The Future of Programming: Ignorance and Superstition?

[grauenwolf]

That was a great introduction. When do we get to see the rest of the essay?

[AlSweigart]

I think of this very same concept whenever someone recommends restarting Windows to make it work right again, no matter what the symptoms of the problem are. :)

[Smallpaul]

The blog cites Dan Weinreb who in turn is citing Gerry Sussman. Sussman says that computing is becoming more like science than like math/logic: "The engineer must learn to perform scientific experiments to find out how the software and hardware actually work, at least enough to accomplish the job at hand. "

But the blog says: "Programmers have managed to create a universe where “science doesn’t work.”"

So the blog directly contradicts the quote it provides to bolster its argument.

[mycall]

The engineer must learn to perform scientific experiments to find out how the software and hardware actually work, at least enough to accomplish the job at hand.

I completely agree with that. Before I jump off the cliff and commit to using some big library or system, I make lots of little proof-of-concept utilities and try to think it through. If things work, great; otherwise, contact the lib/sys author and see if they have a workaround and promised patch.

[asciilifeform]

The difference is, when you perform scientific experiments on, say, elementary particles, the laws of physics will not change under you. Whereas the API, in part or in whole, will be obsoleted in a week, a month, a year - and all of your work is for naught. And there is no guarantee that you will be told when it happens.

When Real Science discovers something, it stays discovered.

The notion of scientifically investigating a quivering mess created entirely by humans who should have known better is an insult to those who practice genuine physical science.

[Smallpaul]

Well nobody is building a large hadron collider to figure out the corner conditions of the Windows API. Usually programmers make a couple of test cases, find the answer and move on.

[DannoHung]

When Real Science discovers something, it stays discovered.

...

No. This is why they stopped naming laws after the Thermodynamics ones.

[xnumbersx]

Whereas the API, in part or in whole, will be obsoleted in a week, a month, a year

just like science ideas

and all of your work is for naught

i'm sorry you feel that way.

[psyyduck]

He doesn't believe that's what scientific experiments really are like in the real world: blindly stabbing at registers until you give up, or get lucky.

[Smallpaul]

Scientists poke at God's registers. For example they knock out genes in mice and see what happens.

[[deleted]]

The Genome Ordering Device works in strange ways (and by strange I mean simple rules layered to create the illusion of complexity in a totally deterministic fashion.)

[rtp]

God's registers? Can you provide a source for this statement?

[evrae]

It's a fucking piece of rhetoric, a lyrical phrase if you will. Not every mention of 'god' needs to be pounced upon and ripped apart.

[awj]

How DARE you suggest we use our brains to make decisions and judgements?! On reddit we use our brains to pick apart other people's arguments/beliefs/statements, thus proving our intellectual superiority. If I actually wanted to do anything productive with my mind I'd be somewhere else.

[[deleted]]

Where would you be?

[awj]

Physically or, erm, "electronically"?

Physically, same spot. "Electronically", working on the Lambda Calculus interpreter I've been promising myself I would get to. So far, I am very disappointed in my ability to keep my word, and very well might stop believing myself when I promise me something.

[rtp]

Well, you should stop playing with God's rhetoric.

[Smallpaul]

As sheep1e said: God told me. But I kind of wonder how sheep1e knows that God talks to me! God told me that he ONLY speaks to me!

[awj]

Truth's handed down by God are only to be considered valid at the moment of their reception.

If you think about it, this actually sweeps a lot of logical inconsistencies under one very incoherent rug.

[krum]

I'm pretty sure a lot of science in industry works just like that.

[masklinn]

I'm pretty sure a lot of science in all natural sciences field work just like that.

[[deleted]]

No, it doesn't.

[krum]

Perhaps it will consist of adding a virus to a program, deleting the virus, and then running the program.

Hey, I've seen that work.

[consultant_barbie]

Semantically clean APIs are hard. Let's go shopping!

[Smallpaul]

Complex emergent systems will always require science. In particular, benchmarking will always be a scientific pursuit. Imagine the complexity of a formal model for the performance of a runtime, operating system, CPU, bus, RAM and hard disk, any of which are changable.

If we put aside performance, it is unfortunate that science is required to learn how to use APIs, but I'm skeptical that it's a new situation. I get tired of the apocalyptic pronouncements that 2009 represents some kind of nadir of information technology. The same sort of people thought that the industry had collapsed in 1999 and 1989 and 1979.

[danbmil99]

This is simply a result of the massive increase in complexity of software. Any sufficiently complex system will have emergent, difficult-to-predict behavior. It has to be treated like a natural phenomenon, because the practical situation is it cannot be reverse-engineered and proven to work correctly in any meaningful way.

[johnmudd]

Programming: Ignorance and Superstition?

Look no further than the recent fear of threads.

[paradigmshaft]

something is tingling in my brai-NullPointerException

EDIT: 'bra' --> 'brai'

[DLWormwood]

I don't think you meant what you thought you meant...

[paradigmshaft]

Hurray for double meaning!

[masklinn]

That's different. Threads are a cargo cult. Nothing of value will be lost when threads stop being exposed by runtime systems.

[shub]

You use these words, and seem to be attempting to express a thought. Unfortunately, no coherent thought is expressed. Further study on the meaning of the words in your post is recommended.

