193 Matching Annotations
  1. Feb 2024
    1. Not a web developer? Sucks to be you. The vast majority of the static site generator tools out there are run from the command line, powered by things you've never heard of like Node, Grunt, or Babel.
  2. Jan 2024
  3. Dec 2023
    1. thanks to the complexity of JDSL it took days to do coding work that should only take minutes
    1. Every time I changed labs and computers during my postdoc years, I had to spend a day or two to reinstall everything I needed
    1. When the designer on the team, who also writes CSS, went to go make changes, it was a lot harder for them to implement them. They had to figure out which file to look in, open up command line, run a build step, check that it worked as expected, and then deploy the code.
    1. I hate npm so much. I had a situation where I couldn't work on a project because I couldn't get the dev environment running locally.
  4. Nov 2023
    1. if you're going to write a 00:35:14 plugin for an ide prepare for your hello world to be days of learning and pages of code just to do the hello world

      If you're going to write a plugin for an IDE, prepare for your hello-world to be days of learning and pages of code just to do the hello-world.

    2. now i would love someday to do a plug-in for intellij that understands all of the 00:33:01 custom stuff for my game code right you know i would love to but you know that's that's a project

      Now, I would love someday to do a plug-in for IntelliJ that understands all of the custom stuff for my game code. Right? You know, I would love to, but you know that's that's a project.

    1. it’s a lot of work to manually migrate 200+ components to what is essentially a new framework
    1. The web started off as a simple, easy-to-use, easy-to-write-for infrastructure. Programmers have remodelled HTML in their own image, and made it complicated, hard to implement, and hard to write for, excluding many potential creators.
    1. This post is a narrative rant (in the same vein of Dan Luu's "Everything is Broken" post) about my problems one afternoon getting a Fancy New Programming Language to work on my laptop.
    1. Some people are extremely gifted mathematicians with incredible talent for algorithmic thinking, yet can be totally shut down by build configuration bullshit.
    1. The repo was 3 years old. Surely it wouldn't be that hard to get running again? Ha!Here's what went well.Installing Android Studio. I remember when this was a chore - but I just installed the Flatpak, opened it, and let it update.Cloning the repo. Again, simple.Importing the project. Couple of clicks. Done.Then it all went to hell.
    1. Since infrequent developers spend relatively little time dealing with the language, setting up and running additional pieces of software is a much higher overhead for them and is generally not worth it if they have a choice.
    1. I sometimes find myself hacking together a quick console-based or vanilla JS prototype for an idea and then just stop there because messing with different cloud providers, containers, react, webpack and etc is just soul draining. I remember when I was 14 I'd throw up a quick PHP script for my project, upload it to my host and get it up and running in just a few minutes. A month ago I spent week trying to get Cognito working with a Serverless API and by the time I figured it out I was mentally done with the project. I cannot ever seem to get over this hump. I love working on side projects but getting things up and running properly is just a huge drag these days.
    1. My husband reviews papers. He works a 40h/wk industry job; he reviews papers on Saturday mornings when I talk to other people or do personal projects, pretty much out of the goodness of his heart. There is no way he would ever have time to download the required third party libraries for the average paper in his field, let alone figure out how to build and run it.
    1. I was trying to make it work with Python 2.7 but, after installing the required packages successfully I get the following error:
    2. Cidraque · 2016-Oct-23 Only linux? :( Matt Zucker · 2016-Oct-23 It should work on any system where you can install Python and the requirements, including windows.
    3. Hi there, I can't run the program, it gives me this output and I can't solve the problem by myself
    1. My first experience with Scheme involved trying and failing to install multiple Scheme distributions because I couldn’t get all the dependencies to work.
    1. The hidden curriculum consists of the unwritten rules, unspokennorms, and field-specific insider knowledge that are essential forstudent success but are not taught in classes. Examples includesocial norms about how to interact with authority figures, whereto ask for unadvertised career-related opportunities, and how tonavigate around the official rules of a bureaucracy.

