Negative focus

http://nrkbeta.no/2014/07/02/negative-focus/

by Agres • 12 years ago

41 45 12 years ago

There's a lot of money in making developers and tech businesses feel dissatisfied with whatever they have, regardless of whatever they need. I think one of the things we haven't really tackled that much is actual dishonesty in the industry, as in, how much of the fire and brimstone is really, really, just an attempt to sell you x or promote the one niche someone is comfortable in. Maybe we don't want to think of software as something higher than glorified laundry detergent, even though the same market rules apply to it.

Then, the people that actually are doing the right stuff are probably already busy doing the right stuff, and we rarely hear them -- or they just don't bother, seeing it'll be drowned in the noise anyway.

csbrooks2• 12 years ago

Ranting gets attention, so people rant.

I've noticed people will use some library or platform or language, and at first they'll love it. Then two or three years on, all they can see are the places it falls short in the domain they're working in. I've personally experienced a disconnect when I'm still in the honeymoon phase, and the speaker has progressed to the "I-hate-this-it's-terrible-throw-it-out" stage.

k__2• 12 years ago

Maybe people need to use fewer libs/frameworks?

The first company I worked as a dev for, while I was studying, wrote most stuff they used themself.

This led libraries and frameworks to just "fit".

But the company structure probably was different.

There was the development, who implemented frameworks and there were the consultants who implemented the end user stuff and installed/maintained it.

Most other companies I know just had a few consultants for customer-admin-stuff and planning and the devs did everything else...

scuba7183• 12 years ago

Or use a 3rd party framework until you see it's problems and more fully understand it's actual use. Then you can write your own

sanderjd• 12 years ago

I think this is just because of the classic leaky abstraction problem. At first a new abstraction seems amazing, but after using it long enough you've seen enough of its leaks to become disenchanted.

csbrooks2• 12 years ago

Interesting. I'll have to think about that some more.

I've been assuming it's because of human nature: when something's new and shiny, we see all the cool new things it will do for us. After being around it for long enough, we tend to only see the flaws, and forget all the benefits.

cnlwsu• 12 years ago

Just hang on until the "stockholm" phase.

CmonDev• 12 years ago

Well, Twitter is using Scala which is among the best modern languages (and I am not a Scala/JVM developer). It is not about the end result (worry of the business). It is about us developers enjoying the process (nobody else cares about that). I am much happier using <decent modern language of choice> rather than JavaScript for example, this is why I am pissed every time Mozilla leverages the historical browser language monopoly and preaches it's mantra that JS is the best choice. And indeed I have no choice but to use JS on the client-side, because everyone seems happy with the status quo (please no transpilation offers - it's demeaning crap). The more negative - the better.

rdtsc• 12 years ago

Well, Twitter is using Scala

Speaking of ranting and Twitter. On a higher level, I think Twitter is helping this negativity crystallize and come through better by the nature of the service. "Express your opinion in short burst of quick messages". It is hard to pass sometimes a more detailed description of what you mean so what comes out is often a mean short response. Usually people don't talk in short messages when they want to express an opinion or tell a story.

There is a whole slew of misunderstandings started on Twitter. Like someone bragged about writing a sorting algorithm. Well it was for learning a language but that didn't fit in the 140 character limit. Then they get attacked for "That is ridiculous this bubble sort it has been around for long" also in 140 charters. It snowballs from there. It is often followed by an apology on some blog somewhere.

forgottenpass• 12 years ago

I see this sort of negativity as an inevitable result of forced positivity/neutrality in other contexts.

Conscious decisions to remain "professional," as well as unconscious limitations more deeply engrained in people all contribute to a bottling up of emotions.

There are a few outlets available in a work context where actual negativity is acceptable. Note that the negativity singled out for this article was either self-deprecating of a group the speaker is a member of, or aimed at inanimate tools.

