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  3. Nobody cares about complexity...

Nobody cares about complexity...

Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved The Lounge
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  • R Roger Wright

    JoeSox wrote: someone will think we can land on the moon. Since we laid off all the people who know how to accomplish that trick when the Apollo program ended, I would hope that people realize that we no longer have a clue how to do that anymore. Robotic orbital stuff we know, but for manned landings we're going to have to start from scratch again - the experts are all living out of shopping carts now, or dead from lack of health care. "Your village called -
    They're missing their idiot."

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    Rob Manderson
    wrote on last edited by
    #22

    Going off on a tangent, as I'm wont to do at times... In June I played the part of tourist in Washington DC and visited, among many other things, the Smithsonian Institute for Aerospace (or whatever it was called). On display they had the Apollo 11 reentry module. Man those three guys must have had cajones!! Not much more space than a coffin and what little of the technology was visible was ancient, even for 1969. Yup, I understand a little thing called design cycles and wouldn't expect 1969 technology to be present in 1969 spacecraft. Given that I had to fly back from the east coast to Phoenix I chose not to speculate on what era technology was in use on the 737's I'd be travelling in :) Rob Manderson http://www.mindprobes.net "I killed him dead cuz he was stepping on my turf, cutting me out of my bling the same way my ho cuts cookies, officer" "Alright then, move along" - Ian Darling, The Lounge, Oct 10 2003

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    • R Roger Wright

      Nobody cares much about apathy, either, but what can you do? :sigh: "Your village called -
      They're missing their idiot."

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      Paul Watson
      wrote on last edited by
      #23

      Meh. regards, Paul Watson Bluegrass South Africa Anna-Jayne Metcalfe wrote: "Cynicism has it's place in life - but it should be kept well away from your inner self." Crikey! ain't life grand?

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      • T Taka Muraoka

        Matt Gullett wrote: in reality, we are becoming dependent on previously hidden complexity and dependent on how that complexity was dealt with. But this is inevitable. You can't build more complex systems without abstracting and simplifying the underlying systems. How many people can do low-level repairs on their cars? Grow their own food? Fix their TV. Build a house. And so on. As things get more complicated, we have to specialize, unless you want to go back a few millenia when life was a bit simpler :-)

        "Sucks less" isn't progress - Kent Beck [^] Awasu 1.1.3 [^]: A free RSS reader with support for Code Project.

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        Paul Watson
        wrote on last edited by
        #24

        I agree we need abstraction and each year we explore new abstractions, some work and others don't. What I don't see us doing is revision, cutting of dead wood. Instead of taking the workable abstractions we learnt from 2002 and layering it over the core, we make the 2003 abstraction layer and put it on top of 2002s, including over the bits that were no good. A good card house builder will build and build, trying new ideas and methods, seeing what works and then starting again, starting with the methods that worked and leaving the methods that didn't. He does not simply continue to build on top of good and bad methods otherwise he would eventually have a rotten, unstable building. I believe we would end up with more useful abstractions while reamining close enough to the core values. Unfortuanatley it requires extra work this approach, some of it dull and un-marketable and therefore it is not going to come from companies. regards, Paul Watson Bluegrass South Africa Anna-Jayne Metcalfe wrote: "Cynicism has it's place in life - but it should be kept well away from your inner self." Crikey! ain't life grand?

