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definitions again (Developers)

posted by kerravon, Ligao, Free World North, 11.04.2024, 04:03

> "The nice thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from;
> furthermore, if you do not like any of them, you can just wait for next
> year's model." -- Andy Tanenbaum
>
> * https://xkcd.com/927/
>
> Not to be overly cynical, but "standards" are usually ignored or only
> half-implemented. Too expensive, too inefficient, too complex, too weak,
> too awkward, too old ("irrelevant!"), too new / untested, obscure / not
> widespread, unneeded, waste of developer time, or just "not invented here"
> or "we don't care".
I can remember someone (possibly in comp.lang.c) saying
something regarding C99 - you can be sure that until
*all* of it is implemented I will be using *none* of it.

I guess this is part of the reason why I'm in this forum
in the first place.

The systems are too complicated such that we are in the
movie "Idiocracy" - no-one knows how to maintain it
anymore.

My wife was unable to operate her bank account for about
6 months because the 6-digit SMS wasn't getting through.
From the biggest bank in Australia.

I could have got that through - anywhere in the world -
in 0.2 seconds using a Commodore 64 and a 300 bps modem.

But the only "solution" they had was "try again later"
and "no-one else has reported a problem".

They needed a competent software engineer to trace the
SMS as far as whatever gateway service they were using,
and then get agreement from a software engineer from
that gateway service that they would take charge of the
problem until they had found the breakage point.

But no-one knows or cares.

That is why I am returning to a simpler world - perhaps
not Commodore 64, but at least IBM XT running MSDOS -
and see if it is possible to create an understandable,
maintainable system.

I do want a cleaner 32-bit system though, but the
historical switch was unclean to me. We went from a
simple 16-bit system to a complex 32-bit system
with GUI - skipping a simple 32-bit system.

And I wish to recontest that notion.

For the mass market GUIs and mouses may be fine.

For certain situations volunteering to be a Unix
sysadmin for the rest of your life may be fine.

But for having a personally understandable system,
I remain on DOS. Or something similar to DOS, anyway.

> Maybe you consider that obvious, but it's annoying how difficult it is to
> stick to standards when few people actually care.
And here's something written by someone else:

https://www.quora.com/Why-did-you-leave-software-engineering/answer/Jeff-Sturm-2

"The inmates are truly running the asylum, as the saying goes"


Who do you expect to be doing something about that?

Big Tech has a vested interest in keeping things as
complicated as possible.

The "business model" of most freeware relies on ignoring
bugs and having no pride in work until some sucker comes
along willing to pay full western contract rates for an
unlimited time to fix the issue.


I guess it's a fundamental problem that "no-one cares".
Most people will do the minimum required to keep their
job and that's the end of it.


Regardless - I personally am slowing everything right down.
And plugging away trying to get very basic things to work.

Or even getting agreement on what the very basic things
even are.

This group could well be the place to get things right.

For whatever reason, people are refusing to move off MSDOS.

That's a huge challenge to the status quo, and that's a
bloody good start.

BFN. Paul.

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