Plugging these isn't going to fix anything. Instead of treating the symptoms, what can be done so that delivering or hearing a rant isn't a huge collective catharsis?

sosuke• 12 years ago

I always thought the negativity was part of sales tactic. We want to sell you a new method for doing what you've always done. Insult your way of doing it, say there is a better way, and that way is our way.

ejk314• 12 years ago

I hate to resort to this cliche... but our harsh self-view might just be because our industry is so young. We have higher project failure rates than other 'engineering' disciplines; but we're still trying to figure out HOW to build things. Half of the time, it's like giving an engineering crew a new, barely tested material and telling them to build a skyscraper with it.

The way I see it, our negativity is actually quite hopeful. We know we can do better. We know we WILL do better. So we are hard on ourselves because we see how far we have to go and what it will take to get there.

igl• 12 years ago

Well, we are not driven by wanting something positive either.

jiggy2011• 12 years ago

"We fail orders of magnitude more than any other engineering discipline."

Our projects also have a lower barrier to entry than other disciplines. You're not going to invest billions developing a new car or building a bridge unless you're pretty sure you can pull it off.

lazyjones• 12 years ago

Only a small percentage of developers/engineers partake in such ranting, evangelism, conferences.

Those who do are typically "blessed" with various personality traits that may seem to encourage this negativity, arguing, "religiousness".

They are not represenative for the state of the industry and I suspect that it's very similar in many other industries (perhaps experimental physicists, biologists, archeologists could share some insights?).

kabdib• 12 years ago

We've been building bridges, roads and other stuff for thousands of years.

We've been building software for maybe 70 years.

I'd give it a little time.

informatimago3• 12 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bridge_failures

arethuza• 12 years ago

Oldest bridge still in use:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkadiko_Bridge

It's from Mycenaean times! i.e. Agamemnon, fall of Troy etc.

Mind you, I've been inside much, much older buildings (from 3000BC rather than 1100BC):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maeshowe

normloman• 12 years ago

No. You're too damn positive.

"We could solve this problem if we just had some idealistic 20 somethings form a start-up about it."

"This industry sucks, but someone will have the courage to 'disrupt' it."

"When I die, I want my body frozen so I can be regenerated after the singularity."

"My start up is doing great. I'm 'crushing it.' All the time."

"I'm not overworked. I just require far less sleep than the average person. Say 2 hours a night."

Get real folks.

tluyben2• 12 years ago

That's what I was thinking. The gloom & doom only comes from people who like to think about that side of software engineering and usually these people have uni degrees. They worry about the complexity of software and where it's going. I am one of those people (while other people are trying to get work done). And as such I find the industry way too optimistic/positive.

angersock3• 12 years ago

Most damning bit:

This does not add up. Haven’t you noticed that we have taken over the world?

No, software has exploded into previously untouched fertile ground--in another few decades, it'll be as boring and constrained as anything else, probably.

Other engineering disciplines are right to mock and laugh and be somewhat terrified about software folks, because they can't engineer for shit.

One of the biggest things that, say, the ASME does is to help standardize practices in its field. The mark of a mature engineering branch is that it has guidelines that are applicable to most use cases, and agreed-upon tools that work for most things.

Software is nothing like this, for better or worse--we still haven't standardized on a set of programming languages, we still haven't standardized on a way of documenting and planning projects, we still haven't even settled on the most basic of issues of training.

And you know what? We openly mock the people that have tried that--think about the criticisms of "architecture astronauts" and UML and XML and waterfall and testing and all the rest.

We don't deserve to be called engineers...we're simply lucky enough that people are willing to pay such large sums for such hastily-built things.

rjknight2• 12 years ago

By telling someone else that 'X sucks', you're asserting your knowledge of X (and often Y or Z too, one of which you might recommend instead of X). Within limits, this is perfectly reasonable - there are pitfalls out there, and advising other people to avoid them is helpful.

