Don't fall in love with your technology

http://prog21.dadgum.com/128.html

by angrycoder • 14 years ago

123 55 14 years ago

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frodwith• 14 years ago

I've recently realized that most of the enjoyment I derive from building things comes from the process (figuring out neat / new ways to do things, debugging, thinking). Shipping is a necessary tedium for me. Maybe people like me have more fun fiddling with the minutiae of our tools than actually "doing cool things".

No value judgment there, just an observation.

cageface• 14 years ago

I used to feel the same way but after many years of tinkering with languages, tools, operating systems etc the novelty began to wear off and I began to feel unsatisfied by the things I'd actually shipped into the world.

These days I get far more satisfaction from putting something new that's useful or fun in front of users and I don't care much exactly what it took to get it there.

TeMPOraL2• 14 years ago

For me it was probably hanging out on HN for the last two years that changed my mindset. I used to like spending time building (as in, building forever, not shipping) things with interesting technologies and great attention to code style, etc. Right now I try to focus on making something useful for me or others[1]. Programming is now more of a tool (one of many) than an art for me (though I still love to play around with technologies and concepts).

I blame this mindshift on the prevailing focus on shipping something useful ASAP that can be seen here :).

[1] - to the point that yesterday, after spending few hours researching available software and technologies, I decided to pay few bucks for a solution that I would normally strive to code myself.

klochner• 14 years ago

This sounds like an engineer chiding artists for not being productive.

There's nothing wrong with deriving pleasure from deep analysis of a programming language - similarly with all of art or mathematics.

Feel free to fall in love with your technology, just realize it's not as likely to make you rich if your goal isn't to ship product.

rbxbx• 14 years ago

Agreed, completely, however there is one difference: When an artist ceases to ship, they starve.

commieneko• 14 years ago

Art, like science, is not necessarily a profession. It can be an avocation. There are many important artists and scientists that did not support themselves with their art or science.

shoover5• 14 years ago

This author enjoys turning a nice line of code or structuring a nice program as much as anyone. Read his past posts. I don't see anything here remotely against art or enjoying the challenge of your work. The point is for him it's important not to get lost in the tools at the expense of not making things.

wavephorm2• 14 years ago

He mentions vi/emacs debate, but perhaps more relevant is all the Linux Desktop and KDE/Gnome drama. Tablets and touchscreen interfaces blow the entire desktop paradigm to smithereens. The desktop UI is done, folks. The Linux community needs to wake up. All that drama, all the work on creating competing UI widget codebases, window managers, etc, and it's ALL going to get thrown out with the bathwater.

ek• 14 years ago

Could you please explain the sentiment about the desktop paradigm becoming outmoded? People seem to say this so frequently and I can't understand it at all. What about people who write code, for example? Do you expect them to be able to achieve the same standard of productivity as they currently can on <insert favorite platform here>?

notatoad2• 14 years ago

I code for 8 hours a day at work using gnome shell. It works perfectly fine. I'm equally productive in OS X. So yes, I do.

smacktoward2• 14 years ago

People who write code are a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the overall computer-using population. That fraction will only get smaller in the years to come as mobile devices get cheaper and more capable.

Traditional desktop interfaces will survive, but they will survive in the same way that, say, Emacs survives -- as a niche product for that tiny market segment, not as the default way the Teeming Millions interact with their personal tech.

mbq• 14 years ago

Don't worry; ten years from now some people will still shout how wonderful is yet another Apple's ultimate hardware build from "miraculously excavated" Jobs' notes -- for instance an eye-track-controlled sphere covered with continuous display showing only "Give 10$ to Apple" button. While others will fork dwm to overcome recent "overly revolutional" changes which catastrophically degraded their productivity.

silon32• 14 years ago

I kinda agree. Android desktop should be the next linux desktop.

Then we can forget about windows/osx/gnome/kde/...

thomholwerda2• 14 years ago

...and continue onwards with GO Launcher vs. Launcher Pro vs. Zeam vs. ...

hollerith4• 14 years ago

Fifteen years ago it was the web browser that was going to blow the desktop OS to smithereens. Larry Ellison announced the "network computer" that had no local storage (i.e., no hard drive) booted from the net and revolved around the browser. Although the web browser has become more important over the last 15 years, the only thing we have today that resembles a network computer is the Google Chromebook, and the only people who have those things are people who got them below cost and want to replace the (Chrome) OS with a desktop OS and (returning to the theme of the OP) people who really really really love the web.

There has been over 30 years of research and field experience with the WIMP paradigm. The code bases (source trees) for the three most "popular" (most relied-on) desktop OSes are over 20 years old. (Yes, I know that the code base for Windows XP and later differs from that of Windows 98 and earlier, but the code base for XP and later, namely, the NT code base, is itself over 20 years old if you count the final 18 months or so of its pre-release development.) I concede that there is a good chance that iOS and Android and Windows Metro will eventually kill the desktop OS, but that is going to take another 10 years and probably significantly longer.

wavephorm2• 14 years ago

The web already has replaced Windows desktop software for most peoples uses of a computer. Facebook, news, email, photo sharing (flikr), music (di.fm), video (youtube)... That's all most people need from a computer and tablets, with an optional keyboard accomplish this just fine.

