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Top-level
@Threadbane @szescstopni @blacklight Nonsense. I write software, and every place I've worked at in my career, people wrote the software. We never used code generators, even in the place that preferred to throw lots of cheap graduates at their codebases. 48 comments
@szescstopni @rrwo @Threadbane @blacklight @blacklight @szescstopni @rrwo @Threadbane Don't worry, there's still microcontrollers, if you want to play with tiny RAM sizes! (though *some* are Gb+ of Flash, now) @blacklight @szescstopni @rrwo @Threadbane FAANG is mostly advertising and retail, it's more fair to compare the goals of software engineering at those companies to Don Draper style martini-fueled advertising campaigns and people managing inventory in the stockrooms at Macy's. I suspect the software flying modern satellites is built to an even higher standard than what's we had in the 70s. @blacklight @szescstopni @rrwo @Threadbane building software has always and is still about choosing an engineering point between fast delivery and "perfectly safe code". In satellite, there is a very specific engineering point since errors are so costly. Same as for rockets or aircraft avionics... In most other industries, the costs balance is very different. Simply because it's cheaper to pay for a car crash vs waiting for perfect guidance system in consumer cars. @blacklight @szescstopni @rrwo @Threadbane > Also, this whole masterpiece of engineering could fit into 69 KB of RAM. I can't think of a single non-trivial piece of code today that can fit into that size. I'm certain that you have tons of things in your home and your vehicle doing all sorts of mission-critical, sophisticated functions with less RAM. It's the difference between *generalist software* that runs on an operating system and embedded software that runs on a microcontroller.  @rrwo @szescstopni @Threadbane @blacklight At JPL in the 1990βs we developed a provably-correct language and compiler for on-board fault control software. [Itβs been so long I forget the lead guyβs name π] The invention felt like matches that would light in a rainstorm. Confidence. Reliability is/was the MAJOR contribution of JPL software to aerospace. Ok, that and autonomy, but thatβs another thread. @rrwo @szescstopni @blacklight @Threadbane @szescstopni @blacklight The "younger" generations of coders are used to having a standard library for everything, and rarely needing to worry about memory usage or performance. But it's so much easier to write code when you don't have to worry about these things. This can be a good thing. A downside is the worship of new technologies just because they are new. Sometimes 50+ year-old is still in use for good reasons. @szescstopni @Threadbane @blacklight I see a lot of folk get hot and bothered by clusters of NoSQL servers that use massive amounts of memory, CPU and bandwidth when a simple SQL database will do the job with less maintenance. But it doesn't look as sexy on a CV.  @rrwo @szescstopni @Threadbane @blacklight There are many cases where NoSQL is only sensible choice. NoSQL has been around longer than SQL, nearly as long as Voyagers which don't use SQL either. There is a narrow range of cases where SQL is appropriate usually some business context at a certain limited scale. It has nothing to do with your resume. Not only this just because business apps and web apps are shitty does not mean kids in critical systems engineering are not killing it, they are.  @nf3xn @rrwo @szescstopni @Threadbane SQL has been around since Codd's original paper in 1974, so it's a couple of years older than Voyager :) As an SQL and relational algebra geek there's nothing worse I could hear than "SQL has only a limited range of applications". Both relational and non-relational databases can be amazing tools for storing data - when used properly for the right use case. @blacklight @rrwo @szescstopni @Threadbane NoSQL is even older than that. As for SQL sadly I have used most of them. SQL has its place, like anything. The key difference between the way say some webshit like facebook is built and Voyager comes down to the way the project is managed. There is no move fast and break things with a nuclear power plant. It's the old school SSADM with endless reams of docs, specs, ERDs and dusty old process Very high detail, labor intense, expensive software cycle.  @nf3xn @blacklight @rrwo @szescstopni @Threadbane I agree. In the old days I worked coding assembly language for medical instruments that would be in the field for decades. Certainly compared to today a lot of care was put into 64k. But as you say that's more about problem domain than technology (I have also spun up MySQL instances for really trivial things, like organizing files at home.) @nf3xn @blacklight @rrwo @szescstopni @Threadbane Ha! I remember one of the last times I used a SQL database for a trivial purpose .. garage temperature recording. I guess it cracked me up at that point how ridiculous it was to have a full unix(ish) stack and SQL to run a thermometer. As an added bonus this pi zero and the one in the kitchen communicated, doing data replication for fault tolerance. It's still funny to me. @John @nf3xn @blacklight @rrwo @szescstopni @Threadbane ah yes, for my first temperature measurement I also used a Zero W with a Postgres db and a pythons script writing to it every minute. Now I use an RPi Pico sending data by MQTT to a server which ingests those messages to InfluxDb, which is read by Grafana. @stfn @nf3xn @blacklight @rrwo @szescstopni @Threadbane That sounds cool and much more modern. My boards answered my questions, which were basically about how the temperature cycle looked in my house with no heat or cooling (not present anyway) running. Before running the test I had not really internalized that the coldest part of the night is not midnight ;-)  @blacklight @John @stfn @nf3xn @rrwo @szescstopni @Threadbane sqlite has triggers. @John this is a very interesting project: do you have some links or details about hardware and software that you have used to achieve it? @seblm I think my method was a little idiosyncratic. If I remember correctly I used a DHT11 temperature sensor, and wrote c code to take a reading and insert it in the database. I just set that c code up as a cron job. I used shell scripts and cron jobs to do my data replication, database dumps and rsyncs if I remember correctly. There are lots of ways to skin the cat, and if you search for raspberry pi DHT11 (or DHT22) there will be lots of examples. @John @nf3xn @blacklight @rrwo @szescstopni @Threadbane @nf3xn @blacklight @rrwo @szescstopni Ouch, yeah. I came in at the start of the floppy era. Before that we actually shipped clinical instruments with ROM boards only, and updates were shipping a new board. Part of our department was still doing that. There was this big consciousness that, even with floppies, you never knew they would reach their destination, and out of date software might live for many many years.  I wasn't taught SQL in my comp sci database courses in 1981, just hierarchical databases, because "relational is cool theory but not practical for commercial apps". Ironically, I never used a hierarchical database but 5 years later, got a contract writing parsers for IMS, COBOL and PL/1 to generate SQL DDL and migrate data to DB2. I was part of an OO Centre of Competence in the mid-1990s. I wasn't writing much code by then, mostly design and team leader. But I remember a developer telling another that I was an expert in C++, even though I had only read the manual (which I still have). I think it was because I knew how to write compilers and read the book critically through that lens, so was figuring out the point of each feature as I read about it. @EricLawton @blacklight @nf3xn @rrwo @szescstopni @Threadbane much the same in my database class in 1989, I think. SEQUEL got a passing mention in the textbook, but that was about it. :) I know relational theory was discussed, but I long ago chucked the proper terms in favor of SELECT, FROM, WHERE, etc. :)  @nf3xn @rrwo @szescstopni @Threadbane @blacklight @nf3xn @rrwo @szescstopni @blacklight But do they have to use an IBM 029 card punch, carry trays of punch cards to the big mainframe on base to compile (ready the next day)!? Do they have to toggle switches on the PDP-11 front panel to load the jmp instruction and then the address of the ISR that loads in the bootstrap loader from paper tape that then reads the hard disk for the big boot? Do they have to code without an onscreen editor!? HUH!? HUH!? HUH!? @szescstopni @rrwo @blacklight  @Threadbane @szescstopni @rrwo @blacklight Learned Fortran in 1969 too. Funny that my list of languages is about as long as yours, but has very few in common -- C (not C++), csh/sh/bash, Pascal, Algol (Burroughs dialect).  @szescstopni @rrwo @Threadbane @blacklight > > "Right. Sometimes I think I should learn FORTRAN." You should learn Common Lisp or Scheme, for sure. Its a high-level language, its a low level language, it is a little of everything in between. @ramin_hal9001 @rrwo @Threadbane @blacklight I might be too old for that. The main reason I still program is to manage running a small rural ISP operation, and Python is all I need for that. @ramin_hal9001 @szescstopni @rrwo @Threadbane I've tried to learn LISP dialects for the past 20 years or so, and I've always failed. I mean, I can definitely read some Common LISP, Scheme or Clojure code by now, and I've even debugged somebody else's code occasionally. But when it comes to writing, all those nested parenthesis and operators in an unintuitive order just keep shouting "unnecessary cognitive burden" to me :) @ramin_hal9001 @blacklight @szescstopni @rrwo @ramin_hal9001 @szescstopni @rrwo @Threadbane @blacklight GNU Lilypond, a music typesetting system, allows embedded Scheme code for the stuff that Just Doesn't Fit in the standard syntax. :) @SarekOfVulcan I might have to look into this β I'll probably have to learn Lilypond to typeset a friend's ukulele book :) @Threadbane @rrwo @szescstopni @blacklight Itβs The Librarian! Ookβ!  @rrwo @Threadbane @szescstopni @blacklight and how old are you? do the new kids even know how to count? @Threadbane @Sassinake @rrwo @szescstopni @blacklight kudos to be on Mastodon. Big respect and good health to you! @Sassinake @rrwo @Threadbane @blacklight Kids know how to count. Not all of them, but enough. And those who do are brilliant. @szescstopni @Sassinake @Threadbane @blacklight There are specialised areas for DSLs and visual tools are useful for experts who are non-programmers to specify an algorithm without worrying about memory leaks or infinite loops. This is also a good thing. But it's for specialised applications.  @rrwo @Threadbane @szescstopni @blacklight ORG.ASM #PoultryCoroner π¦π¦π¦π» |
Gregory's Server
@rrwo @Threadbane @blacklight I'm pretty sure some shitty software companies use drag and drop generators, but this software is not (usually β there might be some xceptions :) found in space rockets.