However, there are a few big risks which arise when doing this, particularly around non-technical people:

1) The developer who cried wolf - if you have a very long list of things that you think 'suck', it may be concluded that you're just particularly picky (and, as the OP shows, it's not backed up by the reality of the many successful projects that exist). When you really need to torpedo a particularly bad idea, you might not be taken seriously.

2) Trying to persuade people by scaring them can backfire. Telling people that their project will fail unless they use the One True Project Management Methodology, or adopt some particular new library or framework might sound like a good idea, but they're quite likely to conclude that if the chance of failure is that high then it's better to avoid the risk altogether by doing nothing.

3) Undermining the credibility of other developers might give you a short-run reputation boost, but in the long-run it undermines the credibility of everyone. Instead of "that guy sucks, but you're OK", you want people to think "that guy is pretty good, but you're awesome!". To an extent, this applies in other areas ("PHP is pretty good, but Clojure is awesome!" sounds like something a happy customer might say, and we all want more happy customers).

As much as I love his writing, I think Dijkstra should take a large portion of blame for the "considered harmful"[1] style of technical criticism. His claim that anyone who ever learned BASIC is a brain-damaged individual incapable of proper programming has done a lot to undermine the credibility of intelligent, hard-working developers ever since. I, for one, would like to issue a heartfelt "fuck you" in his general direction. Again, I love his writing but I think this kind of disparagement has incredibly negative effects in the real world.

We certainly do need to eliminate errors from our practices and our ways of thinking. That's painful and does require criticism of those things. But the main problem for the software development industry right now is not that we are insufficiently critical of our tools, practices or each other, it's that we don't back each other up enough when it comes to dealing with shitty project management or exploitative practices or discrimination that holds people back in their careers. The low-hanging fruit is not yet another web framework, it's figuring out better ways of organising development.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Considered_harmful

PeterGriffin2• 12 years ago

I see it as an issue of supply and demand.

There's a huge demand for silver bullets in this industry.

An endless supply of naive, impressionable kids willing to listen to people rant about how everything sucks and X will change the world.

So no surprise, those who rant gain popularity and visibility and here we are.

bollockitis• 12 years ago

An endless supply of naive, impressionable kids willing to listen to people rant about how everything sucks and X will change the world.

There's also the problem that an engineer who successfully builds a bridge simply keeps to continue building bridges. In software, a 21-year-old programmer can build a webapp, sell it to Google, and walk away a multi-gajillionaire. If engineers could sell bridges to Google, we'd be seeing a lot of strange methods of crossing a river.

It's not just that developers look for silver bullets -- that's a natural instinct in any discipline -- it's that developers have a very real incentive for building and marketing silver bullets.

informatimago3• 12 years ago

"Considered Harmful" was not Dijkstra's idea, but his editor! And there's no way to say that "PHP is good", that's just untrue in all universes.

rjknight2• 12 years ago

OK, but he's still on the hook for "mentally mutilated".

Also, my point is that "good" is really a relative term. PHP is good, because the baseline for programming language quality is quite high. You can do so much stuff using PHP - you can build YouTube[1], Facebook, Wikipedia, WordPress and much more. I don't know what the total value of web applications written in PHP is in billions of dollars, but it's a big number. My point is that if that's what we can do with PHP, just think what we could do with better tools! In my definition, "good" means "enables the creation of valuable things", and PHP does that. I hope that it gets replaced by something better, for the same reason that I hope current medical treatments get replaced by better ones, but I can't call it "bad".

It's weird, but programmers are sometimes the people with the least appreciation for how valuable their creations are. We do things that non-programmers simply cannot do, creating massive value in the process. Yet many programmers are afflicted by impostor syndrome and the sense that what they do is not really that valuable and that most of what they build is crap. This negativity is misdirected, towards other programmers - "I'm better than her because she uses PHP and I use Haskell" - when it should be directed towards the things that cause real project failure. A well-conceived and well-managed project that creates a PHP web application is much more valuable for everyone than a badly-managed project that produces a Haskell application that nobody uses.