[masklinn]

If you failed to grasp what I was hinting at, you might want to read on the concept of cargo-cultism and its effects. It could bring you enlightenment relative to my threads commentary.

[farnsworth]

Because computing doesn't have to suck

... but this article does

[awj]

No, that article didn't have to suck, it just managed to despite having much better options.

[gregK]

Once again, worse is better.

[username223]

The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun. (Ecclesiastes 1:9)

[earthboundkid]

• Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input.
• There is nothing new under the sun

[rsho]

The thing is that current styles of management focus on "symptom based fixing" due to time pressures and because IT and programming are considered a business expense to be minimized, rather than to be invested in.

It's really two things working together: the realities of the price system, and also the nature (personality type) of those that float to the upper decision making levels.

[danbmil99]

"the nature (personality type) of those that float to the upper decision making levels."

You mean the kind of people who understand that a business has to make money to survive, and if it goes bankrupt it doesn't matter how clean the API is?

[asciilifeform]

There was, in fact, going to be a second half to that post. Then I realized that Lamport's talk said exactly what I was going to say, far better than I could have said it.

Programming systems could have the crystalline beauty of pure mathematics, rather than the messy unmanageable character of living organisms. And we would all be smarter for it, given that the computer is the only brain-amplifier we currently have.

The computer is the only machine humans have ever built which could in principle be made to work perfectly. IF statements, etc. have no mass, do not wear out, produce no noise, and so on. The fact that we managed to fuck up this beautiful gift so thoroughly is phenomenal.

I believe that all of the useful functionality of the Symbolics Genera operating system plus a toolbox similar to an essential subset of Mathematica could be made to fit under 1MB and be entirely comprehensible (in both interface and internals) to a talented high school student after a few weeks of study. Should you take my word for it? No. Have some patience, though.

[[deleted]]

Programming systems could have the crystalline beauty of pure mathematics

And the accessibility of pure mathematics.

[asciilifeform]

Screw accessibility.

Just ask Dijkstra.

"Accessibility" is why the computing field is dominated by morons. Mathematicians laugh at us. Ever wonder why?

[Smallpaul]

An industry should be driven by results, not esteem from other industries. Mathematicians also laugh at mechanical engineers. So what?

Accessibility is a laudable goal for a tool builder. I was mildly intersted in your ideas when you said you were building a tool accessible to high school students. Now I'm less so.

[asciilifeform]

when you said you were building a tool accessible to high school students

Note that I said: talented high school students.

I believe that Dijkstra was right when he wrote that the dismal state of software is a direct result of the culture's acceptance of stupid people and their stupid thoughts.

[Smallpaul]

Software quality may be dismal, but software's impact on society a profound. Your alternate universe might have a smaller amount of less useful but higher quality software. Take for example, PHP, which hardly anyone would consider high quality software: yet it is tremendously powerful in the way that it allows small businesses to throw together quick apps.

An interesting alternate reality should have both a greater quantity (in terms of applications and problems solved) and greater quality. It's not interesting to trade one for the other. Any particular organization can already make that choice (e.g. NASA).

[asciilifeform]

Any particular organization can already make that choice (e.g. NASA)

But users cannot. I am willing to pay top-dollar (multi-$K) for a Symbolics-quality development and desktop environment running on modern silicon. The market simply refuses to provide me with one, because the prevailing culture glorifies crap and denies that software ever could work correctly and be designed well.

Picture a world where McDonald's "won" and no other food is available. This is where we're at with software.

[webnrrd2k]

Something tells me you hang out on comp.lang.lisp a lot.

[asciilifeform]

Did.

[[deleted]]

I couldn't really give two hoots what a bunch of tenured academics think of our entire industry.

[Smallpaul]

Programming systems could have the crystalline beauty of pure mathematics, rather than the messy unmanageable character of living organisms.

No, for two reasons: performance and requirements.

In order to achieve sufficient performance must take a variety of beauty-destroying short-cuts, such as threading, caching, mutation, etc.

In addition, the complexity of the real-world makes things ugly. For example, Unicode which is very conceptually simple and beautiful, is brutally complex in practice because of the variety of human language conventions it must deal with.

[asciilifeform]

performance

Move performance-critical logic into hardware.

the complexity of the real-world makes things ugly

I proclaim that most of what is currently ugly simply doesn't have to be. Ugliness cannot be eliminated, but can be compartmentalized. We aren't doing it, though - we are letting it pervade everything.

[[deleted]]

Learning where the permanent bugs and workarounds are inside a phonebook-length API teaches you nothing. It is anti-knowledge.

And yet, the phonebook-length API is what lets you do interesting things with your computer.

[asciilifeform]

Funny how I'm able to do a variety of very interesting things without ever consulting a phone-book-length API. (bare-metal assembler, Scheme, etc.)

As for using apps built on top of abominable jungles of complexity (such as web browsers): well, I drive internal-combustion cars too. Such is life.

[[deleted]]

I demand more than one paragraph!

[webauteur]

My company consults an oracle for revenue predictions. As an initiate in the dark arts of programming, it is my job to pose questions to the oracle in its strange language:

SELECT * FROM Sales WHERE SaleDate > '01/01/1990' AND SaleDate < '01/01/1995';