Motivation of software professionals
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From: Lew on 17 Feb 2010 11:02 Branimir Maksimovic wrote: >>>> I think that are very few people who know ho to program computers these >>>> days. Nick Keighley wrote: >>> "The Earth is degenerating these days. Bribery and corruption abound. >>> Children no longer mind their parents ... and it is evident that the >>> end of the world is fast approaching." >>> -- Assyrian stone tablet, c.2800bc Branimir Maksimovic wrote: >> What is the point? >> Average Joe makes memory leaks in Java no problem... >> these days... >> Software gets more bloated, more and more bugs, ... Nick Keighley wrote: > I was noting the fixed point in the human experience. Things are > degenerating and were always better in the past. To paraphrase /Dilbert/: "Back in my day, we carved our bits out of wood." The problem with those good old days is you had to measure memory in barqs rather than bytes, and everyone knows that the barq is worse than the byte. -- Lew
From: BruceS on 17 Feb 2010 12:46 On Feb 17, 1:50 am, Branimir Maksimovic <bm...(a)hotmail.com> wrote: > Nick Keighley wrote: <with snippage> <insert snipped attribution to Banimir Maksimovic > > Branimir Maksimovic wrote: > >> One guy who claimed wrote sw for robots dind;t knew how much is 2^32 ;) > > > nor do I if you want the exact value. I'd look it up if I needed it (I > > just use hex!) > > Well 4gb answer should be enough, I don;t know exact figure either ;) Maybe I'm just being overly pedantic, but that seems like a bad answer. I don't fault IT people for not knowing the powers of 2, though the approximation of 2^10n to 10^3n makes it easy. I do fault people who seem overly critical for not being precise. > >> I think that are very few people who know ho to program computers these > >> days. Now *that* I can agree with, aside from taking issue with the "these days" part. It seems to me that for most activities, the majority of participants are not very competent, and this certainly includes software development. > > "The Earth is degenerating these days. Bribery and corruption abound. > > Children no longer mind their parents ... and it is evident that the > > end of > > the world is fast approaching." > > -- Assyrian stone tablet, c.2800bc > > What is the point? > Average Joe makes memory leaks in Java no problem... > these days... > Software gets more bloated, more and more bugs, ... > > > > >> Blame educations system, because "C is not safe" and > >> "stay away from assembler". Soon no one will know how to program, > >> and older guys will earn lot of money , but there would be not enough of > >> them... > > > sounds good to me! Ditto. As a member of a very small niche, it's nice to set terms (to an extent). I get all sorts of shiny trinkets to prove my value and further inflate my already healthy ego. > Well, actually if you spend enough time lurking at usenet, you can > learn enough ;) Just be sure to learn from the right folks, or you may well learn wrong. > I don;t have objective picture since my perspective is > from this country where sw industry is practically non existent (btw). > > Greets My perspective is from a country where the sw industry is pretty large, but there's still plenty wrong with it.
From: James Kanze on 17 Feb 2010 15:56 On Feb 16, 3:33 am, Seebs <usenet-nos...(a)seebs.net> wrote: > On 2010-02-16, James Kanze <james.ka...(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > And I tried to use them, and they just didn't stop crashing. > > Even today, Linux is only gradually approaching the level of the > > Unixes back then. > I guess it depends on which unixes, and which Linux. When I > went from SVR4 Unix to NetBSD, though, I had a LOT less > downtime. I've never used NetBSD, but from what I understand, it does seem like it would have been a lot better than Linux. Note that the problem is more one of being new. And not having a decent development process, but that problem was shared by many commercial OS's as well. Up until the late 1990's, I used Sun OS 4 professionally. Early Solaris wasn't that great, either. > > I used vi back then. It didn't have many features, but it was > > solid. It was also a commercial product. Emacs depended on the > > version. Some worked, some didn't. > The version I used (nvi) was nearly-rock-solid. Which is to > say, I found and reported a bug and it was fixed within a day. > And I've been using the same version of nvi that I was using > in 1994 ever since, and I have not encountered a single bug in > 15 years. The two aspects are probably connected. Stable software doesn't change versions that offen. > >> I used gcc by the mid-90s and it was rock solid, too. > > G++ was a joke. A real joke until the mid-1990's. It was usual > > to find more bugs in the compiler than in freshly written code. > I said gcc, not g++. And while, certainly, it has bugs, so > has every other compiler I've used. I had less trouble with > gcc than with sun cc. I used a commercial SVR4 which switched > to gcc because it was noticably more reliable than the SVR4 > cc. I believe that gcc was pretty stable by then. But by the early 1990's, we'd moved on the C++. I did one of the compiler evaluations back then, and I can assure you that g++ was a real joke. > > They are for anyone who is open and honest about it. I did > > compiler evaluations back then, so I know pretty well what I'm > > talking about. We measured the differences. > I do not think it is likely that implying that anyone who > disagrees with you is being dishonest will lead to productive > discussion. My experiences with free software were apparently > different from yours -- or perhaps my experiences with > commercial software were different. My experiences with commercial software are not universally positive. But realistically, anytime before the mid-1990's, most of the free software was simply not acceptable. It didn't have a good enough process to ensure stability, and was too new for most of the bugs to have been worked out. > Whatever the cause, the net result is that by the mid-90s, I > had a strong preference for free tools and operating systems, > because they had consistently been more reliable for me. The turning point was some time in the mid-1990's. When depending on what you were doing. -- James Kanze
From: James Kanze on 17 Feb 2010 16:01 On Feb 16, 10:26 am, Arved Sandstrom <dces...(a)hotmail.com> wrote: > James Kanze wrote: > > On Feb 14, 4:54 pm, Lew <no...(a)lewscanon.com> wrote: [...] > > And I tried to use them, and they just didn't stop crashing. > > Even today, Linux is only gradually approaching the level of the > > Unixes back then. > [ SNIP ] > I have to agree with you here. My earliest use of Linux was > 1993, side by side with IRIX and SunOS. I don't remember > frequent crashing of Linux but there was no question but that > the UNIX systems were more stable, more polished and had more > capability. Granted, everyone back then was throwing Linux on > old PCs, which probably didn't help, but still... Today, the problem is that everyone is throwing it on new PC's:-). Before the drivers for the latest cards are fully stable. (Other than that, there still seem to be some problems in XFree, and I've generally had to more or less hack some of the boot scripts to get them to work.) With the exception of the problems in XFree, however, I don't think you can compare them with the commercial offerings. Solaris always installed like a charm for me, but that was on a Sun Sparc---the two were literally made for each other, and Sun made sure that any new Sun hardware would work with Solaris. Trying to cover generic hardware, including chips that haven't been invented yet, is a lot more difficult. -- James Kanze
From: James Kanze on 17 Feb 2010 16:04
On Feb 16, 3:28 am, Seebs <usenet-nos...(a)seebs.net> wrote: > On 2010-02-16, James Kanze <james.ka...(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > I am. If only because such projects require a larger degree of > > accountability than free software can offer. I can't see anyone > > providing free software with contractual penalties for downtime; > > most of the software I worked on in the 1990's had such > > penalties. > I think it may be done occasionally. Certainly, if I had > contractual penalties for downtime, and my choices were > Windows or Linux, I'd run free software. :P I'd use Windows XP before Linux, but frankly... I'd avoid standard PC's completely: (modern) Solaris on a Sparc, or HP/UX on HP's PA would be my choices. (Supposing I needed a real general purpose system. Some of the embedded systems are probably even more reliable.) -- James Kanze |