[1] The first version, at least. Google doesn't do PHP.

bad_user• 12 years ago

Agree with everything you said, but there's one aspect you haven't touched well:

4) criticism provokes defensive counter measures, being a very human emotional reaction - being negative and attacking people or ideas or solutions with harsh words will almost never trigger the effects one desires, even when abstaining from attacking the person, since there's always somebody behind the championing of an idea, of a choice or a piece of code. This only works when the people attacked admire you, in which case you end up with point number (2) - making people afraid of trying out anything new.

And this happens because people invested time in championing an idea, choosing a certain tool, or writing a piece of code - and now you're coming saying to them that what they did was wrong and the time and effort invested was actually waisted. This is why people tend to get pretty fanatic about their programming languages, or IDEs, or operating systems, or whatever tool they invested a lot of time in - because they want their choice to be the "winner", such that their investment isn't in the end a bad one. The "Paradox of Choice" is very enlightening in this regard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice

The culture we've created is one were harsh words are tolerated, even admired and the subject of amusement - I have smiled countless of times whenever I happened to read the rants of Linus Tolvards and the like. On one hand it's good, freedom of expression is good and sometimes it's healthy to name a turd for what it is. But this backfires and especially with these online communications that lack body expression (and the possibility of being slapped), it's turning out to be a rough industry to be in. No wonder women aren't interested.

Unfortunately while saying these words, I started thinking of how much of a dick I am sometimes, especially in code reviews.

hyperliner3• 12 years ago

Here is a conversation that could happen building a bridge if the builders were like some developers (aka, not engineers):

- "hey, let's figure out the physics of this." -------> "No, let's build a small bridge here with these Legos. I bet they work"

- "ok, let's trace the design key points." -------> "What for? Let's just start right here, aim more or less over there, and that's it"

- "Ok, time to go rent some excavators." -------> "But why? It takes too much time. I can build an excavator here. Look. There. I just built an excavator"

- "Look, they sent us a blue excavator." -------> "No no no. Excavators must be yellow. Don't like it. Return it."

- "Ok, we need to hire extra workers." -------> "But wait, do they have experience with blue excavators? Yellow only? That's lame. Keep looking"

- "Ok, let's put some signage so people know what to do" -------> "No, let's just see where they go and we will extend the bridge there!"

... and the best one

- "Well, we need more resources to finish this project" -------> "Nah, let's just open source it and forget about it!"

sigh

PeterGriffin2• 12 years ago

You've just discovered building a bridge is unlike writing software.

Maybe someone will expend the effort to reverse that, making fun of bridge engineers trying to build a smartphone app with a failure tolerant, scalable backend, or something, but I'm not a comedian. I just write software.

hyperliner3• 12 years ago

Actually, the first joke could be from the user perspective: ---> "so, what do i do with this bridge? Should I, like, step on it or hang from it?"

tjr• 12 years ago

On the other hand, a lot of software is built like bridges. Avionics software (a hefty segment of developers who don't seem to publicly blog much) is built starting with formal requirements documents, and includes formal verification against those requirements, quality audits, signoffs by senior staff and FAA representatives, etc.

Software can be built like bridges. But most software doesn't really need that level of attention, so it isn't built like bridges. In a commercial environment, the benefits of the added overhead would have to justify the expense. I would roughly estimate that avionics-style overhead would quadruple the budget and schedule of your typical web or iOS software project. Is it worth it?

Maybe it'd be worth just being a little more strict, even if not four times as strict. Someone has to make those decisions. But it's certainly possible to take software development more seriously.

hyperliner3• 12 years ago

Yes, it is the nature of the latest innovations that are paying off. In other words, who cares if the flapping bird was supposed to go through the opening, but the software miscalculated and the birdie died?

This line of argument supports the point that developer != engineer.

michaelochurch• 12 years ago

It's harem-queen behavior. The Business is the brash alpha male that plays hot-and-cold with us, exhibits blatant favoritism, walks in and mushroom stamps us and leaves us confused as to whether that's a good or bad thing. We're all clawing at each other and trying to tear each other down in a general "out-bitch the other bitches" contest.

