On Aug 12, 2009, at 9:56 PM, erik quanstrom wrote:
if we're going back there, just take me out back and shoot me now. i want to remember some progress in computer science.
The principal joy I derive from using Plan 9 (and I am quite new) is that it is so well architected. By day I am a web developer (when I'm employed) and I am just thoroughly sickened by the industry. It seems to me that at some point, the cool guys that beat me up in middle school somehow insinuated their way into technology and have hijacked everything. Currently they seem to be proceeding to reinvent the same things over and over again, on top of their own reinventions, for no particular gain except to make new jargon and get their name on the latest version. It's hard to even maintain a portfolio of work one's done when the lifespan of a website is dwindling to one year or six months. And that certainly reduces the incentive to give it everything you've got and make something really good.
I was curious about ICE, because it seemed like they actually took CORBA and said, what would this look like if it were implemented by engineers rather than a committee? But I don't think the problem facing the world is "how do I integrate all these languages, possibly over the network?" but rather "how do I minimize all of this fucking complexity and still get things done?" XML-RPC and SOAP are answers to stupid questions, which is why we have REST, but the joke is that none of the technologies that it relies on are even implemented enough by their own specifications such that it can really be used. It strikes me as ludicrous that you can go make a new Rails app and have to write by hand (or find someone's plugin) to create a login system for you, which won't even happen on the HTTP level (which supports it), or the RDBMS level (which also supports it), or the OS level (which again supports it.) How many times do we have to write username/password logins before we're done and we can fucking can move on? It's not like anything is really different at any of these levels, just the way the bytes get handed around. Then you have to be sure to use a database abstraction layer, because everyone seems to have forgotten that the database *is* an abstraction layer—this fact got lost in the shuffle as it became too complex for anyone to really understand completely. Yet nobody seems to be worried that the same thing might happen to their little project as they pile code upon code and it slowly swells up just like everything that came before or that it depends on. Before long, they need an abstraction layer for their abstraction layer! Then the schmucks come along and complain about performance and demand to be taught every dirty trick to take their barely useful code and remove all the clarity from it in the name of a performance. Software is cancer.
I don't know how long you've been a programmer, Erik, but I'm sure it's far longer than I. From my perspective, no, there is no progress in computer science, we're spending all our time trying to climb out of the same muddy hole we've been in since Dijkstra was a newlywed and Knuth was writing for MAD Magazine. CS has such advanced amnesia that it can't remember what prompted the last question it was asked and so it just repeats the question to itself over and over, never really aware that it isn't an answer. We dig and dig but the problem only gets worse because digging doesn't get you out of a muddy hole.
The things that keep me going are the pleasure I get from knowing a lot of obscure stuff, talking to intelligent, knowledgeable people such as comprise this mailing list, and (oddly) writing SQL. I wouldn't say I have much hope for the industry in general unless there's some sort of major restructuring. I try not to make that my problem and instead share the things I know about with people I think might benefit. So consider this the opposite of being flamed. I feel exactly the same way you do. I hope that in some time I will be doing as much for the good as you and others on this list that carry the Plan 9 torch and endure my stupid questions (and now my rants.)
— Daniel Lyons