      Clever. I also like the framing of MIT's "Missing Semester" https://missing.csail.mit.edu/

    1. Thereafter, I would need to build an executable, which, depending on the libraries upon which the project relies could be anything from straightforward to painful.
    1. I think that the website code started to feel like it had bitrotted, and so making new blog posts became onerous.
    1. almost every other time I've had the misfortune of compiling a c(++) application from scratch it's gone wildly wrong with the most undiagnose-able wall of error messages I've ever seen (and often I never manyage to figure it out even after over a day of trying because C developers insist on using some of the most obtuse build systems conceivable)
  5. Sep 2023
    1. Yesterday I spent a few hours on setting up a website for my music, but then instead of launching it I created a Substack.
    1. The amount of boilerplate and number of dependencies involved in setting up a web development project has exploded over the past decade or so. If you browse through the various websites that are writing about web development you get the impression that it requires an overwhelming amount of dependencies, tools, and packages.
    1. Reading through your link I caught myself thinking if I would put up with all those boilerplate nix steps just to add a new page to the site.
  6. Aug 2023
    1. Another way I get inspiration for research ideas is learning about people's pain points during software development Whenever I hear or read about difficulties and pitfalls people encounter while I programming, I ask myself "What can I do as a programming language researcher to address this?" In my experience, this has also been a good way to find new research problems to work on.
    1. I get frustrated whenever I have knowledge (specifically Web Platform knowledge) to solve a problem, but the abstraction prevents me from using my knowledge.

    1. With Go, I can download any random code from at least 2018, and do this: go build and it just works. all the needed packages are automatically downloaded and built, and fast. same process for Rust and even Python to an extent. my understanding is C++ has never had a process like this, and its up to each developer to streamline this process on their own. if thats no longer the case, I am happy to hear it. I worked on C/C++ code for years, and at least 1/3 of my development time was wasted on tooling and build issues.
  7. Jul 2023
    1. go sample from A gallery of interesting Jupyter Notebooks. Pick five. Try to run them. Try to install the stuff needed to run them. Weep in despair.
    1. I tried writing a serious-looking research paper about the bug and my proposed fix, but I lost a series of pitched battles against Pytorch and biblatex
    1. it's like all right someone built an app that's pretty cool now let me go set up my ide let me go download all these packages what's the stack they're using
  8. May 2023
    1. The paper had the "Artifacts available" badgea in the ACM Digital Library, highlighting the research in the paper as reproducible. Yet, the instructions to get the dataset required several steps rather than just a link: log in, find the paper, click on a tab, scroll, get to the dataset.
    1. @17:03

      The idea of portability is not that you take your C code and recompile it and hope it compiles and hope the compilers have the same bugs in them.

    1. A contrasting experience was to learn how to use the tools to turn my programs into executable. It was a painfully slow and deeply unpleasant process where knowledge was gathered here and there after trial, errors, and a lot of time spent on search engines.
  9. Apr 2023
    1. These systems provide quite powerful tools for automaticreasoning, but encoding many kinds of knowledge using their rigid formal representations requiressignificant- -and often completely infeasible-amounts of effort.

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    1. Handleshave one serious disadvantage.Effective use requires the user’sWeb browser to incorporate specialsoftware. CNRI provides this soft-ware, but digital libraries havebeen reluctant to require theirusers to install it.
    1. The college we were at had locked down the networks crazy tight. Machines could not communicate with each other.
    1. Once I was *attempting* (Igave up) to install an application and the first tutorial allowed mea choice of 6 ways to install something and none worked.
    2. Our informants recognized this as a general problem with tu-torials: “There’s an implicit assumption about the environment”(I5) and “many tutorials assume you have things like a workingdatabase” (I4). If tutorials “were all written with *less* assumptionsand were more comprehensive that would be great
    3. Pimentel et al . [28] found that only 24% of Jupyter note-books could be executed without exceptions

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  10. Mar 2023
    1. After 10 years of industry and teaching nearly 1000 students various software engineering courses, including a specialized course on DevOps, I saw one common problem that has not gotten better. It was amazing to see how difficult and widespread the simple problem of installing and configuring software tools and dependencies was for everyone.
    1. Even notebooks still are problematic, for example, this study found that only 25% of Jupyter notebooks could be executed, and of those, only 4% actually reproduced the same results.
    1. I could port it to Hugo or Jekyll but I think the end result would make it harder to use, not simpler.
  11. Feb 2023
    1. Checking your own repos on a new computer is one thing… inheriting someone else’s project and running it on your machine in the node ecosystem is very rough.

