On 25 April 2016 at 19:00, Swift Griggs <swiftgri...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hmmmmm. Are you sure your personal interest in the topic hasn't pushed you > to be a little sensitive about it ?
Yes. Because I was a support guy, and now am a writer, not a programmer. I have been researching programming languages and operating systems for decades now. The #1 problem of the IT industry is not any language, not processor design, not software or OS design. It's culture. Computers are built by people, and software for them is written by people. And as people, we live in cultures. Some things are cool, or desirable, or trendy. Some things give quick results, or are fun, or are inherently fast but risky and unstable. Others are hard, or are from the wrong college or company or country, or need too much up-front effort, or are slower but safe. And consistently, for decades, technically-illiterate managers have chosen to spend money on things that are cheap but quick, that give quick and dirty fixes. As a result, what we have today are the descendants, not of the best computers we have developed, but of the quickest-and-dirtiest lash-ups that could be made to work long enough to get through a sales demo. As a result, there's been a mass-extinction event of actual good code written by smart people who defy convention. Instead, we have a very small number of architectures and OSes, and layered on top of these unsound foundations are a profusion of tools which try to piecemeal fix the problems of the layers underneath -- and inevitably failing. But that's what we use, and so people choose sides and mock the other side. Unix people mock Windows people, and vice versa. Perl people dislike Python, Python folk don't see the need for Ruby. C types look down on all of them and desperately play down the stories of buffer overflows and stack smashing. And the industry is now huge, much comprised of people trying to fix the screw-ups of others in other places. Massive amounts of code and resources are devoted to keeping unstable stacks of unstable code in unstable languages more or less standing and running, at least in aggregate. Swift, you have provided a superb example of this mockery. And now you've been called on it, you are, in natural human fashion, lashing out in return. It's natural, it's human, and it's exactly why we have the stinking pile of crap that we do today instead of tools that actually work. -- Liam Proven • Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk • GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lpro...@hotmail.com • Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) • +420 702 829 053 (ČR)
