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Message-ID: <559C3667.7030402@neurotica.com>
Date: Tue, 07 Jul 2015 16:28:23 -0400
From: "Dave McGuire (mcguire AT neurotica DOT com) [via geda-user AT delorie DOT com]" <geda-user AT delorie DOT com>
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To: geda-user AT delorie DOT com
Subject: Re: [geda-user] gEDA/gschem still alive?
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Reply-To: geda-user AT delorie DOT com

On 07/07/2015 02:33 PM, Ivan Stankovic (pokemon AT fly DOT srk DOT fer DOT hr) [via
geda-user AT delorie DOT com] wrote:
>>   This sets off some alarm bells for me.  I'm a professional developer;
>> I write code every day and I like to stay on top of new research, and
>> I've never even heard of most of the languages you mentioned here.  I've
>> heard of Go, and Python, Ruby, and Java, of course, but Nim?  Crystal?
>> Rust?
> 
> I'm also a professional developer and know many other professional
> developers.  I also know other developers who are not professional
> (sorry, could not resist).

  ;)

> Just because you haven't heard of them does not mean that the
> rest of the world hasn't.

  Well sure...and I admit that I live squarely in the embedded world
now; I usually don't write server code anymore, and the last time I
wrote user-facing "app" code was 25 years ago.  I'd not really have had
occasion to bump into one of these languages.  But it's not like I live
under a rock; my professional and social groups involve programmers of
all stripes...and yet these languages still haven't come up on my radar
as being anything that's in actual USE anywhere.

>>   Locking development into somoene's pet language that will likely
>> disappear into (further) obscurity in a year or two is not the way to
>> ensure the longevity of a software project.  
> 
> I completely agree.  Though I have to point out that it all depends
> on the likelihood of "disappearing into obscurity".  I predict that
> not all of them will be extinct ten, or twenty years from now.

  One can hope, but one never knows.  But how does one decide which one
to "get behind"?  If you choose the wrong one, all the code you've
written in it effectively becomes obsolete very quickly.  It's not an
easy problem to solve.

>>   And further (and I apologize if it sounds like I'm picking on you
>> here), rabid proponents of dozens of "pet" programming languages have
>> claimed them to be "as fast as C!!" for decades.  I didn't believe it
>> then, and I don't believe it now.
> 
> You do not need to believe anyone.  Measure.  Evaluate.  Then draw
> conclusions.

  I have, with Perl, Java, and C++.  C is consistently the fastest and
has the smallest memory footprint.

  People often seem to forget the fact that programming in higher-level
languages usually involves importing huge blocks of code as binary blobs
over which they have no control, either of what's included and what's
omitted, or what's executed and what isn't.

  When one raises the conceptual level of programming, one (usually)
sacrifices flexibility and control, and invariably people explain it
away with a hand-wave by saying "oh we really didn't want all of that
flexibility and control anyway, because it made us make mistakes!"
Everybody makes mistakes, creates buffer overruns and bad pointer
dereferences etc...but competent developers make fewer mistakes and
introduce fewer bugs.  Lowering the barriers of entry creates more
programmers...not better ones.

  Somewhere along the line, I believe in the early 1970s, some idiot
proclaimed that "programmer time is more precious than processor time".
 This created an excuse for programmer laziness that still affects us to
this day, giving us such "progress" as operating systems that require
gigabytes of RAM and several minutes at billions of clock cycles per
second just to boot.  Every time Firefox slows to a crawl or Xilinx ISE
takes forever to start up, I'm reminded of this.  It seems most people
just accept it, paint on it the pretty face of "progress" (at any cost!)
and pretend to like it.

  When it takes a minute and a half to open a new web browser window on
a machine with six 3.2GHz cores, 48MB of cache, 24MB of main memory, and
fast disks, I very quickly decide that processor time is a whole lot
more precious than programmer time.

  Let's not push gEDA down a path to that same frustration just because
the language most of it is written in actually requires some skills and
thought.

                 -Dave

-- 
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA