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Vitaly L
Continuous Delivery
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Comments by "Vitaly L" (@vitalyl1327) on "Continuous Delivery" channel.

Nope. There is a massive shortage of the experienced developers. And it is only aggravated by the abundance of crap developers who generate tons of needless complexity and tons of technical debt, which can only be mitigated by the experienced developers.
31
@jonathandavis8599 I'm as senior as it gets, greybeard-senior, but I also cannot "center a div", I don't even know what it means. Probably it's a wrong metric after all.
15
the key is to stay away from anything related to web, this way you won't get exposed to javascript. I so far managed to never touch it, in an over 30 years career.
15
Developers deserve a lot of blame here. Of course they are not responsible for the corrupt procurement process, not responsible for the "never admit any failures" MBA culture, but they really built an exceptionally crappy system, even by the British standards. And for this they must be hounded and mocked. Far too often code monkeys get away without their incompetence being exposed and laughed at. This is the time to beat some fear into the bad pseudo-engineers and to remind them what respinsibility is.
13
Juniors are a liability, their contribution is negative, they take time of the senior staff, so it is understandable that companies are reluctant to train them. And most of them are a waste of time.anyway as only a few will ever get to a required level. We need better quality graduates to start with, then training them will become doable.
8
There is a shortage of experienced developers, and overproduction of very low quality juniors, so even for the good ones it's hard to prove their worth while competing with hordes of the worthless and incompetent. It's an awful situation indeed, and I do not have an easy solution. There's simultaneously a huge shortage and it's hard to get in for the newcomers.
7
@skyhappy how is it meaningless? Do the words like "halting problem", "Kolmogorov complexity", "lambda cube" mean anything to you? That's computer science. If your teachers were bad, it's not a representative example of what computer science is, and how vastly different it is from software engineering. The good analogy is chemistry to cooking is what computer science is to programming.
7
Is it unrealistic to expect that programmers can program? Because the vast majority of candidates cannot. Is it too much to ask?
7
Ever heard of open source?
7
@YonoZekenZoid the claim was that "JS is great for learning functional programming.". It's not. Not even close. It's an awful language with some features distantly resembling some of the lesser features of functional languages, at most. It makes no sense at all to explore functional programming with such an awful language.
6
The funny thing is that back then there were much better options, yet, for some reason, an awful javascript was invented. It simply should have never existed.
6
@Michael-Has-Opinions and they are different degrees indeed. Yet dummies go to CS and then complain that they're forced to study a science.
6
@kzelmer there is a shortage of competent developers. Those laid off find new job next day, if they're actually good. Those who struggle are exactly the root of the problem - they are awful, and they aggravated the shortage by writing tons of crap code that now need to be fixed and maintained by the proper engineers. It is nearly impossible to find competent developers now, no matter how much you'rw willing to pay. What is it but a shortage?
6
Which is a Windows design fault. Even a puny teeny little uBoot on IoT devices can roll back. And freequent reboots is a fault condition indeed.
5
This is exactly why getting a STEM degree (any STEM discipline, really) is so important: nobody can lean the fundamentals by chance and without a strict guidance. But once you have a sufficient mathematical foundation, you can build up on top of it and get a systematic understanding of any practical engineering domain, programming included. Without such a foundation you're doomed to get stuck in a mythical thinking, in a pile of unconnected factoids with tons of gaps in between.
5
This pathetic idea is the most destructive cobtrubution of Uncle Bob. His other suggestions are awful and destructive too, but this one caused more damage to this industry than all the other combined.
5
Hiring process will only become tougher and more Kafkian, as a response to the market being flooded by extremely low quality candidates.
5
Shortage is real. There is a shortage of experienced and competent developers. True, companies are not willing to train the juniors, and having juniors in a team is always a massive liability, not many can afford doing it. And, what is even worse, the vast majority of those juniors will be a waste of time anyway, no matter how much effort you'll put in training them. There is an abundance of very low quality very inexperienced developers, and a huge shortage of competent developers.
5
Software development is easy. All you need to know is fundamentals, there's no need to waste your time learning transient crap - all of it is rehashing the same old ideas anyway. People who learn languages, frameworks and libraries instead of basics are doing it wrong and deserve to suffer the consequences of their mistakes.
4
@BigWhoopZH you roll back the system image to the exact state before the last reboot. This is how it's done in all the properly designed systems.
4
there is a lot to hate in javascript without even touching any stupid OOP. To start with, no integer data types. Should have been a complete show stopper, yet people somehow swallowed this insult of a language. Then an awful mess of dynamic and static scoping. Why? And saying that Scheme was an inspiration for this abomination is another insult - it's not even close to 1/100th of Scheme.
4
This is a description of 100% of the software companies out there.
4
These days every piece of imperative code is being compiled via a functional intermediate representation. SSA is equivalent to CPS.
4
if you're given a hammer made of dung and told that it's the only tool you're allowed to use, will you hate those who put you in this position? I bet you would. And JS is exactly this hammer made of dung, when what you really need is a full garage of tools and machines.
4
@kzelmer there is a problem - nobody to train. You can train a high quality CS graduate, or any STEM graduate with a sold fundamental knowledge. You cannot train a bootcamp monkey, unless you build a university for them and spend 6 years filling their massive gaps in fundamental knowledge. And there is a shortage of high quality graduates.
4
@CripplingDuality I'm pretty sure it's very real with the roofers, having gone through a long chain of incompetent ones... In fact, I would not be surprised if there is a severe shortage of competent people in all possible trades.
4
In some places, full MISRA-C is a requirement, luckily.
4
@lankeastor512 regulated professions, such as engineering and medicine, have much higher quality of graduates, as the unfit are filtered out earlier.
3
@th3oth3rjak3_ what I'm saying is that the vast majority of juniors are utterly hopeless and won't ever grow into worthy developers.
3
@Luxcium is it? "Unique"? You're giving too much credit to this ill designed Frankenstein monster language.
3
@ApprendreSansNecessite well, you can always implement a pure lambda interpreter in Javascript (or a G-machine, if you want to do some really hideous obfuscation). My point was that learning functional programming from the bottom up, without a language interfering, is quite beneficial - you'll get a deeper understanding, and you'll have powerful tools you can use in scenarios where nothing else can work - e.g., in dependent type systems, in proof assistants, in total languages, etc.
3
post-mortem ring buffer logs help a lot. Low overhead, free to store, usually sufficient to debug an issue if dump is triggered immediately after.
3
I've been coding for well over 30 years. I never seen a single example of a self-documenting code that does not need comnents.
3
Nah. A generalist can fit anywhere, there is absolutely no need to specialise in any particular stack. I don't know where do you people get these weird ideas.
3
Which is indeed a sign of shortage - with an overabundance of candidates of an inadequate quality. There is a shortage of competent developers.
3
@davidjulitz7446 systems like this should never be bult without using formal methods. And formal proofs woupd have demonstrated very early on that the design itself is inadequate. There is no point in chasing and fixing small bugs when the overall design is utterly broken from the very beginning.
3
You never seen any proper language than, if you think Javascript is capable...
3
the reason people keep fighting about tools is that tools are often misused. And OOP is the most abused tool of all. There are very few cases where OO is actually a right tool for the job, yet it is being blindly used everywhere, including the cases where it's the worst possible choice.
3
@RiversJ nah. They're not kids. They're taught the most important fundamentals, and for anyone with a brain it should be a sufficient base to quickly add all the transient details, all those frameworks, languages and crap. The sad part here is that most of the graduates these days do not have a brain, and then they come here and complain about "too much calculus".
3
There is nothing Lispy in JS. No homoiconicity (and that's what make Lisp a Liso), no macros. It is not expression-based. It is not late 80s to call any language with GC a Lisp flavour.
3
@kzelmer shortage of trained talent is exactly the shortage of workforce. By definition.
3
I'm so glad I never had to touch Javascript and likely never will have to do anything with it. It's a very badly designed language, almost as bad as Python, and it's a real shame it's forced upon everyone who need to do anything in a browser.
3
Yep. Unit tests suck. Integration tests must be the final line of defence, always.
3
@StephenButler-sg5hm right, turn a 3-page maths-dense paper into a single method name. Good luck.
2
@mecanuktutorials6476 this is why I have so much hope for the stochastic parrots that some people call "AI" - they can automate a lot of it out, and can help to throw all this needless complexity away. Yes, it'll result of a lot of wrong people being kicked out of this industry, but it'll make industry as the whole a lot more healthy, without those wrong people.
2
@perfectionbox someone who know fundamentals will be productive and useful for decades to come. Someone who learned the unreal engine will be out of the job market when unreal engine is no longer relevant.
2
@ingloriouspancake7529 and how my attitude will change the objective fact of the very poor quality of the juniors pool? Attitude or not, but you have to comb through hundreds to find one adequate.
2
@theafterman1848 you're so funny. Competent developers from India and wherever else earn market rate and above. There is a massive shortage of competent developers - and pretty much no demand for incompetent ones. Just as simple as that.
2
@secretchefcollective444 everything you mentioned is overengineered af and should have been much simpler than they are.
2
@ApprendreSansNecessite well, you can learn FP in a MIPS assembly then, with pretty much the same effect. JS is just as far from any reasonably functional language.
2
@ApprendreSansNecessite so, you're saying that it's easy to learn FP in JS if you only know JS. This is a much weaker form of the original claim that JS is great for learning FP. I believe in systematic learning and for this reason I think it's better to learn FP starting with pure lambda calculus or combinatory logic. Without any "real" programming languages and all the unnecessary cruft they're unavoidably adding. For the same reason I believe it makes sense to stay away from type systems as well when you're starting learning FP - they're most naturally added later (lambda cube is better built from the untyped lambda corner).
2
@ApprendreSansNecessite Try to evaluate the following term in an eager order: `(\y . \z . z) ((\x . (x x)) (\x . (x x)))` Note that it's supposed to yield `\z. z` if evaluated in lazy order, and the second part is discarded, as it should be. It won't ever terminate if evaluated in an eager order.
2
@@peterobinson1What are you talking about? It is nearly impossible to find a developer in London, and recruiters flock around any semi-decent one. You must be doing something badly wrong.
2
The vast majority of the so called "developers" don't know how to write code, period. Even bad code.
2
What a lot of programmers fail to understand is that Turing-completeness is harmful. Every time you do something in a Turing-complete language you must justify this choice, and most of the time you'll find that there is no such justification. There's a very good reason why, for example, full MISRA-C is not Turing-complete. Now, the good thing about functional programming is that it's easy to restrict it while keeping it still very powerful and flexible - Total functional programming, as in languages like Coq. Imperative languages turn out far more restrictive when you kick Turing-completeness out of them.
2
@DyingKlokateer by competent I mean capable of learning and solving problems. Knowledge is cheap, ability to gain it and use it is rare. And, sadly graduating from a university does not guarantee such an ability, especially these days, when it is very hard for a student to get kicked out.
2
The shortage is massive. But the quality of candidates is abysmal, so it's really hard to find a single competent one even if you go through hundreds of them. And all those hundreds will come here and babble that "there's no shortage, I went to a hundred of interviews and not a single offer". Well, guess why you're not getting any?
2
@Toulkun there's not enough worthy graduates to train, and tons of worthless ones diluting the pool, that's the biggest problem.
2
This is exactly the main driver of the current shortage.
2
@davidjulitz7446 it is a distributed system, formal proofs of soundness are indeed possible (TLA+ or simialr). And yes, lack of QA loop is also developers fault. They shoudl have raised an alarm and decline to work in such conditions.
2
Only if your OS and bootloader are utter trash. Otherwise it is trivial. And if you do not have a hardware watchdog on a mission-critical system, you're criminally negligent and must go to jail.
2
In the sane coubtries the title "engineer" is legally protected. So there are no software "engineers" in those countries. The rest of the world should do the same.
2
Tools are not any better. If you think your bloated development environment based on the deplorable Electron of all things is any better than an average IDE we had since 80s, think again.
2
@aabhishek4911 by enforcing immutability, allowing compiler to use the fact that once value is read it won't change. To get the same level of optimisation in an imperative language you must litter your code with 'const' and carefully annotate aliasing.
2
@chakritlikitkhajorn8730 tooling - yes, absolutely, Javascript got the best JIT compilers out there, for example. I am talking about the language itself, and the language is among the worst ever created by humanity.
