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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   35888 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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This is a subject near and dear to me. Because I positively loath working with most new programmers. I loath this entire generation of "programmers" that never had to manage memory. That just stitches libraries together to accomplish 99% of their tasks. And if it isn't garbage collected, and it isn't a library, they flail around uselessly.

That's "programming" in the same way purchasing a bird house kit from a hobby shop is "wood working". Yes, you are technically using a tool that is also used in that activity. But 95% of the work was done for you. And they are barely even cognizant of that fact.

But I'm a fucking crazy person. I got annoyed that 86Box didn't work with my HOTAS once, so I downloaded the source and fixed it myself. A certain especially difficult level of Populous pissed me off to such a degree, I download the version of DOSBOX with the debugger built in and began dissecting the bytecode that effects the AI speed. Successfully I might add. Patched a version of the game just for me that was a smidge easier for my aged reaction times. When the Oculus Quest came out, I was annoyed that a lot of Gear VR games would run on it, but the controls weren't mapped to the right buttons. Since most of those games just run Unity, and use the built in Oculus plugins, I discovered I could replace the .net bytecode in the dlls to remap the controls. So I took about a half dozen Gear VR games I liked, unpacked the APK files, edited the DLLs, repacked and signed the APK files, and then loaded them onto my Oculus Quest.

Lately I decided I wanted to learn x86 assembly, targeting the 8088 platform, BIOS/DOS function calls, EGA graphics and Adlib music. Wrote a sprite editor, currently working on an adlib tracker. All in assembly. It's so much fun, I love it.

So yeah, I'm a fucking lunatic.

I came up through a Computer Engineering program. There was programming in all 4 years of it, largely in C++, but also Java and Python (which I hated). But other required courses were the material properties of transistors, which I largely forgot. Then how to create adders and other simple electronics out of discrete components (NAND gates, XOR gates, etc). Then some assembly on this project board I actually still have, but can't recall at all what it ran.

I still remember, after I graduated, I was talking with a buddy of mine who did a Computer Science degree at a different school. At some point he asked me "So how did we get to where we are now, with operating systems and compilers and stuff?" I was blown away that after 4 years, and a Computer Science degree, he didn't know that.

Increasingly, the teaching of programming is "vibes based" as you put it. Fundamentally incompetent people are being handed degrees. The only reason they appear to be able to perform a task that vaguely resembles programming is that people smarter than they or their entire lineage will ever be set the table for them.

This is a subject near and dear to me. Because I positively loath working with most new programmers. I loath this entire generation of "programmers" that never had to manage memory. That just stitches libraries together to accomplish 99% of their tasks. And if it isn't garbage collected, and it isn't a library, they flail around uselessly.

If programming is as simple as piecing together libraries, shouldn't this have a depressing effect on salaries? Yet coders are making more than ever despite the abundance of libraries. Instead of having to be super-efficient, programs are now way more complicated, such as backend and frontend. One challenge has been replaced by another.

If programming is as simple as piecing together libraries, shouldn't this have a depressing effect on salaries?

There's also a lot more demand for software engineers now. Everything runs on apps, web sites, productivity software, etc. Everything that used to be mechanical and complicated now has an embedded computer. Availability of libraries is just one variable that has changed gradually over the course of decades.

Much love and respect to what you're doing and your opinion - I've followed along plenty on your friday threads.

But the problem with this attitude is having everyone write in assembly or C means we'd never get anything done. Re-Inventing the wheel is fun (sometimes), but it's not efficient. Stitching together libraries correctly is still difficult enough that very few people can be competent software architects.

I'd agree that people need to understand they're standing on the shoulders of giants, and I have seen a marked decrease in that knowledge/attitude among younger programmers. But if I had to build some of the things I've worked on without anyone else's great code, I'd be miserable.

But the problem with this attitude is having everyone write in assembly or C means we'd never get anything done. Re-Inventing the wheel is fun (sometimes), but it's not efficient. Stitching together libraries correctly is still difficult enough that very few people can be competent software architects.

