Gregory's ServerToday I'm going to yell about appliance-grade engineering.
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Fifty years is a long time for software. Fifty years is not very long for a set of tooling. I'm not going to rant at length about tooling today, even though it's very connected to the points I'm trying to make here. What I will say on the topic of tooling is that I learned to do woodworking, metalcraft, and a bunch of other artisan skills using tools that were over a century old, and they're still as usable today as they were 25 years ago when I was learning the difference between messing around to learn and crafting something carefully. You can't say that for anything related to computers, so I'm not going to address that today. So, when I say fifty years isn't a long time for tools, I'm saying that everything since code was run on the first microprocessor barely counts as a tool in my book, they just aren't stable enough yet. Which brings us to my main point. Appliances, specifically appliance grade computing. |
This rant is as much a case study of the recent #Voyager1 mission news (https://blogs.nasa.gov/voyager/2024/10/28/after-pause-nasas-voyager-1-communicating-with-mission-team/) as it is a response to the utterly on-point stuff that @ludicity said yesterday in their blogpost:
https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/why-i-will-always-be-angry-about-software-engineering/