There is no inherent reason that people need to use a virtual desktop, remote controlled by a mouse. The desktop metaphors, overlapping windows, cascading menus, constant nagging popups, files and folders, hardware drivers, blue screens... all this stuff is a nightmare for average users. They are already abandoning the desktop model because it never worked very well.

mwsherman• 14 years ago

I love the sentiment that the love should be directed towards what we produce. It’s natural that the tools that enable it should be part of that feeling. But the satisfaction is in the product.

dkarl• 14 years ago

Every tool I use is someone else's product, and I'm glad they love it. In fact, I demand that they love it. For me, that's what separated Unix from Mac OS and Windows when I was first exposed to it over a decade ago. Unlike in those other two operating systems, here wasn't a separation between the ugly, dirty parts no one was supposed to love and the beautiful parts that "mattered." In Unix, and now in Linux, I might just use the filesystem to store my source code files -- it's just a tool for me -- but there's somebody who loves the filesystem and makes it as beautiful for me as they know how.

silon32• 14 years ago

Those that don't understand 'Makefiles' are doomed to reinvent them, poorly.

Peaker• 14 years ago

It's hard to reinvent something that is so poorly designed, any more poorly.

eliben2• 14 years ago

You'll be surprised !! - http://www.cmake.org/

krig2• 14 years ago

"That's the same year that multi-touch interfaces exploded, low power consumption became key, and the tired, old trappings of faux-desktops were finally set aside for something completely new. "

Funnily, this statement sounds a lot more like it is spoken by someone who has fallen in love, in this case someone infatuated with multi-touch interfaces and so on.

It sounds like the author is arguing that new is automatically better. I mean, I think I understand the point he is trying to make about being trapped in the familiar and being unable to appreciate new approaches, I just don't think it's said very well here. Is he claiming that input interfaces and power consumption are areas of technology that are seeing high innovation and rapid adoption of new ideas, in contrast to the area of build systems and editors? That seems patently absurd to me. Input devices have barely changed at all since the typewriter (the exception would be the invention of the mouse), and although touch interfaces have uses in some areas, in others they are not an improvement at all - one new piece of input technology making it into general use since the sixties does not rapid innovation make. Oh, and build systems and editors are the two things where there are new approaches popping up all the time. The latest I heard was that google Go will ship version 1 with their own build system, for example.

wladimir6• 14 years ago

It reads like a rambling. He's pitting Linux advocates against touch technology? I don't even understand why. Android is based on Linux, and Ubuntu has been developing a touch-friendly interface for a long time.

And what does that have to do with makefiles? Is there suddenly some magical "miniority report" touch wand that replaces them? (yes, I know there are alternative systems, but they're generally a new syntax for representing the same thing)

"Absurd" is indeed the appropriate word. Too much of the tech brochure cool-aid...

shoover5• 14 years ago

Forget the details. They are examples. Back up. Make something.

shoover5• 14 years ago

Click around and read some archives on that blog. The author writes lots of interesting things about all different kinds of technology, lots of it quite old. But he also writes from a perspective of what it means to him. Far from infatuation with the latest and greatest from Apple. That's an example, for crying out loud. Just read the last paragraph of the OP over and over until it sinks in.

krig2• 14 years ago

I don't think I mentioned Apple? You say it's an example, but an example of what? If I misunderstood what he meant, then perhaps you can enlighten me.

I did the read the last paragraph of the OP, and I tried to summarize my interpretation of it in my post. If you disagree, perhaps it would be helpful if you shared your point of view. Just telling me to read it again is not very informative.

Tichy• 14 years ago

But, but... which should I use, Emacs or Vim???

hollerith4• 14 years ago

This might be the explanation for the unthinking conservatism influential in the Linux community.

wladimir6• 14 years ago

Can you quote some examples of this? Like in any community there is a lot of conservatism, but how is it influential?

I hear quite some complaints that Ubuntu/Debian/kernel changes are going too fast, more than that it is going too slow. Seems the conservatists complain a lot (about the new UIs, about new logging systems, about new init daemons, about new process IPC systems, etc) but are not really that influential on the actual projects.

What am I missing?

hollerith4• 14 years ago

An example of the influence of conservatism is the fact that important parts of GNU/Linux (e.g., all of the terminal-emulation applications) rely on pseudo terminals (PTYs). In contrast, Plan 9's kernel never supported PTYs and Plan 9's analog to a terminal emulator (namely, the thing you use to interact with a shell) never relied on them -- and Plan 9 started in the mid-1980s. There is a real terminal emulator available on Plan 9 (called vt100 IIRC) but it is implemented entirely in userland and nothing else in a typical Plan 9 install depends on it.