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    1. But my experience with build systems (not just Javascript build systems!), is that if you have a 5-year-old site, often it’s a huge pain to get the site built again.
    1. Usability and accessibility can impact where a technology falls on the spectrum: not paying attention to these dimensions makes it harder to move to higher levels of agency, staying more exclusive as "Look at what I/you/we can do, as the capable ones"
  12. Jan 2023
    1. igal needs Perl to run and it also relies on a few other programs that come standard with most Linux distributions.
    1. We rebuilt Cloudflare's developer documentation - here's what we learned

      This post is one massive derp. (Or rather, the problem solved by the changes documented here is... The post itself would instead be best described as one massive "duh".)

      Spoiler alert: anti-wikis with heavyweight PR-based workflows that ignore how much friction this entails for user contributions don't beget many user contributions! (And it also sucks for the people getting paid to write and edit the content, too.)

  13. Dec 2022
    1. Six months passes and while you had almost forgotten about your little project, you now have got some new ideas that could make it even better. The project also has a few open issues and feature requests that you can take care of. So you come back to it. “Let’s start”, you whispered to yourself with excitement. You run npm install in your terminal like an innocent man and switch to your browser to scroll on Twitter while you are waiting for the dependencies to be installed. Moments later you return to your terminal and see… an error!
    1. By summing together these costs, the overall estimate is that in 2015, child-hood poverty in the United States was costing the nation $1.03 trillion a year.This number represented 5.4 percent of the U.S. annual GDP.The bottom line is that child poverty represents a significant economicburden to the United States.

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    1. The migration would not be complete without calling out that I was unable to build the Mastodon code base on our new primary Puma HTTP server.
  14. Nov 2022
    1. But. I somehow changed-ish laptop, and you know the problem where you change laptop and suddenly you lose access to a few things? Yes. That's one of my problems. This site was using nini to statically generate pages and interconnect them with backlinks, and it's great. But I figured I'll keep it to simple html pages that don't need any compilation for now, so that when I change this laptop, I'll still be able to publish without having to install anything.
    1. This made me realize how little joy I’ve been getting from being an admin. How I’ve come to resent the work I have volunteered to do.
  15. Oct 2022
    1. This costs about $650 USD to operate

      Crazy! This underscores how badly Mastodon—and ActivityPub, generally—need to be revved to enable network participation from low-cost (essentially free) static* sites.

      * quasi-static, really—in the way that RSS-enabled blogs are generally considered static sites

  16. pointersgonewild.files.wordpress.com pointersgonewild.files.wordpress.com
    1. IMO: one of the biggest problems in modern softwaredevelopment• Code breaks constantly, even if it doesn’t change• Huge cause of reliability issues and time wasted• This is somehow accepted as normal

      ⬑ "The Code Rot Problem"

    1. This is the big hurdle; to leap over it you have to be able to create the program text somewhere, compile it successfully, load it, run it, and find out where your output went.
    1. this level oftime commitment is likely to prevent a potential user with apassing interest from trying a programming language or tool
    1. We next made two attempts to buildeach system. This often required edit-ing makefiles and finding and in-stalling specific operating system andcompiler versions, and external librar-ies.
    2. Several hurdles must becleared to replicate computer systemsresearch. Correct versions of sourcecode, input data, operating systems,compilers, and libraries must be avail-able, and the code itself must build
  17. Sep 2022
    1. It's wild that you have to set up Docker to contribute to 600 characters of JavaScript.

      Current revision of README: https://github.com/t-mart/kill-sticky/blob/124a31434fba1d083c9bede8977643b90ad6e75b/README.md

      We're creating a bookmarklet, so our code needs to be minified and URL encoded.

