Compare also Spanish national radio and TV where every time is read out twice to account for the fact that the country has two timezones (Continental European vs Canary Islands)
I think that's 100 programmer hours to fix the problems, and 100 staff days to field calls from a nation whose hobby is complaining about things that don't matter.
Dear Points of View,
I would like to raise two problems with JamesH's post of the 6th of June. Firstly, he mistakes us for "a nation", despite the constitutional recognition of our 4 different nationalities within the united state.
Secondly, he alleges that we tend to complain about things that don't matter, which is a scurrilous accusation with no foundation in fact.
It's a legitimate get-out clause, and any good developer would use it as such. "OK, boss. You want a feature that's of practically zero utility? Fine, let me just do the figures.... yep, one arm and one leg ought to do it. Oh, you've changed your mind? Fine."
All in all they've come to the right decision. There are several use cases for a clock, and only one of requires such a degree of accuracy: that of using it to set your PC clock. This is not the everyday use of the BBC website clock. The BBC website clock is nothing more than window dressing. If the decoration starts interfering with the usage, it's time to get the paintbrushes out....
DNA is made up of five elements: carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen and phosphorous. If I was to take a single molecule of my DNA and break all the molecular bonds (ie strip out all structural information) and hand you a collection of the resulting atoms, would you have all the "content" of my DNA in any useful sense?
So please dial back the insults.
XML may be a structured plain-text representation of the document, but the structure itself has semantics that are not always trivial to decode. In order to "write a piece of software that opens the document and preserves the import information", I would have to decode the semantic links between elements. The whole point of this discussion is that step in the process. Plaintext certainly makes the job easier, but it doesn't make it easy.
There may be nothing arcane about opening an XML document and doing something with its [NB: no apostrophe] contents, but there may be something very arcane about doing the right thing with its contents. If there's a non-obvious interaction between two elements, for example, as happens in Microsofts OOXML.
Speaking of which, why don't you go and download a large PowerPoint presentation in PPTX format from slideshare, open it up in a text editor and then come back and call me a "dumbfuck" again when you find it trivially easy to process....
p>Because the weaker the console, the more performance it takes to do it accurately.
That's a misrepresentation of the truth.
What you're referring to is the culture of "hacky" code that evolved to overcome the limitations of hardware. For example, sprite multiplexing. Early graphics devices with hardware sprites had a very limited number on-screen - on a business system, there might only be one for the mouse pointer. In order to overcome these limits, programmers would use raster interrupts to track the screen refresh and switch out the sprite banks so that they could draw the full limit of sprites in the top section of the screen, and then the full limit again below; doubling, tripling or quadrupling the number of available sprites. This means that the emulator has to do cycle-exact graphics, whereas a system with unlimited sprites (whether in hardware or software) doesn't need to have any notion of a moving cathode-ray beam to follow.
The more advanced the hardware, the less likely that software interfaces with the hardware as bare metal, instead relying on APIs that abstract it out, making hardware-specific timing often unnecessary.
Because you absolutely have to have a 4Ghz quad code, eight thread CPU with 2048 stream processors and 8 GB ram to emulate a 1Mhz 6502 with 16K of RAM....
Well no, but seeing as you've already got the 4GHz doo-dah, it's cheaper to just buy a clicky USB stick for that than to buy Pi + stick + box + USB keyboard. Projects like this may be fun for the maker, but it does kind of miss the point of general purpose computing and the general trend for convergence.
This story might be newsworthy if it was a commercial kit that offered licensed MAME ROMs so that theme bars could set up retro arcades on 80s night. But as it is, it's just another "Pi-in-a-case" story, just with a custom driver....
Yes. And of course there is a disconnect between academic and practical software engineering, and it's a disconnect that is perpetuated by the "ivory towers" attitude. Software Engineering should be treated like any other field of engineering, but in most cases it's currently run by the Computer Science department. If people objected to that, fine -- then we'd maybe start to see more movement towards recognising SE as a distinct discipline, but the prevailing attitude is not "CS vs SE", it's "university vs real world", and that's a problem.
Academics with degrees in software engineering describing how to write code is like a horny virgin describing how to have sex:
The same goes for academics with degrees in medicine describing how to treat a patient, academics with degrees in civil engineering describing how to build a bridge and academics with degrees in accounting describing how to balance the books at year-end, I take it?
This is one thing that really p!sses me off about the programming world: the notion that "the real world" is all about graft and experience, and that actually thinking about what you're doing and why is a bad thing. I've just started programming again, and I'm following the advice I was given during my CS degree because it's good practice, and a good idea. When I cut corners, I acknowledge I'm being lazy, but I don't swear about ivory tower academics — I choose to break the rules for short-term convenience having assessed the impact of doing so, which is still good practice. That's what the "real world" coders forget: anything can be good practice if done for the right reason. The academics don't demand that we do everything one way every time, just that when we diverge from the "best" path, we do it conscious of the consequences.
Except that you clearly didn't follow the same rigorous software engineer process as NASA. Dividing LoC by num_programmers says your guys spent significantly less time on the code than NASA, which is to be expected.
If you're doing it right, you're not having to "do it all over again". You're only having to change small portions of a piece of software rather than huge chunks or starting over.
But that's nothing to do with "agile", is it? That's just a matter of high encapsulation, low coupling and other coding practices that result in high reusability. Agile methodologies might actively encourage these practices, but all good coders should be working that way anyway.
The problem with Agile is that it gives too much freedom to the customer to change their mind late in the project and make the developers do it all over again.
Call me crazy, but I always thought Agile was developed in response to customers doing exactly that, but under methodologies where it was much more expensive to do so.
Agile was about uncertainty in the spec. It allows you iterate and incorporate new information as and when it is discovered. "Changing your mind" means ripping it up and starting again, and that's no less painful in an agile environment than any other environment -- code that can be reused will be reused in the next design cycle, but an agile process is a continuity, and a change of mind is a discontinuity.
"Changing their mind" is always bad. "Realising their mistakes" and "revising their assumptions" are good. The goal of "agile" is to adapt to new information, and to allow for the continued flow of new information. "Changing their mind" breaks that flow. It's not new information, it's something completely different. You can't "adapt" to a change of mind, you just have to start from scratch.
If your customer thinks agile lets them change their mind any more frequently then any other design philosophy, your customer needs re-educated. If you think agile lets the customer change their mind any more frequently then any other design philosophy, you need re-educated.
If I get really froggy I use HTML, and you can just strip the tags and read that.
Only if you're very, very careful, because if you strip the tags, you lose the ALT attributes on your IMG tags, which means you're ditching the plaintext fallback for the non-textual information in the page..../p.
Holy shit, yeah, you're right - it's totally impossible to strip out the XML tags and be left with readable plain text content!
I bet nobody could ever decode it!
You seem to be assuming a flat-text file with predictable order. Strip the XML out of anything in a tabular format (eg a spreadsheet -- see TFS) and you lose vital data. Blank cells are lost and the tabulated data no longer lines up.
It gets worse in a filetype with unstructured formatting, eg DTP and slideware. You've got a collection of elements that are only ordered by their metadata. The explanatory labels you want to overlay on top of that image? They're no longer linked to it and you've no way of knowing what they're their for. Multiple news stories on the same page merge into one, and have been divorced from their headlines.
If there is an easier, clearer and more useful first step: take it. Follow the "path of least resistance", because it's frustration that turns people off learning something new....
My philosophy is simple: Hello World is stupid. When I started programming in C at university, it bugged the hell out of me how long we took struggling with the language before being allowed to actually do something. The real way to start C is to start teaching the *n*x command prompt, and start making simple programs for shell extension commands (square, square root etc). That's the quickest way to get to something conceptually useful, because you're starting with divide-and-conquer and effectively teaching procedural programming by stealth -- the barrier between the command line and the program is less abstract than between calling procedure and called procedure.
Things are obviously a bit different for Java, but the point is that you should be looking for the real core design goal of the language and starting there. C was designed for Unix, in the days when everything happened in a shell, and getting it to do anything else takes a few steps longer.
It might have done if you hadn't shown yourself unaware of the existence of such thing as a "runtime library". You outright denied that it existed, so while you have demonstrated a deeper understanding of the workings of C than me, you've also demonstrated that your usage of terminology is somewhat... nonstandard....