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        • M Matt Gullett

          I'm still ranting from this past week, so please forgive me if I don't shut up anytime soon.... Most of us have some concept of the number of things that must go right for me/you to post a message here on CP. (I'm not going to try and analyze it all.) We developers often complain about how users have not idea how complex software can be. Even seemingly simple application features can require signifigant blood,sweat,tears,cursing,etc. As a developer, my perspective has always been that users just don't care how complex something is and explaining it to them typically just leads to something like "it shouldn't be that hard". Well, because I've been generally pissed off the past week or so, I've been thinking. (If you think thinking is a strange thing to do, you haven't worked in market research yet.) I have just realized that the real problem is not that software is complex, but is that people are stupid many things in life are complex. Developers rarely understand the complexities that management must deal with (ie. dealing with customers, competition, sales people, sales people, etc) We also don't usually care about the complexity of a users job. We have all heard the "you don't understand everything that's involved in my job" line before and we typically blow it off. I think the reality is that we humans tend to make things more complex than they need to be. E=MC^2 (my point exactly, whoever thought that the ^ symbol meant to-the-power-of?). The reality is that we developers are merely drug dealers dealing out the desires of our users. The drug of choice today is the presumed reduction of complexity. The reality is that we are getting the raw end of the deal because the complexity is not gone, it is merely shifted to us. We keep creating platforms (frameworks for Marc Clifton) to de-complexify (I know it's not a word), our jobs, but all we really produce is a more addictive drugs for our user, which leads to more complexity for us. Which brings me to a point, not the point, just a point. Platforms (frameworks for Marc Clifton) suck. They provide us with the tools to increase our headaches, not reduce them. In the short term, they help, but in the long term we're screwed, because they will only lead to more complex platforms to be build on top of them. Ultimately, our little house of cards will collapse. We're all doomed. Doomed I tell you. Run for your lives. The natives are coming. :)The only hope is for each of you to send me $1. My paypal account

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          Andrew Peace
          wrote on last edited by
          #25

          And there was me looking forward toa rant about algorithmic complexity ;)... -- Andrew.

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          • M Matt Gullett

            I'm still ranting from this past week, so please forgive me if I don't shut up anytime soon.... Most of us have some concept of the number of things that must go right for me/you to post a message here on CP. (I'm not going to try and analyze it all.) We developers often complain about how users have not idea how complex software can be. Even seemingly simple application features can require signifigant blood,sweat,tears,cursing,etc. As a developer, my perspective has always been that users just don't care how complex something is and explaining it to them typically just leads to something like "it shouldn't be that hard". Well, because I've been generally pissed off the past week or so, I've been thinking. (If you think thinking is a strange thing to do, you haven't worked in market research yet.) I have just realized that the real problem is not that software is complex, but is that people are stupid many things in life are complex. Developers rarely understand the complexities that management must deal with (ie. dealing with customers, competition, sales people, sales people, etc) We also don't usually care about the complexity of a users job. We have all heard the "you don't understand everything that's involved in my job" line before and we typically blow it off. I think the reality is that we humans tend to make things more complex than they need to be. E=MC^2 (my point exactly, whoever thought that the ^ symbol meant to-the-power-of?). The reality is that we developers are merely drug dealers dealing out the desires of our users. The drug of choice today is the presumed reduction of complexity. The reality is that we are getting the raw end of the deal because the complexity is not gone, it is merely shifted to us. We keep creating platforms (frameworks for Marc Clifton) to de-complexify (I know it's not a word), our jobs, but all we really produce is a more addictive drugs for our user, which leads to more complexity for us. Which brings me to a point, not the point, just a point. Platforms (frameworks for Marc Clifton) suck. They provide us with the tools to increase our headaches, not reduce them. In the short term, they help, but in the long term we're screwed, because they will only lead to more complex platforms to be build on top of them. Ultimately, our little house of cards will collapse. We're all doomed. Doomed I tell you. Run for your lives. The natives are coming. :)The only hope is for each of you to send me $1. My paypal account

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            Lost User
            wrote on last edited by
            #26

            Like the "Windows is all a con, they can do XP in 50MB".... yeah :suss: The tigress is here :-D

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            • R Rob Manderson

              Going off on a tangent, as I'm wont to do at times... In June I played the part of tourist in Washington DC and visited, among many other things, the Smithsonian Institute for Aerospace (or whatever it was called). On display they had the Apollo 11 reentry module. Man those three guys must have had cajones!! Not much more space than a coffin and what little of the technology was visible was ancient, even for 1969. Yup, I understand a little thing called design cycles and wouldn't expect 1969 technology to be present in 1969 spacecraft. Given that I had to fly back from the east coast to Phoenix I chose not to speculate on what era technology was in use on the 737's I'd be travelling in :) Rob Manderson http://www.mindprobes.net "I killed him dead cuz he was stepping on my turf, cutting me out of my bling the same way my ho cuts cookies, officer" "Alright then, move along" - Ian Darling, The Lounge, Oct 10 2003

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              Roger Wright
              wrote on last edited by
              #27

              The ones that flew in Mercury had to have been certifiably insane, but Apollo wasn't a whole lot better - just roomier. Don't worry about the 737s - the vacuum tubes on their flight control circuits help keep the wings warm and ice free. "Your village called -
              They're missing their idiot."