2
@chakritlikitkhajorn8730 brainfuck is not bad at all, for its purpose. It was designed to teach Turing machines and to explore how potential future TM-based computers can be used (think of, say, DNA computing). Assembly is not "horrible" too - it's just a reflection of the actual hardware. Basic is remarkably simple and can be implemented on a really rightly constrained hardware. Not bad at all either. Though Forth is even better, but for the teaching purposes Basic was the right thing to happen. While for JavaScript there is no excuse at all. No single reason for it to exist. It should have never been created in the first place.
2
@chakritlikitkhajorn8730 language is defined by its purpose. A language that fits a purpose, which have a nice, clean semantics that reflects the purpose, the problem domain as closely as possible is a well designed language. In this regard, Brainfuck is perfect, and not just that, it's beautiful. While JS serves no purpose. It was not derived in any way from its supposed problem domain. It's inconsistent, its semantics is even hard to define (it shows that the language was just jotted in a couple of days, and no spec was written before the implementation started). If a PL theorist tried to build a language for the niche occupied by JS, it'd be a very different language. Most likely, something similar to Scheme. If a PL theorist had to create an accessible language with a dense encoding for a 4kb RAM, 8080 CPU device, they're likely to reinvent Basic, given that Forth is deemed too alien to the target audience and teaching purposes.
2
My experience does not match yours at all. Portability across the very diverse Unix world was a solved problem (autotools). Portability between *nixes and VMS was not an issue either. Caring about crap platforms like PCs was an easy to avoid mistake.
2
@mandisaw or, you could stick to Unix and be happy. Did so since the 80s, and my software stack now is not too different from what I had for decades.
2
@Meritumas you must feel like you're in the wrong sector of this industry if it can even be outsourced. And if something can, in fact, be outsourced without severe quality and communication implications, it is criminal not to outsource.
2
@travispulley5288 lol, that's a funny take. Which letter in the word "science" you failed to understand?
2
@travispulley5288 so, you have no idea what science is. As expected.
2
now ask any PL theorist what they think of JS. Language is objectively very poorly designed.
2
@CripplingDuality try to apply your flawed logic to doctors or civil engineers. Expectations are not unreasonable, they're set by the very nature of our reality.
2
@trignals it is an unfirtunate and misguided response of the industry to an abysmal quality of the vast majority of the candidates. Imagine something like this happening in regulated professions, like civil engineering, medicine, accounting.
2
Do you realise that Lisp existed since forever? That we had Smalltalk since 80s? That we had Perl and Tcl?
2
@TheBoing2001 Again, javascript is a really crappy language, and it's not equipped with any of the powerful tools for creating higher levels of abstraction. Clearly you know very little about programming languages if you don't see how limiting JS is in comparison to the real languages. If you're very determined, sure, you can build nice things with it. But it's a massive waste of time and effort, and a better tool would have been much more suitable.
2
@TheBoing2001 your answer got deleted, apparently, for having URLs. "Javascript is fine." - no, it is not. It's a crappy language devoid of any tools for creating higher level abstractions without suffering too high performance costs. Namely, no proper macros, and no proper control over code generation. "With 3 other click you can C&P and run entire chess game" - mind you, a chess engine was one of the first programs Konrad Zuze wrote for his primitive computer in 1945. Hardly an impressive achievement in the 21st century. Clearly you're a fanboy and you don't know anything at all about PLT, so you cannot see how deeply flawed JS is. And, no, ease of deployment is not a virtue of JS the language. It did not facilitate this cross-platform deployment in any way. It's simply the result of web standards monopoly. If Tcl/Tk was such a standard, you could deploy a Tcl/Tk application everywhere equally effortlessly. So your argument makes zero sense. Now go and learn some computer science, you're clearly lacking the most basic education.
2
 @edgeeffect no they cannot. "Why" can be a mathematical reasoning on three pages. Good luck turning it into a method name.
2
And the solution is always the worst possible - to produce a lot of very low quality developers, who, in turn, will create such enormous piles of technical debt that even more developers will be needed to maintain all that mess. Hordes of code monkeys is never a right solution, it's a root of the problem. Introduce the same level of professional quality regulation as in, say, civil engineering or medicine, and things will get much better in just a decade or so.
2
Software engineering is an engineering. Obviously. So why we're not regulating it like the other branches of engineering? Why software engineers can work without any certification, why they do not have personal liability for their incompetence? High time software engineering is regulated to the same level as civil engineering or medical professions.
2
Companies are picky because they have to - a wrong developer will cause a lot of damage, not many can afford it. What's the point in hiring a destructive incompetent junior, your losses won't be that awful if you just keep the position open until you find a right candidate.
2
We had much better software in the 80 and 90s. We have much much worse developers now in 202x. So yes, development was easier, we did not have to tolerate that much awful software written by awful people.
2
@almari3954 ideally there should not be any concurrency whatsoever in a BLDC controller. Designs tbat utilise concurrency (such as ODrive) are just wrong. A proper real-time design will be an FSM with precise timings of all measurements and PWM settings, wile communications are handled entirely independently on a separate core.
2
Lol wut? Tests are the only way to force LLMs to generate anything remotely meaningful.
2
There's only one real 10x programming in this world - Fabrice Bellard. All the other self-styled 10Xs impostors, and of course they just poison everything around them and add no value to anything.
1
LLMs write a much better code with ReAct, in languages they were not trained on (ideally, languages that did not even exist in the training set).
1
@philipoakley5498 it is only possible in the most trivial cases.
1
@BigWhoopZH "Desktop operating system" is a dumb thing that should have never existed in the first place. We never needed "desktops". What we need is *terminals*. Immutable and expendable. Microsoft have a lot to answer for, and spreading this deranged idea of a "desktop computer" is among their top crimes.
1
@BigWhoopZH looks like you have no idea what you're babbling about. Try to define, in your own words, what are the use cases for this so called "desktop" abomination. You'll see that for anything you can come up with there is a much better solution. There is no single reason to ever use a "desktop OS" for anything.
1
@BigWhoopZH the entire desktop idiom is fundamentally broken. You don't need a desktop, connected or not. There is no single use case for anything "desktop". You need terminals for data entry (which is a naturally connected used case anyway), and you don't need anything "desktop" for the local use cases.
1
@BigWhoopZH you did not, you failed to name a single use case for this so called "desktop".