      Run the following the project root directory:

      $ docker build . -t kill-sticky && docker run --rm -it -v $(pwd):/kill-sticky kill-sticky
      
    1. Un-fortunately, there are no ascertainable statistics on the amount of time we wastefussing among papers and mislaying things
    1. Many research projects are publicly available but rarely useddue to the difficulty of building and installing them
    1. Over in the IndieWeb community we were having a conversation about how easy it should be for people to create their own websites (also for small local businesses etc.) Where making the site is basically the same as writing the text you want to put on it. Social media silos do that for you, but out on the open web?
    1. When I go to use some software it takes an inordinate amount of time to set things up.
    2. Some of my ruby, nodejs and python projects no longer run due to dependencies not being pinned at creation time.
  18. Aug 2022
    1. So what’s wrong with all the different languages? Nothing, if you enjoy the mental exercise of creating and/or learning new languages. But usually that’s all they are: a mental exercise.
    1. There has been significant pressure for scientists to make their code open, but this is not enough. Even if I hired the only postdoc who can get the code to work, she might have forgotten the exact details of how an experiment was run. Or she might not know about a critical dependency on an obsolete version of a library.
    1. today’s notebook implementations require note-book authors to take various precautions to ensure repro-ducibility, which are exactly the same as required for makingscripts reproducible: a detailed documentation of the soft-ware environment that was used, listing all dependencieswith detailed version information
    1. over the seven years of the project, I ended upspending a lot of time catching up with dependencies. Newreleases of NumPy and matplotlib made my code collapse,and the increasing complexity of Python installations addedanother dose of instability. When I got a new computer in2013 and installed the then-current versions of everything,some of my scripts no longer worked and, worse, oneof them produced different results. Since then, softwarecollapse has become an increasingly serious issue for mywork. NumPy 1.9 caused the collapse of my MolecularModelling Toolkit, and it seems hardly worth doing muchabout it because the upcoming end of support for Python 2in 2020 will be the final death blow.
    1. even if the code has been made available, it cannotbe easily run because of changes in the underlyinglibraries, operating systems, and other dependen-cies
    2. Finally, software is hard to work with. Forgetmaking research reproducible, it is hard enough touse it 6 months later.
  19. Jul 2022
    1. if you’re a beginner you can use Replit which allows you to program through your browser without installing anything on your machine
    1. We never got there. We never distributed the source code to a working web browser, more importantly, to the web browser that people were actually using. We didn't release the source code to the most-previous-release of Netscape Navigator: instead, we released what we had at the time, which had a number of incomplete features, and lots and lots of bugs.
    1. getting set up requires a github account and “pushing” commits every time I write a post
    2. But starting, hosting and maintaining your own blog is still too hard.
    1. It's also hard to share this workflow with someone non-technical. I have to setup and maintain the correct environment on their machine
    1. It is long past time to return to designing tools not just for rock stars at Google but the vast majority of programmers and laypeople with simple small-scale problems.
    1. @2:10

      They didn't publish the code. They published the algorithm. And they prided themselves on—the computer scientists at the time—of describing the algorithm, not GitHubbing the code. These days we don't—we GitHub the code. You want the algorithm? Here's the code.

      This is not always reliable. There are some non-highly-mathematical things that you'd prefer to have the algorithm explained rather than slog through the code, which is probably adulterated with hacks for e.g. platform gotchas, etc.

      There is a better way, though, which is to publish a high-level description of the workings as runnable code that you can simulate in a Web browser. Too many people have misconceptions about the stability of the Web browser as a platform for simulations, however. We need to work on this.

    1. When you’re building developer tools, if the officially supported developer environment doesn’t work for people in some way, they build their own approach.
    2. it shows that any time that you make something easier or harder to do, either because it’s faster or slower, or just because you’ve reduced the number of steps, or you’ve made the steps more annoying, or you’ve added cognitive overhead, then people react by changing how they use your tool.
    1. @14:18:

      So, for example, if you want to make a very basic static site: well, okay, now you need the static site generator, and now you need a library system, you need a package manager, you need a way to install the package manager, you need a way to check for security vulnerabilities in all the packages, you need a web server, you need a place to run the app. It's a whole thing, right?

    1. It took me an hour to rewrite my ui code and two days to get it to compile. The clojurescript version I started with miscompiles rum. Older clojurescript versions worked with debug builds but failed with optimizations enabled, claiming that cljs.react was not defined despite it being listed in rum's dependencies. I eventually ended up with a combination of versions where compiling using cljs.build.api works but passing the same arguments at the command line doesn't.
  20. Jun 2022
    1. There’s not much implementations can do, and it’s up to the debugger to be smarter about it.

      This is fatalistic thinking.