Yes, there is benefit to being able to get kernel messages during boot over an RS-232 link, but note that the whole infrastructure of TERMCAP files and cursor addressing is not needed for that capability, and yet TERMCAP files and cursor addressing remain an integral part of Linux -- if your TERMCAP file is misconfigured or your TERM environment variable is set wrong, you might be unable to get to a shell prompt.

Part of the reason this "cursor addressing" infrastructure is still integrated into IIUC all of the important distros is that reducing technical debt in a distro is a thankless task, but (since the complete dominance of the ncurses library for cursor addressing makes ("made"? Mabye ncurses is no longer completely dominant -- I've been away from Linux for a few years) it fairly easy to remove TERMCAP files, etc, from the set of things that have to be configured correctly to get to a shell prompt) I think that part of the reason that if your TERMCAP file is messed up, you might not be able to get a shell prompt is the hesitancy to change the design of the parts of a distro that come from the Unix of Bell Labs in the 1970s, which is frequently talked about in reverential tones.

(Yes, I know that cursor addressing might not date back to the 1970s, but it does date back to the 1980s and is now considered fairly integral to one of the things (the PTY) that was in Unix from the beginning.)

Note that it is possible for Linux to suffer from conservatism and from unnecessary design churn at the same time. For example, the design churn might be restricted to the parts of Linux that do not come from the Unix of the 1970s.

For a second example of conservatism in Linux, consider the persistent of /usr as discussed recently in

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3519952

thomholwerda2• 14 years ago

The complete and utter inability to come up with a consistent, modern, human-readable, non-arbitrary directory structure comes to mind. People are so blinded by the arbitrarily "designed" [1] FHS they refuse to even entertain the idea that it might just be time to replace it with something better.

[1] http://www.osnews.com/story/25556/Understanding_the_bin_sbin...

EDIT for clarification: layers upon layers upon layers of virtual directory structures don't count. It only adds complexity and makes the system more obtuse.

dasil0032• 14 years ago

He mentions vi/emacs. I am pretty much in love with vim, and I anticipate never using another editor for my daily work. This will certainly prevent me from discovering the joys of Microsoft's latest toolchain. On the other hand, I think it makes a much wider world of programming accessible because of the richness of the Unix world.

I freely admit that being very familiar with older tools and paradigms will make me unfairly biased against new approaches that may in fact be objectively better. But network effects being what they are, I'm not particularly keen on striking out after novel approaches (Plan 9 sounds like a massive improvement on Unix paradigms, but whose got the time?).

Of course I don't really have a problem shipping. I tend to keep my eye on the ball, sharpening tools only as an occasional distraction, so I guess the article isn't directed at me.

fein• 14 years ago

Of all the arguments for the author to pick, the "archaic" editor issue is probably the most insignificant/ most misunderstood. There is no arguing (at least in my little world) that using tools like vi/ emacs make you a FAR better programmer than hand holding IDE's like VS. When you need to make vi/ emacs do something for you, a knowledge not only of the programming process, but also the inner workings of the editor must be understood. There is really no better way to expand knowledge than being forced to do things for yourself. Perhaps one could make an argument for productivity (in regards to things like VS), but I believe that a skilled vi/ emacs user will be more productive in many languages, whereas most Microsoft coders live in a world of .Net, or Java coders live in a world of Java.

Disclaimer: Church of Emacs

hello_moto• 14 years ago

Geek loves to praise his tools and pulled assumptions over thin air for everything else.

vim/emacs are nice (I'm a vim user) but gosh... have you ever tried the latest JetBrains offering? PyCharm? RubyMine? the JS editor.

The only reason I'm using VIM is because I'm just that _weird_. My dream setup would be a 11"/13" laptop with nothing other than a console and a web browser. If IDEs can fit that screen (which they can't right now...) I would dump vim in an instant and never look back.

AznHisoka• 14 years ago

You have to know what type of person you are. If you love solving problems and bringing something new to the market, then don't stick to any technology like a religion, they are just tools, and a means to an end.

If you like coding as a hobby, then feel free to fall in love with the technology, but realize you might not be taking the best path to creating something useful or solving problems.

shoover5• 14 years ago

Wow, I thought this was a community that valued shipping. All the top comments here say otherwise. Where are the makers?

ivix• 14 years ago

I get it about Forth, but not so sure about vi/emacs/makefiles - what does the author think was used to build his beloved touchscreen displays?

Ipad software is not written on an ipad.

EdiX• 14 years ago

Why would anyone expect anything but talk about the language forth in comp.lang.forth? And this isn't the first time the blog tries to make possibly valid points through a bunch of bad examples, the most prominent example being "Free your technical aesthetics from the 1970s" which was factually wrong for the most part (yet he still stands by it).

I think I'm being trolled, therefore I'm removing it's feed from my reader.

Don't fall in love with your technology

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