1
@BigWhoopZH e-gate is a terminal application, by the very nature of the data. You cannot store it locally or even cache it locally. Where they failed is in redundancy and in the system design from thr very beginning (what kind of imbeciles do such things over WiFi?!?). And how any of the things you listed is "desktop"?!? You seem to call a "desktop" any device with a local processing. It is a massive stretch. Desktop is a far more narrow thing - an environment with UX modelled after a literal desk top, with folders, documents, tools and all that trash. A game console is not a desktop computer. A CAD workstation is not a desktop computer.
1
@peterdz9573 the asnwers make no sense - calling any device with a local storage a "desktop" is nothing but a poor trolling attemt and do not deserve a polite answer.
1
@BigWhoopZH you started with a narrow definition when you babbled about "no desktop OS" that would have an immutable root by default, and after this bait switched to a broad definition. Enterprise Linux distros clearly did not fall under your initial definition, embedded distros (Android included) neither, so it is clearly on you.
1
@peterdz9573 go back to the beginning of this thread, to the outrageous claim that "no desktop OS have such a configuration out of the box", which pretty much defined what is supposed to be a "desktop" - a consumer PC or a laptop running stock consumer-tier Windows or one of the toy Linux distros, or a Mac. Ignoring all the corporate systems.where such a thing is very often a default, at a cost of very limited end user rights.
1
@peterdz9573 I never said "remote". Terminal can be connected locally, to a single host (or a mainframe). And yes, 99.99% of the use cases of desktops today in the corporate environment should have been terminals, and the remaining 0.01% is for specialised devices with specialised OS configurations, not some generic "desktop" bought from Currys.
1
@peterdz9573 you can have a gui on a terminal. A more sane corporate setup is where your laptop runs an immutable and a very trimmed down OS which can only run a VNC client and nothing else, and all the work is done on, again, immutable Windows VMs running remotely. A VM is destroyed immediately when the user session is done. I worked in such environments in a few major investment banks, for example. Is it still a desktop? I would not call it that. It's a terminal. And I first used immutable X11 terminals in mid-80s, all the technology existed since then. Not using it now is a criminal negligence.
1
you're just saying that "worse is better". You're right. Humanity have a tendency for falling for the worst possible solution when multiple options are available. Did it over and over again. Javascript is a perfect example of such, an extremely awful language design, made at a time when PLT was already extremely advanced and people knew exactly how to construct languages fit for any given purpose.
1
@CripplingDuality why is it a nightmare scenario? At least it is better than having to comb through hordes of hopeless juniors to find the few worthy ones.
1
@world-9644 we need high quality juniors. The current horribly diluted junior pool have an opposite effect, making it impossible to detect and nurture any talent.
1
@world-9644 yet, they are indeed a liability, even the brightest ones, but you have to put up with some liabilities long-term. It is an optimisation problem. What makes this problem hard is the very diluted junior pool.
1
@theafterman1848 you're not very coherent, but from what's possible to decipher from your rambling I can conclude that you worked for a failing company and if you were smart enough you ran from there very quickly.
1
@theafterman1848 you're pathetic. If your argument is that I can google rants of sore losers like you, conplaining about shortage of jobs - then you know where you must stick your argument. There is a massive shortage of the experienced developers. I struggle finding any, for months. There is an abundance of trash "developers" who should have never been in this industry, and nobody needs them any more, so you may get an impression that there is no shortage, if you're ome of them.
1
@theafterman1848 only CRUD crap is ever outsourced anywhere, India included. You're pathetic and you see the very bottom of the barrel, confusing it for the rest of the industry.
1
@theafterman1848 you will never earn a living as a developer because you're trash, not because someone is "crashing the labour market" (right, to an extend that starting salaries are pushed well into six figures for good).
1
@theafterman1848 the reality is that I cannot find competent developers. And I see an abundance of worthless "developers". Shortage is real. And stop babbling about outsourcing, only the bottom of the barrel projects are ever outsourced.
1
@dacianbonta2840 another "let's just glue the libraries together" self-styled developer detected. How hilatious that your lot really believe you have a right to have opinions.
1
@dacianbonta2840 you're not very coherent, and you clearly have reading comprehension issues. Looks like you're beyond any hope, no amount of training will form you into even a barely useful engineer.
1
@h4ck3rd4wg two words: message passing.
1
@secretchefcollective444 the problems are not hard - go to shadertoy and see how easy all the graphics algorithms are when done right. Photoshop is a huge pile of legacy code upon legacy code, awfully overengineered, just like 99% of the other code out there. Most programmers have no idea how to program.
1
@secretchefcollective444 examples? Think of, say, CADs. Geometry of the B-Rep is insanely complex. Finding an intersection between two NURBS is computationally intensive and mind-bending. But why? Why people keep using b-rep when all the solutions turn embarrassingly trivial in an implicit representation (such as SDF)? Same goes for 2D image processing - just turning your data into a right form eliminates all the complexity from the problem.
1
@secretchefcollective444 it's perfectly possible to derive splines from SDFs (for slicers, for any forms of CNC). Much easier than from b-rep. More so, SDF is ideal for modelling the tool path for CNC. And yes, mesh-based systems are overengineered too.
1
Not all languages. Some are vastly more awful than the others. Good languages tend to be designed by people who know what they're doing, who have a deep knowledge in PLT and in compiler construction. Really bad languages, like Javascript, PHP and Python, tend to be designed by eager amateurs. Somewhat less crappy languages are designed by amateurs but later fixed (or at least specified) by professionals - case in point here is Java, with spec written by Guy Steele Jr.
1
@chrisjsewell I'd say both Python and JS are exceptionally awful scripting languages and must be avoided. There are far better options.
1
@chrisjsewell various Scheme implementations, for example - including the official GNU scripting engine, Guile, and more performant alternatives like Racket. LuaJIT is also very good. Raw Lua is very small footprint and still very capable. Various Forth implementations can be extremely small footprint and yet nearly infinitely capable due to the meta nature of the language. Even Tcl have its place, and often is a right tool for embedded scripting (in this one I might be biased, as nearly all EDA tools are scripted with Tcl).
1
There is only one meaning to "M.A.D." - mutually assured destruction. People must stop trying to fit anything else there.
1
@ApprendreSansNecessite language with separate statement and expressions cannot be called functional language, full stop.