      Here's what both implementations and debuggers can do together: 1. implementations can document these things 2. debuggers can read the documentation and act accordingly

    1. other people’s toolchains are absolutely inscrutable from the outside. Even getting started is touchy. Last month, I had to install a package manager to install a package manager.
    1. I suspect because most software is optimized for industrial use, not personal use. For industrial uses the operations overhead is not a big deal compared to the development and operational efficiency gained by breaking things up into communicating services. But for personal uses the overwhelming priority is reducing complexity so that nothing fails.
    2. preventing the build from bitrotting would probably require a full-time maintainer in the long run
    1. I was speaking to the CEO of a developer tools company earlier this year. He told me that the biggest obstacle to contribution is his local development environment.
    2. Your personal dev environment travels with you no matter which device you use

      A lot of these ideas are junk. This one, though, is achievable. triplescripts.org.

    1. Built using Go, Hugo is incredibly fast at building large sites, has an active community, and is easily installable on a variety of operating systems. In our early discovery work, we found that Hugo would build our docs content in mere seconds.
    2. Developer documentation is incredibly important to the success of any product. At Cloudflare, we believe that technical docs are a product – one that we can continue to iterate on, improve, and make more useful for our customers.One of the most effective ways to improve documentation is to make it easier for our writers to contribute to them.
    1. The interconnectivity features need a server though, and that involves either using a third-party service, or spinning up your own VPS, which means added cost, and you’ll probably have to do that at some point anyway if you choose the third-party option at first.
  21. May 2022
    1. I think adding automated deployments would be a nice quality-of-life feature and would definitely encourage me to write more. Currently, I have to upload a new text file to my server and refresh the pm2 job.

      Is "automated deployments" really the solution?

    1. I develop in Node and Sveltekit regularly and the chances that on any given day my flow might be crushed by random madness is unacceptably high.
    2. I have seen experienced developers pull their hair out for a day or more trying to get a basic build system working, or to import a simple module.
    1. This is a problem with all kinds of programming for new learners - actually writing some code is easy. But getting a development environment configured to actually allow you to start writing that code requires a ton of tacit knowledge.
    1. I can write JS and TypeScript easily enough but when I start a new project I'm always fighting the tooling for at least half an hour before I can get going.
    1. Yes, you could write Python utilities that are easy to install and run, but people don't. And the last bit of that sentence is the one that actually counts. "Could have" doesn't actually count in an engineering context.
    1. I just want to try this C++, download, unzip, oh it's windows so .project file. Fine, redo on windows , oh it's 3 versions of vstuido old and says it wants to upgrade , okay. Hmm errors. Try to fix. Now it's getting linking error.
    1. It feels like every example I run into is an easy to follow "20-steps + 10 packages + 64GB cloud server instance" process when all I want to do is to download some historical temperature data to CSV.
    1. if you think it's hard for someone who is already a programmer - think about how needlessly complicated the entire ecosystem and everything surrounding it is for the average person
    1. Today I tried to help a friend who is a great computer scientist, but not a JS person use a JS module he found on Github. Since for the past 6 years my day job is doing usability research & teaching at MIT, I couldn’t help but cringe at the slog that this was. Lo and behold, a pile of unnecessary error conditions, cryptic errors, and lack of proper feedback.
    1. > Movim is easy to deploy> Movim is lightweight (only a few megabytes) and can be deployed on any server. We are providing a Docker image, a Debian package or a simple installation tutorial if you want to deploy it yourself.I imagine a typical Tumblr user landing on this page and not getting a single word of the "easy to deploy" section.

      Related: comments about deployability of PHP over in the comments about "The Demise of the Mildly Dynamic Website".

    1. I woke up realizing one of the computers I use isn't set up to build and I wished I could use it to build and release the new version
    1. The thrill of getting "hello world" on the screen in Symbian/S60 is not something I'll ever forget. Took ages of battling CodeWarrior and I think even a simple app was something like 6 files
    1. I still stick by the fact that web software used to be like: point, click, boom. Now it is like: let's build a circuit board from scratch, make everyone learn a new language, require VPS type hosting, and get the RedBull ready because it's going to take a long time to figure out.
    1. Furthermore, its release philosophy is supposed to avoid what I call “the problem with Python”: your code stops working if you don’t actively keep up with the latest version of the language.
    1. The biggest barriers to coding are technical complexity around processes like collaboration and deployment, and social obstacles like gatekeeping and exclusion — so that's what we've got to fix
    2. If you’re a coder, when’s the last time you just quickly built something to solve a problem for yourself or simply because it was a fun idea?

      And how future-proof was the result or how easy was it to make sure you could share it with others in a form that they could make use of (and not be dependent on you or some third-party or their internet connection)?

    1. That said, I've since realized I was wrong of course. Trying to maintain projects that haven't been touched in more than a year led to hours of fixing dependency issues.
    1. Psst: Philip gave me a copy of this piece (just like he did many others before he decided to unpublish it). I will totally let you peek at my copy (if you want, and if you happen to be in Austin—I'll respect Philip's commandment not to distribute unauthorized copies, but to reiterate: you're free to look at the copy I already have). It's a great article, even if lots of the feedback at the time unnecessarily focused on quibbling with his decision to characterize the issue as being inherent to "command-line bullshittery", rather than charitably* interpreting it as general discontent with the familiar pain** of setting up/configuring/working with any given toolchain and the problems that crop up (esp. when it comes at the price of discouraging smart or even brilliant people who have interesting ideas they wish to pursue.)

      * See also https://pchiusano.github.io/2014-10-11/defensive-writing.html

      ** See also http://lighttable.com/2014/05/16/pain-we-forgot/

    1. Requirements: Ruby and Bundler should be installed.

      wat

      This site has a total of two pages! Just reify them as proper documents instead of compilation artifacts emitted from an SSG.

  22. autonomous-data.noeldemartin.com autonomous-data.noeldemartin.com
    1. Autonomous

      This term is well-suited for the sort of thing I was going for with S4/BYFOB.

      @tomcritchlow's comment about being hobbled by CORS in his attempt to set up an app[1] that is capable of working with his Library JSON is relevant. With a BYFOB "relay" pretty much anyone can get around CORS restrictions (without the intervention of their server administrator). The mechanism of the relay is pretty deserving of the "autonomous" label—perhaps even moreso that Noel's original conception of what Autonomous Data really means...

      1. https://library-json-node-2.tomcritchlow.repl.co/library?url=https://tomcritchlow.com/library.json
    1. Imagine if node.js shipped inside Chrome by default!

      There was something like that, in HTML5's pre-history: Google Gears.

      I've thought for a long time that someone should resurrect it (in spirit, that is) for the world's modern needs. Instead of running around getting everyone to install NodeJS and exhorting them to npm install && npm run, people can install the "Gears 2" browser extension which drastically expands the scope of the browser capabilities, and you can distribute app bundles that get installed "into" Gears.

      Beaker (mentioned later in this post) was an interesting attempt. I followed them for awhile. But its maintainers didn't seem to appreciate the value of frictionless onboarding experience, which could have been made possible by e.g. working to allow people to continue using legacy Web browsers and distributing an optional plug-in, in the vein of what I just described about Gears.

    2. But… on installing node.js you’re greeted with this screen (wtf is user/local/bin in $path?), and left to fire up the command line.

      Agreed. NodeJS is developer tooling. It's well past the time where we should have started packaging up apps/utilities that are written in JS so that they can run directly in* the browser—instead of shamelessly targeting NodeJS's non-standard APIs (on the off-chance everyone in your audience is a technical user and/or already has it installed).

      This is exactly the crusade I've been on (intermittently) when I've had the resources (time/opportunity) to work on it.

      Eliminate implicit step zero from software development. Make your projects' meta-tooling accessible to all potential contributors.

      * And I do mean "in the browser"—not "on a server somewhere that you are able to use your browser to access, à la modern SaaS/PaaS"

    3. An incomplete list of things I’ve tried and failed to do
  23. Apr 2022
    1. the C standard — because that would be tremendously complicated, and tremendously hard to use

      "the C standard [... is] tremendously complicated, and tremendously hard to use [...] full of wrinkles and [...] complex rules"

    1. myvchoicesofwhatto.attemptandxIiwht,not,t)a-ttemptwveredleterni'ine(toaneiiubarma-inohiomlreatextentbyconsidlerationsofclrclfea-sibilitv

      my choices of what to attempt and what not to attempt were determined to an embarrassingly great extent by considerations of clerical feasibility.

