is that as long as corporate America and the world continues to use an authoritarian, top-down pyramid structure of power then the limits of that structure apply. The empowerment movement has all but been banished and that fundamental, tyrannical space confinement of top-down, micro-management of authoritarianism by threats and intimidation cannot be addressed by any amount of bottom up discussion. Nothing is going to get better until those in power give it up. I actually find it amazing the the empowerment movement ever found fertile ground at all. But to be honest America flirted with power sharing for a time only when it got its azz kicked by Japan in the automobile and electronics industries. America soon abandoned empowerment because the lure of draconian power is ever seductive. Steve Jobs put the final nail in the coffin of the empowerment movement in the tech industry.
Been 30 years since college physics but I believe the total heat+electricity output of the fuel cell will then again be needed to separate the aluminium waste in order to recycle the aluminium? That's a zero some game except the 80% lost to heat. That heat loss is inefficient? Perhaps the new hybrid car should have a steam engine! ha!
Simple and easy are two words with no meaning. Why? Because simple and easy attest to common brain paths that do not exist. In computer science the divide between functional programming ease and simplicity as with the likes of Lisp and procedural languages as with like Python stand in stark contrast. Functional programmers believe everyone thinks like they do even though the vast majority of software is procedural and whose population do not find being lost in sets of parenthesis easy or simple. Easy and simple are meaningless because there is no uniform, blank slate learning path in the human brain. In fact, if one had to model every person having a unique learning path versus today's notion that what's easy from me is easy for thee then the unique model would surely realize far more efficacy in practice.
What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.
--Herbert Simon, economist
What if one is printing the output of a function? Then one is left with reverting to positional formats. Mixing positional and named formats is less than robust. One of the common cases for function output is using pprint. As someone who has been using Python since 2.4 print formating using pprint is robust. Over the years I've found it a best practice to only use positional formatting so as to have the format string be stable when switching between usuing a variable or pprint of the variable, especially when debugging. So, I am not using f strings. Another thing is that as a decades long PERL developer I observe Python is becoming the new PERL in having fifty ways to do something. All of these ways will have small-to-large performance differences. Because of this then soon we will all have the Python Cookbook on our shelves to document them so one knows when to part ways with less optimal usages. It is always faster to print an unformatted list then a format string and in fact pylint will ding your code if logger uses a format string and not a list of strings and variables in print order. Then one begins to wonder if this is the case for logger then why not for every print statement? And thus Python is quickly degenerating into PERL code readable territory with each new version.