1
@ApprendreSansNecessite It's either lambda calculus (which only have expressions), or statements. Not both. ADTs have nothing to do with FP (besides being mostly explored by FP-first languages). Recursion in JS is useless for the lack of tail call optimisation guarantee. But first and foremost, FP = lambda calculus, and lambda calculus is expression-based. Another mandatory thing for FP is strict static scoping. Everything else is optional, but expression-based language, unlimited tail recursion and strict static scoping are mandatory.
1
@ApprendreSansNecessite there is an important property in the pure lambda calculus that is missing from eager languages - it assumes lazy evaluation (to be practical). If your language is eager order, you cannot have a pure lambda, you need at the very least a built in 'if'', along with 'true" and 'false' in some form. So you already cannot get to understand the most essential properties of lambda calculus if you're doing it in an unsuitable (too big and complex) language.
1
@ApprendreSansNecessite later I will produce an example when eager order makes it impossible to evaluate a term (hard to do so typing on a mobile). Sure, learning FP with whatever tools you have is better than not learning at all. Just keep in mind that results of such learning may be quite incomplete. JS is very far from an "ideal" language for anything, not just learning FP, and the only virtue it have is (and you seem to agree) is that a newbie is likely to already know some bits of JS due to its popularity and accessibility. It is a new Basic in this regard. Which is rather sad.
1
Take a look at Mathematica, and you'll never think of Python as more than a toy.
1
@twodyport8080 what planet you are from? Because on this planet experience is the opposite - impoasible to find competent developers, recruiters and head-hunters flocking around every single developer they think they can sell. You're obviously doing something very wrong if this is not your experience.
1
@bobbycrosby9765 sure, but you can have a zero cost log (see above).
1
@juleslondon3088 No AI, even superhuman AI, will be able to extract an information that *is not there*.
1
@juleslondon3088 you cannot infer the information that is not there. You can guess, and all your guesses will be, likely, very wrong. Code only tells the half of the story and there is no way you can correctly infer the intention, the constraints, the larger context from a piece of code. Like in my timing example in the other thread here - no amount of guessing will give you the actual physical timing. You'd have to buy or rent a 10gs scope and do the experiments in the physical world.
1
@ in my experience, the vast majority of relevant information is outside of the code, and cannot be inferred. But this can be a difference between problem domains, of course. If yours is some standard CRUD, some typical web stuff, then yes, code will be pretty descriptive of the intention. In my case it is not - a lot of information is about the hardware and the physics of the real world, and often a result of some pretty complex mathematics, and if it's missing from the code, it cannot be guessed.
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it's more about the real quality of the majority of developers and architects than about some perceived capabilities of this so-called "AI" (in fact, just statistical predictive model). If a majority of code monkeys are worse than a dumb predictive model - well, they should not have been code monkeying to start with, and when they're all gone - good riddance.
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@ApprendreSansNecessite it's a really bad term. Compilation does not define what's the level of the source and target language. A lot of modern compilers consists of dozens of tiny compilers that translate a language into a nearly equivalent language, with some minor changes. Adding some babble like "transpiler" to the mix just confuse people and obscures the meaning of compilation.
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@ApprendreSansNecessite the word "transpiler" is from colloquial use indeed, you'll never meet it in any PLT papers. So it's important to remind people once in a while that the term is unscientific and is better avoided altogether for adding no real value.
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@MartyrCry this may only apply to the very junior roles. I rarely see stack even being mentioned in the role descriptions (and I certainly never mention it myself when I write such descriptions), for it's an irrelevant tiny detail.
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@catocall7323 this is the consequence of overabundance of very low quality junior developers from bootcamps and such, they are not generalists and will never be able to turn generalist, they are trained monkeys tuned to a single stack and a very narrow range of problems. Industry adapted to this situation, making it very hard to the few worthy ones to get in and to get noticed at all in the huge pool of the bootcampers. This is an awful sitiation indeed.
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@ wrong.
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@fulconandroadcone9488 Like, a 6 years-long onboarding process for juniors to go through all the CS curriculum they've missed?
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@arcomarco7131 there is. Or you know where I can find competent engineers? I am all ears.
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@guamie agreed, experience correlates with quality but does not guarantee it.
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@kevinmcfarlane2752 there absolutely is a shortage. And it may be caused by how much the pool is diluted by incompetent ones, making it very hard to find the good developers among the masses of mediocrity. Works the other way around, good developers fail to find jobs for they're drowned in the said masses.
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@yugiohfanatic1964 if the same work can be done for 1/10th of the price, it must be done for 1/10th of the price, obviously. The problems start when it turns out that it won't be the same work, not even close.
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@dacianbonta2840 look, no company can train a developer. Never. A good engineer is a product of at least 6 years in a higher education, with a few internships and an active community projects participation. The problem with junions these days is that pool is so diluted with hopelessly bad ones - all the bootcamp graduates, people from second tier universities, etc., that it is impossible to find the good juniors I described above. Most companies simply gave up and don't even try any more. There is absolutely no way companies could step in and replace the function of the proper universities
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@dacianbonta2840 it takes 6 years of a university to prepare an engineer. You now want companies to do it in a few months instead? Really?
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@psychic8872 writing about your code (or anything else) is a way to discipline yourself. A centuries-old discipline trick.
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@7th_CAV_Trooper AI won't have a context, it can only explain what code is doing (which should be obvious from the code itself), not why it's written this way and why it's written at all in the first place.
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@ that's the most important part of any software project. And it's almost always not in the code.
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@7th_CAV_Trooper wrong. "Why?" may include cases like "this is a workaround for a bug in a third-party component that will become obsolete or misbehave once the bug is fixed", or "this is written like this because the assumption on the input data is this and this". These things must be documented. If not, the remaining code is garbage.
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@7th_CAV_Trooper commit comments are code documentation. Too bad they're usually "fixing a bug" and that's all.
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@7th_CAV_Trooper commit messages get lost too - large refactorings wipe the history out...
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@7th_CAV_Trooper commit messages are far from the ideal place for important contextual documentation. Also, a lot of constraints and assumptions stem from physical world, performance experiments, etc., and if not documented will render resulting code meaningless. I just finished debugging an obscure protocol implementation, and I would have done it weeks faster if the original author cared to actually document the timing constraints and the reason behind them. I had to repeat all the original author experiments (some of which were quite expensive) to find out what could have been just documented in the first place.