See, this Tweet: https://twitter.com/MichaelOChurch/status/484126337335324672

    Women and programmers share: undeserved low status to the group because 
    the most popular 5% tear the rest down.

Offensive? For sure. But the underlying reality (in both examples) is offensive, too.

We have people who publicly say things like, "We're all terrible at our jobs" (meaning that humans are not great at reasoning about complex systems, and cannot build maintainable systems under the deadlines The Business tends to demand, especially when the requirements are nonsensical and contradictory) or "95% of us are morons who should be fired" (actually, most of those mediocre programmers are bad because no one ever invested in them.) The Business hears this and sees us as a low-status tribe that'll take abuse without fighting back.

In a contrast to our self-deprecation and acceptance of low status (and worse pay) we have these brash, 24-year-olds who recently flushed out of McKinsey, or who got "accelerated into the one-year analyst program" at Goldman because they told too many sexist jokes or mistook one too many female MDs for secretaries, but who can talk a good game about "crushing it" and raise millions and become "founders".

It's no wonder that The Business has its way with us. It's a legitimately negative situation, but it's mostly not our fault.

We need to be more progressive, more self-protecting, more collaborative and organized, and (dare I say it) more political. Mindless optimism is not the way out.

logfromblammo• 12 years ago

I don't think we are too negative as an industry. We are exactly as negative as we need to be. We say everything is horrible, because everything actually is horrible and broken and held together with baling wire and duct tape. We always seem to be complaining because, despite what we may believe, we are not in control. We are not now a meritocracy, and we never have been. We dedicate our lives to continuous self-improvement and refining the skills of our craft.

But we are still subservient to people who have chosen to study human interactions and business organization. And they follow business fads. They mandate Waterfall or Scrum because other people use it, and they believe incorrect decisiveness is better than endless vacillating trials and experimentation for a piddling, measly, single-digit-percentage gain in efficiency. We want to feel pride in our work, but someone else also wants it to make money. We want to build bridges that last centuries, but those paying us just want to cross an inconvenient obstacle and never look back. We want to avoid reinventing the wheel. Those paying us would rather pay us to do that than buy someone else's crappy wheel. Hell, sometimes we even build wheels to give away to anyone who wants one, and we still have to reinvent them.

Everything is horrible. We are always complaining about it, and always trying to fix things. But none of us have money, aside from those few who won a startup lottery. The people who have the money call the shots, and people with money only listen to people who have money. So they make Cargo Cult copy environments from our startup lottery winners, with zero understanding about the true source of their success. We often don't even understand it ourselves.

To a person that measures worth by profits, there is a natural inclination to discount the sheer luck of being in the right place, at the right time, with the right tool. And even if there is someone out there holding conductive rods and a giant capacitor bank, lightning could still strike the guy with a shovel.

Essentially, we have a lot of useful knowledge and skills, but still no respect. People listen to what physicians say, even if they tell us that magic beans can make us lose weight. People listen to what lawyers say, even if they tell us to just slip this neck brace on before going into the courthouse. People listen to what engineers say, even when they crash spacecraft into planets because they forgot to label their distances with units. Very few people listen to what a software professional says. They are literally surrounded by our work, which is often done so well that they don't even notice it is there, but when we speak, it sounds to them like Charlie Brown's teacher: "wah wah whaaa ma waa na nah ba".

And to be honest, a lot of that is our fault. We learned to communicate effectively with perfectly logical yet absolutely moronic machines rather than emotional and intelligent humans. What we desperately need is the prestige and charisma to establish professional boundaries in such a way that the people paying us don't cross them, and so that the quislings among us won't support those breaches just because its the only way for them to get promoted.