2. Would be your main justification for calling the C runtime a VM — that it is called before the program itself. Surely the defining feature of a virtual machine would be that it mediates all control flow, and you have so far only talked about the C runtime manages the call stack for C's procedural features. Relatively complex procedures built on basic operations could in theory be carried out with no interaction between the program and the runtime.p>
3. If an instruction doesn't exist in hardware, it has to be implemented in software. Now, so are you saying that the C object file includes a "virtual instruction" that is interpreted on the fly by the VM, or is it instead not usually compiled into a library call? I mean, if I compile C to an 8-bit microcontroller based on the 6502 chipset, then all FP operations must necessarily be done in software. Are you calling that a virtual machine? Because that sounds a bit of a stretch.
You've convinced me that the "runtime" is not a "runtime library", but if you're calling it a VM, then the term VM has lost all meaning.
In principle, I'm all for using public money to "commission" public works/research etc.
On the other hand, a lot of public money is offered as seedcorn to help establish ongoing viable income streams. IE. we give you funding now, but not forever.
Right now it's "we give you funding now and forever", but perhaps a mix of the other two would be best...? The government can commission research as public property OR give a grant that allows the research institute to keep the profits on the understanding that their future ability to seek research grants will be diminished.
I still don't get why the C runtime is being called a "VM" rather than a "runtime library". Is every Windows DLL that abstracts out a piece of functionality that could conceivably be implemented in hardware now a virtual machine? Or just things that are commonly implemented in hardware? For example, 3D graphics (remember when that was all software? It still is on many cheap Android devices) and MP3 decoding (most portable devices have on-chip MP3 decoding, not sure whether PC soundchips do now or not).
If the OS runs the program as a VM, then why would I need the C runtime to operate as a VM too? A VM that is the only thing running on a VM? My sandbox would hold more sand if it wasn't inside another sandbox....
Slashdot Mirror
Jeeze. Too hard to read the TZ environment variable? Anybody who doesn't have that set properly doesn't deserve to know what time it is.
Anyone who doesn't know how to set it is exactly the sort of person who would go to the BBC website to check the time on their computer!!!
Compare also Spanish national radio and TV where every time is read out twice to account for the fact that the country has two timezones (Continental European vs Canary Islands)
I think that's 100 programmer hours to fix the problems, and 100 staff days to field calls from a nation whose hobby is complaining about things that don't matter.
Dear Points of View,
I would like to raise two problems with JamesH's post of the 6th of June. Firstly, he mistakes us for "a nation", despite the constitutional recognition of our 4 different nationalities within the united state.
Secondly, he alleges that we tend to complain about things that don't matter, which is a scurrilous accusation with no foundation in fact.
Yours faithfully
Disgusted
Tunbridge Wells
It's a cop-out, nothing more.
It's a legitimate get-out clause, and any good developer would use it as such. "OK, boss. You want a feature that's of practically zero utility? Fine, let me just do the figures.... yep, one arm and one leg ought to do it. Oh, you've changed your mind? Fine."
All in all they've come to the right decision. There are several use cases for a clock, and only one of requires such a degree of accuracy: that of using it to set your PC clock. This is not the everyday use of the BBC website clock. The BBC website clock is nothing more than window dressing. If the decoration starts interfering with the usage, it's time to get the paintbrushes out....
DNA is made up of five elements: carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen and phosphorous. If I was to take a single molecule of my DNA and break all the molecular bonds (ie strip out all structural information) and hand you a collection of the resulting atoms, would you have all the "content" of my DNA in any useful sense?
So please dial back the insults.
XML may be a structured plain-text representation of the document, but the structure itself has semantics that are not always trivial to decode. In order to "write a piece of software that opens the document and preserves the import information", I would have to decode the semantic links between elements. The whole point of this discussion is that step in the process. Plaintext certainly makes the job easier, but it doesn't make it easy.
There may be nothing arcane about opening an XML document and doing something with its [NB: no apostrophe] contents, but there may be something very arcane about doing the right thing with its contents. If there's a non-obvious interaction between two elements, for example, as happens in Microsofts OOXML.
Speaking of which, why don't you go and download a large PowerPoint presentation in PPTX format from slideshare, open it up in a text editor and then come back and call me a "dumbfuck" again when you find it trivially easy to process....