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@jeffthejava1 something documented elsewhere will never be read. Comments are close to the code and it is hard to ignore them. Code without comments is a very poorly written code indeed.
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The tech world does not need (and really never needed) juniors churned out by all those bootcamps and sub par universities. They were always useless. Smart fresh people from top universities, with solid STEM degrees, will alway be in demand.
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@gauravtejpal8901 found a bootcamp "graduate"
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@gauravtejpal8901 found a bootcamp "graduate".
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oh, really? Any developer must master dozens of languages. Any capable developer must continuously create new small languages, because Language-Oriented Programming is by far the most powerful abstraction tool. A developer with only one language under their belt, especially such a crippled and ill-designed language as JS, is not a real developer. Want to be "full stack"? Master the entire stack underneath your level of abstraction. Starting with analog and digital electronics, HDLs, all the necessary elements of computer architecture, all the PLT-related mathematics, PLT itself, a deep understanding of compilation and interpretation methods available, a deep understanding of how operating systems work (and when and where to use them or ditch them altogether). Understand networking, from PHY levels to high level protocols, and know where you should be on this stack of abstractions depending on your goals. There's a lot of critically important knowledge there. Javascript, browsers and all that meh are not among even the tangentially impactful pieces of knowledge.
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To summarise - the language you must be a native speaker of should be the language of mathematics. All the programming languages are just special cases of it, once you have a solid grasp of the real language of the universe.
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@ApprendreSansNecessite the downsides of compiling to JS and alike is that the runtime itself is rather crappy (no integers, really? and a very intrusive GC), and, more importantly, if JS is your common denominator language, it limits what your static analysis can do (pretty much nothing for such an extreme dynamic language). The only reason to ever do such a thing is if your code must run in a browser. No point in running JS anywhere else.
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@ApprendreSansNecessite I'm yet to see a single compelling argument for using the same language for different components of a system, be it "client side" and "server side" in a context of web development, or anything else. And the argument "our engineers are just not good enough and can only use one language" is really a bad argument. And yes, I'm aware that there are web developers who style themselves arrogantly as "full stack" developers. They need to be constantly reminded how thin and tiny their coverage of the tech stack is, and how much more they could have achieved if they were actually full-stack.
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@ApprendreSansNecessite in a multi-language environment you're limited to an underlying target language semantics for your analysis. And if its semantics is designed to hamper any analysis attempts, you cannot prove anything about your system as a whole. Typescript does not help, as it's not a compilation target for any of the higher level languages you're talking about. Also, even Typescript does not remove the dynamic nature of the underlying language, so even a heavily annotated typescript code cannot really be reasoned about.
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@ApprendreSansNecessite for me, it sounds like a weird design, when similar data processing happens in different parts of the system. For data model - yes, it can be the same while flowing through the system, but it does not mandate the same language that handles the data in any way. Validation is normally just a part of the data model. And things like data model, validation, etc., should be defined in a higher level (ideally, declarative) language anyway, and then translated into whatever language whatever part of the system is using. You're likely familiar with rudimentary forms of this approach employed in IDL and similar protocol / data model description languages. There's often dozens of languages involved, with a single data model in between them. I admit I stay away from anything related to web, so may be unaware of some of the rationalisation behind common design choices in that world. From far away, the whole web stack looks like it's massively overengineered and badly designed on all levels though.
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@ApprendreSansNecessite I believe this sort of behaviour still falls under data model specification and must be declarative. When it is some ad hoc low level code manually screwed together, it is unavoidably a huge source of errors and worse. I never cared at all about anything web. But I did a lot of work with distributed systems shuffling huge variety of data around, including very sensitive data in financial applications (that also included high frequency trading). Every single time, some form of IDL was the only reasonable solution, and sharing validation / processing code between system components was never a meaningful design choice.
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@davidjulitz7446 you do not need to prove the whole system, just the distributed communication part. This is what TLA+ is for. And this way it'd quicly becone apparent that there exist a number of conditions where network lag or breakdown compromise transactions integrity. Every communicating system must go through such a proof. And we do it for quite complicated, heavily distributed designs.
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@tonymerrett I've been building fault-tolerant systems for over 30 years.
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Did it occur to you that you can be the problem here? It is very hard to find developers in the EU, the shortage is very obvious.
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@tacorevenge87 France, Spain, Germany. Outside of EU the market is very lively in Switzerland and the UK.
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This is why eDSLs are better than pretty much anything else. The most readable code is the code free from leaky abstractions, and you can do it only with language-oriented programming.
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 @wreynolds1995 as an engineer with a degree in physics - absolutely, anyone with such a background will have no trouble passing the exams to become a chartered engineer.
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 @wreynolds1995 UK is not one of the sane countries, anyone can call themselves an "engineer" there.
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@langhamp8912 yep, that's my point exactly. Though I doubt you can teach the scientific method properly without using any of the hard sciences as a guiding example.
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@nerdobject5351 not sure about zero wear and tear - sitting is the new smoking, after all. And RSI is real.
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It can't even do guaranteed TCO. How can you FP with it?
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also, this is where Literate Programming shines. When "ehy?" is a result of a few papers-worth reasoning, write this reasoning down alongside with the code the same way you'd write a paper.
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@skyhappy first, let me reassure you, that you have no faintest understanding of the real world. It's pathetic, frankly, how code monkeys always run around rambling about the "real world", why they don't even possess a mental capacity to even start understanding it. Secondly, no, computer science is the most important science out there, binding all the other sciences together. It's the science of what computation is, and our universe is built on the notion of computation on many levels. You won't understand it, of course, I'm saying it here not for your benefit. I'm a nuclear physicist who had to turn to computer science, because there were no answers to my questions anywhere else. And only computer science could finally make all the pieces of the puzzle click in. And computer scientists are supposed to explore this branch of knowledge. Not write some pathetic crappy code, like your kind does. And I'm so glad I'll never have to work with primitive nobodies with overblown ego like you. That's another great feature of the current market, it's very picky, and it works exactly as intended, leaving your kind out of anything meaningful.
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One have grey hair, and the other does not need little blue pills to perform.
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@edgeeffect some languages were designed by PLTists, e.g., Scheme.
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@jamesgood7894 a lot of cases when people were unable to express a simple idea even in a pseudocode (anyway, no reason to ask about any specific languages, this is not an important knowledge). Is it that much to ask? And I'm not talking about dumb and pointless intevriew questions like the infamous FizzBuzz or asking to implement a double-linked list, no. Just any kind of a problem with more than two steps in its solution.
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@vincentvogelaar6015 LLMs do have reasoning abilities. Just give them a Prolog, and let them write, test and debug proofs.
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@vincentvogelaar6015 apparently you do not understand how to use LLMs. They're not any different from our own minds - we cannot reason either, unless we use tools, such as formal logic. So give LLMs their tools - give them an ability to write down reasoning step by step, to verify the reasoning using formal methods (as in - make them write down the steps as HoL proofs or Prolog predicates). I'm using LLMs for solving engineering problems, and reasoning is a crucial part of it. Even very small models (like Phi-3) are perfectly capable of reasoning on a level beyond the capacity of an average engineer, when given the right tools and proper sandbox to test the ideas in (akin to our imagination). Also, LLMs perform the best when reasoning about things that were not in the training set. E.g., they write much better code in languages they've never seen - because they're forced to do it slowly, verifying every step, instead of churning out answers instinctively.
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@vincentvogelaar6015 apparently you do not understand how to use LLMs. They're not any different from our own minds - we cannot reason either, unless we use tools, such as formal logic. So give LLMs their tools - give them an ability to write down reasoning step by step, to verify the reasoning using formal methods (as in - make them write down the steps as HoL proofs or Prolog predicates). Give them a sandbox to debug the proofs, just like you do with any other code. Provide a critical loop to make sure they did not miss anything from the formulation of the problem when translating it to a proof. I'm using LLMs for solving engineering problems, and reasoning is a crucial part of it. Even very small models (like Phi-3) are perfectly capable of reasoning on a level beyond the capacity of an average engineer, when given the right tools and proper sandbox to test the ideas in (akin to our imagination). Also, LLMs perform the best when reasoning about things that were not in the training set. E.g., they write much better code in languages they've never seen - because they're forced to do it slowly, verifying every step, instead of churning out answers instinctively.
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@vincentvogelaar6015 youtube keeps deleting my answer for some reason. I'll try to make it shorter: in order to reason, LLMs must use tools, just like we do. Writing things down, visualising them, applying formal logic, you know, formally - and it all works really well with even the very small LLMs (like Phi-3). And LLMs perform the best on knowledge that was not in the training set, it's forcing them to slow down and reason in very small verifiable steps instead of generating an "intuitive" answer.
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@vincentvogelaar6015 how is it not a reasoning, if this is exactly what humans do? With the result at least not worse, but often much better than human reasoning. You just give this autonomous agent loop with its toolbox a single, vaguely worded goal, and after some time and a lot of very small steps it will create a solution. Fully autonomously. Right now I'm using LLMs to design mixed signal circuits and mechanical parts this way. Just give them the goal, and they do the work. Including finding the datasheets for the required parts, creating and running simulations for things they're not certain about, etc.
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@vincentvogelaar6015 see the Voyager paper for a rudimentary example of such a self-improvement. No need for further model training - there are more efficient ways of storing the accumulated knowledge.
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There is never "too much calculus". The more - the better. But of course code monkeys will never understand why it's so important. You sound truly pathetic and revolting. I hope I'll never have to work with someone like you.
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@ArchetypeLuna "clean code" is a fad popular among the lowest of the low code monkeys, not an essential skill. Unit testing is an obvious thing and details depend on the specific toolchain, so should not be taught in a generic course. It is better to teach formal semantics and proof theory instead, for there's too many code monkeys who put too much faith in unit testing where a formal proof would have been a much better guarantee.
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@c00ckiez for the "real skills" you should have went to a trade school and then do an apprenticeship. Higher education is for the adults who can acquire the mundane lowly "real skills" on their own once they're given a fundamental knowledge and a robust framework for learning. You're pathetic, and I'm really glad I'll never have to work with someone like you. Luckily, all my co-workers are PhDs at least. You have zero chance of ever understanding why Laplace and Fourier and the rest of calculus would have moved you to a totally different level from the code monkey level you're permanently stuck in now. And you're a perfect example of why we have a shortage - too many useless code monkeys, and not nearly enough people who had guts to actually learn calculus.
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Developers who do not use formal verification for critical systems are trash developers. There are no excuses. Ignorance is not an excuse. "Hard to find competent developers" is not an excuse. This industry is teeming with the wrong people who should have never been allowed anywhere close to programming - all those self-taughts, bootcamp "graduates" and such.
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Complex-schmomplex, they built Horizon in a Visual freaking Basic 6, without ever even thinking about boring details like ACID. It was doomed to be a failure through and through, not just a "complex system with a few bugs".
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@tongobong1 nah, a lot of companies are willing to pay well above the market just to get a mildly competent developer. Yet they struggle, there's just not enough developers and a lot of them are not primarily motivated by money so cannot be easily head-hunted out of their current jobs.
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@kzelmer what a dumb take. The shortage is real and measurable.
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@benisrood on a fact that it is very hard to find a single competent engineer, that companies viciously poach from each other, that recruiters call all the time and sound very desperate and offer obscene money. Everyone I know struggle hiring engineers.
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@benisrood you can live in Barcelona and work for a company in the UK, or Switzerland, or USA, or wherever else pay is much better. This is exactly what I do, living in Barcelona on a UK-level income. Also, startups that I know in Barcelona offer way above 60k.
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It is a systematic problem. If the industry is regulated, then both management and developers will have their hand tied, they'll have to do the right thing even if they really really want to ship crap to market asap. Incompetent developers are a problem - and regulations will weed them out. Incompetent management is a problem, and regulations will limit the damage they can cause.
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@WhyteHorse2023 this is why this situation is so absurd - overproduction of juniors led to an unsustainable drop in average quality, made it nearly impossible to find those who are worth even trying to train, all the while experienced people retiring with nobody to replace them. If the junior pool was not so diluted with the wrong people it would have been much easier to train them into experienced engineers.
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Many languages, some are good, some are mediocre, but none as awful as JS. I use C, C++, various flavours of Lisp (including Scheme), Tcl, Verilog, ocaml, and a few more, including even Fortran. Nothing is as ill designed as JS.