We need a cartel, folks. I know that most of us, myself included, find the idea repugnant, but the current arrangement is not working for us.

informatimago3• 12 years ago

There's a fundamental dichotomy here between the logical machine (the logic needed to do our job as programmers), and the emotional aspects. Some companies archive at their level a connection between both (thinking of Apple here), but this is done more by chrome than anything else.

Would the creation of an emotional computer system help? Would users be happy when interacting with their computers to get answers like: "Sorry, I'm not in the mood today!".

Or should hardware company make things more interesting by making computers explode like Hollywood cars when you open the wrong file?

"Halt and Catch Fire" indeed.

A cartel or a guilde...

jasonpriestley• 12 years ago

The author suggests that the enormous economic success of software suggests that the methods used are not "crap", but I don't think this is valid. In fact, it's somewhat the opposite - the strong economic growth in the software world (and the exponentially improving performance and reach of the underlying hardware) allow low-quality software to proliferate.

The economic argument for quality engineering is, "it may cost more upfront, but will deliver a more reliable product with lower total costs." But this argument is invalid in the current software world, where network effects and first-mover advantage are enormous, and a successful company can grow explosively. No one would follow the strategy of "build a quick bridge out of plywood, then when we have 10 million people using it and it starts falling down every other day, we'll have enough money to hire some people to build a real bridge." But that's what twitter did.

As software developers, a lot of our job is just putting up with the crap that the software world has been built on, because the people in charge have made the rational calculation that it's better to hire ten times more engineers and expand to Asia, expand to mobile, expand up market and down market and into different markets a little sooner.

I agree entirely though, that it's counterproductive for programmers to blame ourselves or to seek a technical fix to what is basically an economic and organizational problem.

m0th87• 12 years ago

This is a good thing, it's a sign the industry is moving fast and hopefully in the right direction. Constant self-reflection keeps us on our toes.

zackmorris3• 12 years ago

As a borderline ranter/troll myself, I recognize the sentiment that there is too much negativity in the developer sphere. But, the difference between what I say and what the typical mouth breathers spout on, say, political forums, is that I can point to specific examples and evidence of why the status quo sucks.

What the people with a positive slant on all this seem to miss is that it’s not just any one area of computer science that is facing difficulties, it’s all of it. For any technology or methodology, I immediately see flaws that range from merely annoying (semicolons in C, colons in Python) to downright devastating (shared mutable state between processes, the inability to statically analyze imperative code). Very little software has been written that is provably bug-free, and it came at great cost. Some of the control code that NASA has written comes to mind, or perhaps some of the early work in lisp, maybe a few other things like Excel that attempt to avoid programming altogether. Most everything else succumbs to an inability to scale, because code complexity grows exponentially while performance grows linearly. So code that works is generally small and modular. Unfortunately, when we try to tie everything together under umbrella frameworks like UNIX, something is lost and we’ve never solved that in a mainstream way, at least not to my satisfaction.

The great successes today have come in spite of existing technology, not because of it. I very much wish that the world would slow down for a moment, take a step back, and really assess the numerous ways that computing as we know it today has failed to deliver on the promises made by pioneers 50 years ago. It’s like the recent post on HN of how concurrency is the new memory management. While that’s true, it merely reveals the tip of the iceberg, not just in the fact that most languages fall down in the face of concurrency, but that even hardware has been unable to keep pace with the newest trends. It doesn’t even scratch the surface of the wetware issue, that generations of programmers have been raised on orthodoxy that can’t take us to the next level. I know that something is terribly wrong when I point out a problem and am met with such hostility, disguised as positivity. To me, this can be as damaging as excessive criticism. But it’s shielded behind the enormous profitability of the tech sector, where people would rather jump through hoops and make money than solve problems once and all for society and increase everyone’s wealth.

angersock3• 12 years ago

Most of your points are wrong.

"inability to statically analyze imperative code", a.k.a, the halting problem. And we've still done a lot here--consider PVS-Studio or similar tools.

Tying stuff together in nix works fine, and has worked fine for decades.

