[TUHS] more about Brian...

[Brad Spencer]

Will Senn <will.senn at gmail.com> writes:

[snip]

>> I've done this and I've employed people who have done this.  We're
>> a dieing breed, the focus seems to be on programming languages and
>> tools for idiots.  People don't want to learn the discipline it takes
>> to work with malloc()/free().  It's sad.
>
> I completely agree. This is ridiculous. Do modern programmer's seriously 
> think that the old code wasn't complex or robust? Sheesh, there's code 
> out there that has run through more millions of transactions an hour for 
> more years than most of these folks have been alive. There's also code 
> that's been running without any updates, for decades. Most code written 
> by the newbreed won't run for a month without surfacing dozens of bugs. 
> Margaret Hamilton would prolly have some choice words for these folks.

This would appear to be a Not Unix conversation... but...

So...  the idea that code would run that long was not at all valued at
my last job.  The management found it simpler and better (for some
definition of better) to just reinvent everything every 3 to 6 years.
In the mean time, the languages used would change.  The idea that one
would "have to waste time" figuring out how to use malloc() and free()
properly was not looked upon well when the development time would be
better spend solving the needed higher level problems.  In other words
there literally was no interest in creating code that was going to be
maintained for more than about 6 years and in a lot of cases would not
be maintained more than 3 or even 1 year.

To bring this back to Unix somewhat...  When I started there, everything
was a Solaris based private cloud (SmartOS by Joyent) running Java apps.
In the 5 years I was there, the move was from Java to Go, due to the
licensing changes that Oracle made to Java and then a move to
containers.  SmartOS has a container technology that is sort of like
Docker, but since the majority of the containers in the world that
people know about are fully Docker in some form with Linux it wasn't as
compatible as required so SmartOS was dumped and everything was redone
in Azure public cloud with Linux and as much of the native Azure stuff
as they could stand to use.  Make everything "green field" all of the
time, or something....

I didn't really agree with much of this, but I became pretty mercenary
as I got old and the place paid well.







-- 
Brad Spencer - brad at anduin.eldar.org - KC8VKS - http://anduin.eldar.org