    1. Not realizing that you need to remove the roadblocks that prevent you from scaling up the number of unpaid contributors and contributions is like finding a genie and not checking to see if your first wish could be for more wishes.

      Corollary: nobody wants janky project infrastructure to be a roadblack to getting work done. It should not take weeks or days of unrewarded effort in the unfamiliar codebase of a familiar program before a user is confident enough to make changes of their own

      I used to use the phrase 48-hour competency. Kartik says "an hour (or three)". Yesterday I riffed on the idea that "you have 20 seconds to compile". I think all of these are reasonable metrics for a new rubric for software practice.

    1. Most programs today yield insight only after days or weeks of unrewarded effort. I want an hour of reward for an hour (or three) of effort.
    1. must not consist of a bag of tricks and trade secrets, but of a general intellectual ability

      I often think about how many things like Spectre/Meltdown are undiscovered because of how esoteric and unapproachable the associated infrastructure is that might otherwise better allow someone with a solid lead to follow through on their investigation.

    1. When something goes wrong with a computer, you are likely to be stuck. You can't ask the computer what it was doing, why it did it, or what it might be able to do about it. You can report the problem to a programmer, but, typically, that person doesn't have very good ways of finding out what happened either.
    2. Fry's Law states that programming-environment performance doubles once every 18 years, if that.
    1. The difficulty encountered by authors today when they create metadata for hypertexts points to the risk that adaptive hypermedia and the semantic Web will be initiatives that fit only certain, well-defined communities because of the skills involved
  24. Mar 2022
  25. citeseerx.ist.psu.edu citeseerx.ist.psu.edu
    1. Writing for the web is still a complex and technically sophisticated activity. Too many tools, languages, protocols, expectations and requirements have to be considered together for the creation of web pages and sites.
    1. the complexity is not intellectually rich. Substantial coordination between tools is required to perform simple operations. This busywork draws from a finite pool of cognitive resources
    1. front-end dumpster fires, where nothing that is over 18 months old, can build, compile or get support anymore. In my day job, I inherit "fun" tasks as 'get this thing someone glued together with webpack4 and frontend-du-jour to work with webpack5 in 2022
    1. I tried building Firefox once but I wasn't able to, it's slightly outside of my competences at the moment
    1. Don’t read the code before learning to build the project. Too often, I see people get bogged down trying to understand the source code of a project before they’ve learned how to build it. For me, part of that learning process is experimenting and breaking things, and its hard to experiment and break a software project without being able to build it.
    1. I am struggling to think of any open source project of any size beyond small NPM packages that I've experienced that do not have an arcane build system. At least all of the ones I've encountered have been incredibly obtuse, to the point that I've mostly just given up.
    1. having to install 12gb xcode so i can convert my chrome extension to safari. or my local env/build system stop working because i update from catalina to big sur

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    1. I’m considering updating my Mac to Big Sur just to run this.

      Meanwhile, not only does the scope of this tool not merit the Big Sur requirement, it doesn't even require a Mac. It interaction style is so free of intracies that it could be developed (and distributed) as a single HTML file with a text input and some script blocks.

    1. Around @11:16:

      "What made HyperCard the ubiquitous product it was in the early 90s... was the fact that it was included free with every Macintosh sold. So anybody could use it to create somethnig, then share their creation with somebody else with the confidence that the other person would be able to run it."

      So that was in that day. What is the box today?

      Let me ask it another way: What is available on every computing device[...]?"


      I would encourage us all to find ways to make the system immediately available to users.

    1. You will need a JVM installed with appropriate enviornment settings (JAVA_HOME, etc) along with Maven 2.x+. You will also need Babel as well as SIMILE Butterfly. Butterfly should be installed in a peer directory to Backstage, like
    1. I have been personally and my whole professional life on Linux for 15y. And I have the exact same feeling when I have to compile something.The waste of time to compile anything is staggering. And more often than not I give up on failure after 2h.
    1. Understanding a strange codebase is hard.

      John Nagle is fond of making the observation that there are three fundamental and recurring questions that dominate one's concerns when programming in C.