My rant isn't so much "Everyone needs to write everything in assembly/C" as "Everyone, at some time, needs to have written something in assembly/C".

I sure as shit am not re-inventing the wheel constantly in my day job. I'm stitching together libraries for efficiency's sake, same as everyone else. But having at one point made my own wheel, even if not a particularly good one, I understand you aren't supposed to use a wheel flat on it's side. Or try to put a flat edge on it. Which keeps me from doing pants-on-head retarded things with other people's wheels.

But like... there are lots of people who are value-positive programmers in today's environment who would never be willing or even able to do anything worth doing in assembly. I bet you're much better than they are -- you're a grandmaster while they're merely competent -- but surely you agree they're still worthwhile to employ, even if only so they can do the dumb grungy projects on which your talents would be wasted. It feels like you are picturing the counterfactual universe as one in which everyone who was currently employed as a software engineer had your talents and depth of expertise -- but I think the more likely alternative is one in which almost no one can live up to your standards, so almost no one writes software, almost nothing gets built, and our society doesn't get to have nice things.

I'm sorry you have to work with them, though. The depth of conviction that makes great programmers great also means it is torture for them to be forced to collaborate with relatively shitty programmers.

torture for them to be forced to collaborate with relatively shitty programmers

This is mostly because we want them to notice our brilliant optimizations and beautiful abstractions in PR review, and decorate our PR with :thumbsup: and :+100: and :sunglasses: emojis. But it all just goes past them and they Approve without comment.

I completely agree. My university was a little "behind" the times and I was raised with the C method, even my AP class in high school was C++. I always knew that it would be of benefit to me and now after being in the industry, the nodejs generation is trash and I hate working with them.

Okay but garbage collection is better than reference counting for performance though, and reference counting is better than manual for sanity, certainly so when you're writing trees.

garbage collection is better than reference counting for performance though

These aren't the only two options available. Especially with the advanced research that has gone into static analysis these days.

And still, if you want any kind of performance you still have to worry about locality and all the other fun issues that only come up if you understand what is actually happening behind the scenes.

Being able to understand well how to do manual memory management requires more intelligence than just slapping stuff together, and understanding how it works is also very important for using automatic memory management well (if you write a nice, GCed, dynamic language naively or use a ton of lambdas or temporary objects, it may perform very poorly, whereas making it work well with the JIT makes your code look more like C)

I'm not dismissing garbage collection whole sale. I'm dismissing programmers who have known nothing else.

Here is an example. Once upon a time i had to shove about 10 thousand objects into NASA Worldwind and see how it ran. It ran like dog shit. Because whatever fresh graduate they had coding it reallocated memory for each objects screen transformation every frame. So it triggered the gc literally multiple times a frame with a few thousand objects to render. That is a level of idiocy only possible if you learned to program in an environment where you were barely cognizant memory was a resource with costs associated with it.

I'm not dismissing garbage collection whole sale. I'm dismissing programmers who have known nothing else.

Eh, this basically feels like a box out of the famous XKCD comic.

Because whatever fresh graduate they had coding it reallocated memory for each objects screen transformation every frame

This really is a problem though, if you write 'clean functional immutable nodejs' where every single function creates a new immutable object, it'll perform terribly. I've done it a few times on fun hobby projects, and it really did perform badly.

And learning manual memory management and writing some C definitely is worth doing in learning, and many fields of programming still require writing it. (That said, in most contexts doing it manually, or even worrying that much about memory management, is awful and just slows you down.)

If you don't understand the difference between dick measuring over your choice of text editor, and fundamentally not understanding how a computer works, then yes, it's superficially similar.

My disgust reaction to argumentum ad XKCD aside, it does make me wonder. Did programmers of old complain when things moved from byte code on punch cards to disks and actual languages, with compilers and all? I certainly had a few professors who seemed to have such a chip on their shoulder.

