"Living organisms can’t survive in their own waste...
# linking-togethers
Scott Anderson
10/28/2020, 5:18 PMGood talk so far. I'm not quite through it, but suggestion of "write the meaning first" (effectively a prototype or executable documentation) and then write optimizations that can be turned on and off reminds me a little of John Carmack's blog post on parallel implementations http://www.sevangelatos.com/john-carmack-on-parallel-implementations/
Scott Anderson
10/28/2020, 5:19 PMI've tried to do this in a professional capacity almost every time I implement a new system of reasonable complexity but never really get a chance to do it properly due to ridiculous time constraints from product people 🙂
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Mariano Guerra
10/28/2020, 5:35 PM
contracts (https://www.eiffel.com/values/design-by-contract/introduction/) and property bases testing go also in that direction
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Scott Anderson
10/28/2020, 5:46 PMComputing in the future is also something that Carmack talks about a lot. It's pretty reasonable in graphics, if you build with the latest Nvidia super GPU (3090 now) you're 5-10 years in the future of most users
Scott Anderson
10/28/2020, 5:47 PMmaybe 15-20 depending on what population you're talking about
Scott Anderson
10/28/2020, 5:47 PMthey did it with say... buying NeXT machines back when they were working on Doom
Scott Anderson
10/28/2020, 6:14 PMone thing about this talk is he focuses a lot on programming being engineering or science, and should be a tool for making abstract big ideas more tangible. That makes sense (its Alan Kay!). But I think he's overly negative on what most programmers actually do day to day
Scott Anderson
10/28/2020, 6:14 PMmost programming jobs are craft, there are no big ideas involved, it's literally making interactive forms for a custom database
Scott Anderson
10/28/2020, 6:19 PMtinkering is the wrong word for it I think, maybe plumbing? You could argue that no code\low code tools (or some future imagined tool, or better education, etc.) could get rid of a large class of programmers, but just because you have electricians and plumbers doesn't mean they should be engineers and learn real engineering, and it also doesn't mean that they shouldn't exist as professions and everyone should do their own plumbing and electrical work
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wtaysom
10/28/2020, 7:40 PMOn programming as craft, I was reflecting today that my job is 95% tedium, 5% virtuosity, and a good chunk of the virtuosity is in how to turn a thorny problem into a not so fancy custom database.