Only if you consider "metadata" not to be data, but metadata is data -- data about data.
p>Because the weaker the console, the more performance it takes to do it accurately.
That's a misrepresentation of the truth.
What you're referring to is the culture of "hacky" code that evolved to overcome the limitations of hardware. For example, sprite multiplexing. Early graphics devices with hardware sprites had a very limited number on-screen - on a business system, there might only be one for the mouse pointer. In order to overcome these limits, programmers would use raster interrupts to track the screen refresh and switch out the sprite banks so that they could draw the full limit of sprites in the top section of the screen, and then the full limit again below; doubling, tripling or quadrupling the number of available sprites. This means that the emulator has to do cycle-exact graphics, whereas a system with unlimited sprites (whether in hardware or software) doesn't need to have any notion of a moving cathode-ray beam to follow.
The more advanced the hardware, the less likely that software interfaces with the hardware as bare metal, instead relying on APIs that abstract it out, making hardware-specific timing often unnecessary.
Because you absolutely have to have a 4Ghz quad code, eight thread CPU with 2048 stream processors and 8 GB ram to emulate a 1Mhz 6502 with 16K of RAM....
Well no, but seeing as you've already got the 4GHz doo-dah, it's cheaper to just buy a clicky USB stick for that than to buy Pi + stick + box + USB keyboard. Projects like this may be fun for the maker, but it does kind of miss the point of general purpose computing and the general trend for convergence.
This story might be newsworthy if it was a commercial kit that offered licensed MAME ROMs so that theme bars could set up retro arcades on 80s night. But as it is, it's just another "Pi-in-a-case" story, just with a custom driver....
Yes. And of course there is a disconnect between academic and practical software engineering, and it's a disconnect that is perpetuated by the "ivory towers" attitude. Software Engineering should be treated like any other field of engineering, but in most cases it's currently run by the Computer Science department. If people objected to that, fine -- then we'd maybe start to see more movement towards recognising SE as a distinct discipline, but the prevailing attitude is not "CS vs SE", it's "university vs real world", and that's a problem.
After all, even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and when it is, you'd be a fool to disagree with it.
Perhaps, but you'd be a bigger fool to agree with it in the absence of supporting evidence....
Academics with degrees in software engineering describing how to write code is like a horny virgin describing how to have sex:
The same goes for academics with degrees in medicine describing how to treat a patient, academics with degrees in civil engineering describing how to build a bridge and academics with degrees in accounting describing how to balance the books at year-end, I take it?
This is one thing that really p!sses me off about the programming world: the notion that "the real world" is all about graft and experience, and that actually thinking about what you're doing and why is a bad thing. I've just started programming again, and I'm following the advice I was given during my CS degree because it's good practice, and a good idea. When I cut corners, I acknowledge I'm being lazy, but I don't swear about ivory tower academics — I choose to break the rules for short-term convenience having assessed the impact of doing so, which is still good practice. That's what the "real world" coders forget: anything can be good practice if done for the right reason. The academics don't demand that we do everything one way every time, just that when we diverge from the "best" path, we do it conscious of the consequences.
Except that you clearly didn't follow the same rigorous software engineer process as NASA. Dividing LoC by num_programmers says your guys spent significantly less time on the code than NASA, which is to be expected.
If you're doing it right, you're not having to "do it all over again". You're only having to change small portions of a piece of software rather than huge chunks or starting over.
But that's nothing to do with "agile", is it? That's just a matter of high encapsulation, low coupling and other coding practices that result in high reusability. Agile methodologies might actively encourage these practices, but all good coders should be working that way anyway.
Call me crazy, but I always thought Agile was developed in response to customers doing exactly that, but under methodologies where it was much more expensive to do so.
Agile was about uncertainty in the spec. It allows you iterate and incorporate new information as and when it is discovered. "Changing your mind" means ripping it up and starting again, and that's no less painful in an agile environment than any other environment -- code that can be reused will be reused in the next design cycle, but an agile process is a continuity, and a change of mind is a discontinuity.
"Changing their mind" is always bad. "Realising their mistakes" and "revising their assumptions" are good. The goal of "agile" is to adapt to new information, and to allow for the continued flow of new information. "Changing their mind" breaks that flow. It's not new information, it's something completely different. You can't "adapt" to a change of mind, you just have to start from scratch.