It wasn't byte code on punch cards to disks and actual languages. Compilers were rather early in the game, and macro-assemblers too. FORTRAN goes back to 1957, COBOL 1959, the well-known FORTRAN IV in 1962. FORTRAN was famously designed for punched cards, which is why the strict column rules in FORTRAN 77 and earlier. Aside from grouching about "you're not a real programmer until you've had to sort the box of punched cards you dropped on the ground", I don't think there was serious complaining about the move away from them. Complaints about assembler v. high level languages survived for much longer.

Yeah, it's probably fair that your point deserved more care and elaboration than argumentum ad XKCD can provide. Which: sorry about that! I was overly flip.

So!

Fundamentally software is a rickety tower of abstractions built on abstractions built on abstractions. At the lowest level you've got logic gates, and if you put enough of those (and some other stuff) together in the right configurations you can make stuff like arithmetic logic units; and if you put enough stuff of basically that abstraction layer together, you have yourself a CPU, and that and some other bits gets you a computer; and then you have the BIOS, the OS on top of that, and the language runtime of the stuff you're working on on top of that, and your program running on top of that. Obviously you already know this.

And the reason this basically kinda works is that a long time ago programmers figured out that the way to productivity is to have hardened interfaces at which you program; the point of these interfaces is to avoid having to concern yourself with most of the vast underground of abstractions that form a computer. Which means that most programmers don't really concern themselves with those details, and honestly it's not clear to me they should in the typical case.

That's because making maintainable software is about ensuring that you are, at all times, programming in the level of abstraction appropriate to your problem domain, neither going higher (resulting in perf issues, typically) or lower (resulting in bugs and long implementation times as you re-invent the wheel over and over). For every guy who tanks the performance of an app by not respecting the garbage collector, there's another that decides to implement his own JSON parser "for efficiency" and hooks it up to the [redacted] API, resulting in several extremely-difficult-to-debug issues in production that I personally burned several hours in fixing, all to shave milliseconds off an hourly batch process' running time. Not that I'm bitter.

So I guess that sort of statement-- "you're only a good programmer if you've used a language with manual memory management"-- feels like unjustified programmer-machismo, where someone chooses one of those abstraction layers between bare physics and the language runtime more-or-less arbitrarily and says "ah, but only if you deeply understand this specific abstraction layer can you truly be a good programmer."

Admittedly I work in distributed systems, where 99% of things that actually matter for performance occur over the network.

I'll second memory management, or more broadly understanding pointers, as being an important boundary.

There is nothing fundamentally lost moving from machine code to assembly - one's just shorthand for the other. Transforming C mechanically into assembly by hand is not hard, just pointless and tedious. But languages "above" memory really truly do lose sight of something. There is nothing in the Haskell Man's conceptual toolbox he can use to get a handle on the memory of the system he runs on.

I'll grant it's not often important, but there is a real line between "languages which require memory awareness" and languages that do not, and it's not arbitrary. A real aspect of system execution and performance is totally lost.

Abstractions leak. All of them. Even down to the physical layer. A great programmer needs to know enough about the layers below to recognize when they're being bit by a leaky abstraction. If you don't understand enough about the layers below to be able to recognize an operating system call that doesn't work, or a CPU that mis-executes an instruction, or a memory management system that causes your code to grind to a halt while you pay the cost of deallocation, you're going to be unable to solve a problem. Thing is, physical layer issues are very rare (and simple bit flips are much more common than something as esoteric as rowhammer). Operation system bugs are at least reasonably rare with mature operating systems. Issues due to allocators, on the other hand, happen ALL THE TIME if you have a lot of data. So they're rather more important.

I would honestly put both our complaints in the bucket of "Programmer is ignorant about the level of abstraction they are working at." But people don't know what they don't know. And the only way out is for them to have worked at multiple levels of abstraction to know the bounds of the one they are currently operating in.

I know some really old programmers (old enough to remember punch cards) and while I wouldn't say they are unhappy with the spectacular leaps in ease and power of computing, there is definitely an element of "I had to walk uphill ten miles in the snow both ways" in their attitudes.

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