      More broadly (speaking of software development generally), one of the two big frustrations I have when dealing with a foreign codebase is the simple question, "Where the hell does this type/function come from?" (esp. in C and, unfortunately, in Go, too, since the team didn't take the opportunity to fix it there when they could have...). There's something to be said for Intellisense-like smarts in IDEs, but I think the criticism of IDEs is justified. I shouldn't need an IDE just to be able to make sense of what I'm reading.

      The other big frustration I often have is "Where does the program really start?" Gilad Bracha seems to really get this, from what I've understood of his descriptions about how module definitions work in Newspeak. Even though it's reviled, I think Java was really shrewd about its decisions here (and on the previous problem, too, for that matter—don't know exactly where FooBar comes from? welp, at least you can be reasonably sure that it's in a file called FooBar.java somewhere, so you can do a simple (and cheap) search across file names instead of a (slow, more expensive) full-text search). Except for static initializers, Java classes are just definitions. You don't get to have live code in the top-level scope the way you can with JS or Python or Go. As cumbersome as Java's design decision might feel like it's getting in your way when you're working on your own projects and no matter how much you hate it for making you pay the boilerplate tax, when it comes to diving in to a foreign codebase, it's great when modules are "inert". They don't get to do anything, save for changing the visibility of some symbol (e.g. the FooBar of FooBar.java). If you want to know how a program works, then you can trace the whole thing, in theory, starting from main. That's really convenient when it means you don't have to think about how something might be dependent on a loop in an arbitrary file that immediately executes on import, or any other top-level diddling (i.e. critical functionality obscured by some esoteric global mutable state).

    1. Despite its warts, we continue to rely on e-mail with attachments as the standard enabler of these collaborations because it is a universal solvent. Our HR folks, for example, work for a different organizational unit than I do. Implementing a common collaboration system would require effort. Exploiting the e-mail common denominator requires none.
  26. Feb 2022
    1. The tool uses nodejs and once nodejs is installed, you can install the tool using:
    1. Editing a list of dependencies or wrangling with package managers doesn’t sound too bad

      Disagree. Sounds plenty bad.

  27. Jan 2022
  28. Dec 2021
    1. With that in mind, I'm trying something new, the guided tour for Mu. Ironically, it atomizes my previous docs by linking repeatedly into anchors in the middle of pages. Proceed if you dare.

      The current incarnation of the tutorial (https://raw.githubusercontent.com/akkartik/mu/7195a5e88e7657b380c0b410c8701792a5ebad72/tutorial/index.md) starts by describing "Prerequisites[:] You will need[...]", and then goes on to list several things, including various software packages—assuming a Linux system, etc.

      This is the idea I'm trying to get across with the self-containedness I've been pursuing (if not with triple scripts then at least with LP docs).

      That prerequisites list should be able to replace with two requirements, i.e.:

      "You will need: (1) this document, and (2) the ability to read it (assuming you have an appropriate viewer [which in 2021 is nowhere close to the kind of ask of the old world])"

    1. I do wonder if this will eventually become a burden in the future when Node inevitably falls out of favor.

      "burden"

    2. since when have I enjoyed webpack
    3. looks like I need a full blown Ruby environment. No thanks!
    4. If a piece of software (or a web site) gets in my way, I usually just give up and move on because that first irritation is usually just the first drip of an approaching cascade of frustration.
  29. Oct 2021
    1. Around @0:25:52

      Krouse: Another subset of "shit just works" would be—

      Leung:"No installation required"?

      Krouse: Yeah. "No installation required". [...] as I was just telling you, I spent the last, like... I spent 5 hours over the last two days installing... trying to install software to get something to run. And it's just ridiculous to have to spend hours and hours. If you want to get Xcode to run, it takes— first of all you need a Mac, which is crazy, and then second of all it takes, depending on your internet connection, it could take you a whole day just to get up and running. Why isn't it xcode.com/create?

    1. I no longer know how it works. I don't care to maintain it. It needs big changes to handle something like embedding a Jupyter notebook. And it depends on Python 2.6(!).With hundreds of pages, and its own custom URL layout that I don't want to break, I dread migrating
  30. Sep 2021
    1. Use node.js v10.2.1 (there are specific bugs in each of v8.x, v9.x, v10.0, and v10.3 that each cause telebit to crash)
    1. the ghcjs compiler. But it was a real pain, I Haskell but it's just getting it to install and run and compile, it's just kind of a nightmare
  31. Aug 2021