Hardware keeps pace just fine with newest trends, and in fact enables* programmers to try things they couldn't have before.

"Wetware" issue? What're you on about?

zackmorris3• 12 years ago

Sorry, I don’t mean to diminish what you are saying because it’s valid too. I just disagree. The problem with imperative code vs functional code is that it's difficult to analyze all of the states without just running it (I realize there's a lot more nuance than that). I personally don't think that any of the major players like C++, java or even Go can be saved because there are just too many side effects. But, in fairness no language can be guaranteed to work 100% properly once it has access to external resources (unless the inputs and outputs can be guaranteed to be within a known set). The other big players like Haskell/Closure/Scala can’t be saved either, because they can do anything imperative code can do (you could basically write a C compiler in a functional language and make it unpredictable under some condition). Worse than that, functional languages are basically unreadable without strong backgrounds in the theory. As has been said many times, there is no silver bullet.

But, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. I think for starters, a reasonably safe language that is binary compatible with C could begin replacing some of the aging code under the right circumstances. I think we are long overdue for a tool that can exercise a binary over some number of inputs and outputs and come up with the underlying code. Unfortunately it would also copy errors, which is kind of bizarre to think about. We sort of have decompilers now but they generally result in an unreadable mess because they have no notion of the kinds of considerations humans make when they write code. I would prefer a decompiler that takes a typical toolset (linked lists, binary trees, etc) and arranges those metaphors in a way that generates the same code even if it’s a little less efficient. That kind of efforts obviously needs a moonshot from universities/government/philanthropists and I don’t see it happening any time soon. It’s on par with strong AI. And more importantly, it’s probably not profitable. But if we had it, we could take the behavior driven design that business people or Star Trek characters reason in and generate a program that performs that behavior. Genetic programming comes close here but current hardware isn’t suited to it because we aren’t used to thinking in terms of search spaces 10 or 20 orders of magnitude larger than what we can hold in our heads.

I remember the first time I saw UNIX, my very first thought was “this can’t possibly be how computers work”. It only seems to work now because we’ve been immersed in it so long, but its fatal flaw is illiteracy. 99% of the population isn’t educated enough to use it effectively. I remember thinking the same thing when I saw HTML. The main reason the web took off is that it could handle plain text, not because of some magic with parsing tags. All people wanted to do was post MS Word files, and it failed at that (among numerous other things). So I’m not arguing against something like the stream as the underlying principle that makes UNIX so powerful, I’m arguing against everything else added on top of it that was written in a non-human way and makes it illegible and brittle.

Hardware has gone almost nowhere in 30 years. I’m still using the basically single threaded CPU that I was using the first time I saw a Mac in 1984. It’s faster and cheaper but fundamentally the same. Video cards have kind of gone somewhere, but with their proprietary/closed and narrowly scoped use case, they have made 3D programming needlessly complex compared to a true programmable multicore CPU. Until my computer can run a concurrent version of Go on a realistic number of processors (say 256+, or unlimited via the web) I don’t see any revolutionary advances in AI, physics, medicine, etc coming any time soon.

Unfortunately I really can’t go into enough detail with this stuff on a forum. I guess that’s the gist of the wetware issue. How do I take my experience and distill it down into something others can use to avoid the same mistakes? More importantly, how do I convey the greater expectations that would be possible if we had better tools? Or even incorporate other people’s notions myself when I’m knee-deep in code? I’m thinking in terms of things like freeing people from labor and admittedly technology has gone a long way towards that end, but for some reason it stuttered maybe in the mid 90s and I can’t quite figure out how that happened or how to get past it. It’s a bit like living within the Matrix and knowing that something is terribly wrong without being able to fathom what would be beyond it. Maybe it’s something geopolitical and people have decided that this level of progress is enough and just don’t care about going further. I’m certain if there was a demand, manufacturers would sell the tech that would run circles around what we’re having to use now. But there is more money in video games and solving first world problems, so here we are.

Negative focus

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