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@bernardd yet, Borland Pascal compiled instantly woth no visible delay on an 8086.
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 @PavelHenkin you could always safely distribute a hash. They were just some lousy code monkeys, they built a system on top of f-ng WiFi, obviously they never considered anything at all.
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but imagine how fun it'll be if you'd do all these things with an actually capable language that does not cripple your creativity? Only people who had little exposure to the other languages and programming models can genuinely believe JavaScript is a right tool for expressing their ideas.
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So, you really want to try to prove that there is no shortage? Really? Find me a few engineers who are not a total crap.
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@arcomarco7131 Shortage is real - there are no engineers. How else can I prove it? It is far easier to prove an existence than non-existence. It takes on average 5 months and a hundred of interviews to get a new engineer. While you can easily prove that there is a lot of them, supposedly, readily available. And it is an experience of everyone I know. Less than one in a hundred is worthy of talking to, even less are actually hireable. And yet you insist that there is no shortage. Are you surrounded by hungry eager engineers who will switch jobs on a whim if offered an above the market compensation? Where is this paradise of yours?
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@awmy3109 oh, how cute, to assume that IO is always a bottleneck and that you do not pay very dearly in performance for crappy abstractions and abstrraction-enabling features like GC and duck typing. You do pay, a lot, in orders of magnitude of performance difference.
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@awmy3109 also, no, it is not a "fact" that IO is somehow always a bottleneck. This is something only a narrow minded web coder can say, who have no idea how huge the world outside of his pathetic web stack is.
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@awmy3109 somehow my long answer got lost. Again: GC, dynamic typing, virtual calls are abstraction-enabling tools that harm optimisation and cost a lot in runtime.performance. This is why your JS is orders of magnitude slower than my C++.
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@awmy3109 right, what a great argument! Since only JS is available in a web browser, JS is somehow now a great and performant language. Simply for a virtue of monopoly. Nice. But this is not what OP was talking about. This is how people with experience from outside of web see the web ghetto. Any time we take a closer look we recoil in disgust. This whole web thing is a pile upon piles of utter crap, and it should have never been like this. Also, people like you are very often guilty of not even trying to think if they really need to build a "web app". Turns out, very often they should not, but they still do, because this is all they know. A lot of time a native application is a far better solution. Even more often, no UI at all is even better, yet, the people with such a severe professional deformation fail to see it. Now, you claimed JS is somehow performant (we know it's not, not even close). You claimed you don't pay for abstractions in such a language. Wrong again, you pay dearly. Admit you're wrong and stop moving the goal posts.
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@rentefald You most certainly can write game engines from scratch. If you believe you cannot, you must stay as far away from programming as possible, as you're a part of the problem of massive overengineering of pretty much everything.
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really? Have you ever seen any proper dependently typed language?
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@salvatoreshiggerino6810 Ada (SPARK) is what both pays well and got a really good type system. And projects tend to be far more exciting than the typical corporate stuff - automotive, aerospace, other kinds of high reliability embedded...
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No. There was never any Java in Netscape. They just wanted to jump on a hype bandwagon, as Java was becoming popular in the corporate world.
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The pre-winter AI definitely could fix it. You know - formal proofs, SMT solvers, etc. All the stuff modern so-called "engineers" who are likely nothing but some bootcamp "graduates" know nothing about and have no mathematical background to even start comprehending.
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Nah. There are formal methods and well established design protocols that would have highlighted all such issues on a design stage. But the developers were incompetent and should have been flipping burgers instead of being anywhere close to any real world engineering.
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@charlesd4572 there is nothing wrong with flipping burgers - it's a decent profession, and it is far more suitable for the self-taughts and bootcamp "graduates" than engineering. There were no unknown failure points in this system. Like, in every distributed system every link can go down. Obviously. "Engineers" who fail to use formal methods to evaluate all possible failure modes (based on known individual component failures) and their consequences are not engineers and should not be allowed to design anything at all. I've been building fault-tolerant systems for decades. It really hurts to see what abominations people build when they have no engineering background. Cache is indeed the wrong solution here - and using a WiFi for anything even mildly mission-critical is an outright crime. A fail-safe design would have had multiple communication channels and a quick way of detecting the issues with them.
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@charlesd4572 there were no unknown failure points in this case. All were pretty obvious. Yet code monkeys failed to do anything at all with them. Do not try to find excuses - there is no excuse for doing such an awful job.
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@charlesd4572 stop trying to find excuses for bad engineering. There is no excuse. They used wifi ffs, they clearly set for failure from the very beginning.
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@charlesd4572 of course you can. There is an entire engineering discipline doing just that. Of course there are always unknown failure modes, but you can always design a system tolerant to all the failure modes you know about in advance. Have you seen aerospace and medical designs? Even automotive?
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@martinjungmair705 software had a lot less bugs. A lot better usability. Was a lot more responsive than the current overbloated ill-designed software. And had all the features end users needed.
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@martinjungmair705 of course there was a lot of crap software back then. Pretty much everything on PC was awful (and now is even more awful), with an exception for Borland products. I'm talking about the proper software (Unix, VMS) of that era. In particular, everything from Microsoft was absolutely awful, maybe with an exception for the first Windows NT release.
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@ContinuousDelivery to add on the topic of continuous delivery of the embedded solutions - I found it very useful to have a simulated analogue hardware-in-the-loop. For example, for the aforementioned BLDC controller, we're using a patched ngspice version that supports mixed signal time step simulations, so we can run firmware in a loop with a simulated analogue part of the system (with even a load being simulated). Every change to firmware therefore runs through a set of tests, including breakdown scenarios that cannot be tested on a real hardware (well, they can, but only once).
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 @almari3954 if you don't have any interrupts, and just poll all sensors in order, your FSM is always deterministic and allows a precise timing analysis.
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@almari3954 if there are no interrupts, FSM is deterministic. There is no problem.with such "concurrency".
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@pompiuses there's a caveat - Java is best performing only if you write it in such a way that GC does not have much to do. I had to deal with a few Java real-time GC implementations, it always boils down to writing in a very restricted subset of Java and continuously questioning - why the heck we did not just use C++? As for thoughput performance - yes, JRE is one of the best, and GCs available for it are very mature.
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All the antivirus companies are just a security theatre and a scam. Microsoft should have never caved to them, AVs must be pushed out of the market.
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