If your customer thinks agile lets them change their mind any more frequently then any other design philosophy, your customer needs re-educated. If you think agile lets the customer change their mind any more frequently then any other design philosophy, you need re-educated.
If I get really froggy I use HTML, and you can just strip the tags and read that.
Only if you're very, very careful, because if you strip the tags, you lose the ALT attributes on your IMG tags, which means you're ditching the plaintext fallback for the non-textual information in the page..../p.
Holy shit, yeah, you're right - it's totally impossible to strip out the XML tags and be left with readable plain text content!
I bet nobody could ever decode it!
You seem to be assuming a flat-text file with predictable order. Strip the XML out of anything in a tabular format (eg a spreadsheet -- see TFS) and you lose vital data. Blank cells are lost and the tabulated data no longer lines up.
It gets worse in a filetype with unstructured formatting, eg DTP and slideware. You've got a collection of elements that are only ordered by their metadata. The explanatory labels you want to overlay on top of that image? They're no longer linked to it and you've no way of knowing what they're their for. Multiple news stories on the same page merge into one, and have been divorced from their headlines.
Readable != useful.
A hurdle is a type of obstacle
If there is an easier, clearer and more useful first step: take it. Follow the "path of least resistance", because it's frustration that turns people off learning something new....
My philosophy is simple: Hello World is stupid. When I started programming in C at university, it bugged the hell out of me how long we took struggling with the language before being allowed to actually do something. The real way to start C is to start teaching the *n*x command prompt, and start making simple programs for shell extension commands (square, square root etc). That's the quickest way to get to something conceptually useful, because you're starting with divide-and-conquer and effectively teaching procedural programming by stealth -- the barrier between the command line and the program is less abstract than between calling procedure and called procedure.
Things are obviously a bit different for Java, but the point is that you should be looking for the real core design goal of the language and starting there. C was designed for Unix, in the days when everything happened in a shell, and getting it to do anything else takes a few steps longer.
Did that help?
It might have done if you hadn't shown yourself unaware of the existence of such thing as a "runtime library". You outright denied that it existed, so while you have demonstrated a deeper understanding of the workings of C than me, you've also demonstrated that your usage of terminology is somewhat... nonstandard....
2. Would be your main justification for calling the C runtime a VM — that it is called before the program itself. Surely the defining feature of a virtual machine would be that it mediates all control flow, and you have so far only talked about the C runtime manages the call stack for C's procedural features. Relatively complex procedures built on basic operations could in theory be carried out with no interaction between the program and the runtime.p>
3. If an instruction doesn't exist in hardware, it has to be implemented in software. Now, so are you saying that the C object file includes a "virtual instruction" that is interpreted on the fly by the VM, or is it instead not usually compiled into a library call? I mean, if I compile C to an 8-bit microcontroller based on the 6502 chipset, then all FP operations must necessarily be done in software. Are you calling that a virtual machine? Because that sounds a bit of a stretch.
You've convinced me that the "runtime" is not a "runtime library", but if you're calling it a VM, then the term VM has lost all meaning.
In principle, I'm all for using public money to "commission" public works/research etc.
On the other hand, a lot of public money is offered as seedcorn to help establish ongoing viable income streams. IE. we give you funding now, but not forever.
Right now it's "we give you funding now and forever", but perhaps a mix of the other two would be best...? The government can commission research as public property OR give a grant that allows the research institute to keep the profits on the understanding that their future ability to seek research grants will be diminished.
You do realise that human diseases are very different from computer viruses, and can't be transmitted by the internet, don't you?
I still don't get why the C runtime is being called a "VM" rather than a "runtime library". Is every Windows DLL that abstracts out a piece of functionality that could conceivably be implemented in hardware now a virtual machine? Or just things that are commonly implemented in hardware? For example, 3D graphics (remember when that was all software? It still is on many cheap Android devices) and MP3 decoding (most portable devices have on-chip MP3 decoding, not sure whether PC soundchips do now or not).
If the OS runs the program as a VM, then why would I need the C runtime to operate as a VM too? A VM that is the only thing running on a VM? My sandbox would hold more sand if it wasn't inside another sandbox....
All languages? Where's the assembly language runtime?
It's often implemented in hardware....