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              • M Matt Gullett

                Marc Clifton wrote: I agree 100% about MS being on the right track with BCL/CLR. But this is only the current trend. A long time ago, the two competing programming languages What if the problem with software is source code? Seriously, what if there is a better way to translate our desires into computers. I am not talking about AI, or anything like that here. I am talking about a total rethink of how computers and automation work. As I said to Taka Muraoka, maybe the long term problem is that all this "hiding of complexity" will lead to a time when no one is able to manage the lower levels of complexity. (There was a movie on this subject, just can't remember the name.) Maybe we need to stop thinking of software as source code and start thinking in terms more concrete concepts. Maybe hardware should be redesigned so that binary is old fashioned. Concepts are handled at the hardware level. I really don't have a solution, or a plan, or even a solid concept. The more I think about the problems that face software developers, the more I think that we keep trying to solve our problems by looking within instead of without. (We talk about thinking outside the box, but what I see is mostly just thinking inside-the-box, we just keep building new systems on the old ones we don't like anymore. The old ones are still around, just hidden.)

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                Marc Clifton
                wrote on last edited by
                #28

                Matt Gullett wrote: What if the problem with software is source code? I was thinking about that, but I decided to refrain from the old and wearisome chant "we need computers to read our thoughts". I'm not actually sure that would be a good thing. Matt Gullett wrote: Concepts are handled at the hardware level. Interesting. Concepts are usually soft-wired, whereas mechanisms of percept are hardwired. Von Neumann, in the 1950's, revolutionized computers by realizing the that computer program (the concept), should not be hard-wired into the machine. He envisioned software as made up of subroutines (autonomous modules) that the programmer selected, building his program. We really haven't succeeded, 60 years later, at even that "simple" idea. One of the problems, as I see it, with source code is that we (programmers) are constantly having to translate our world concepts into machine code. Hidden in this is that we are also translating our perceptual mechanisms. This is bidirectional--for example, the weather channel tells me it is 76 degrees outside rather than my feeling it. Even worse, the code that embodies our concepts results from faulty percepts (which is why computers that read your mind would be useless). It seems that where this interface occurs is the area that needs significant work, without turning humans into Borgs. Rather, the computer needs to be "humanized". Matt Gullett wrote: The more I think about the problems that face software developers, the more I think that we keep trying to solve our problems by looking within instead of without. Hmmm. I think this is particularly hard for people to do. Thinking, that is. Latest AAL Article My blog Join my forum!

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                • M Matt Gullett

                  I am not sure I agree with you here. Where does the abstraction end? At what point do we cease to have the capacity to understand any of the earlier works? I am thinking of some movie (can't remember which one), where there is a major world disaster and nobody knows how to fix anything or make anything work. Mankind basically reverts back a few hundred years. I wish I could remember what show that was... I agree that what you are saying is logical, but I am not sure that it is right. Maybe there is a better way that does not require the abstraction and hiding of complexity. I don't claim to know what it is, if it exists, but I wonder if it exists. What if the problem of software is not that it is complex, but is that we make it that way because the medium we use to translate our desires into software (ie. source code) is innefective and a better way exists?

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                  ProffK
                  wrote on last edited by
                  #29

                  Will a world disaster not wipe out an even sample of the population, with one man knowing enough to get a generator up and running again, one with enough knowledge to maybe crackle up an old radio etc. etc? Hallelucination - when you think you see God

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                  • M Matt Gullett

                    Marc Clifton wrote: At that point, it loses the mystique of "complex" and simply becomes mundane in it's complexity. This is definitely true, but what you fail to mention is that nuisances of the system become overlooked and depended on. For example: How long does it take for a cached data queue to be dropped from memory when a change is detected? In my system, it is not time based, it is based on usage, locks, available wake-up time, and whether or not an alernate record is needed or available. Also depends on how long it takes to prepare a new cache entry. I know this not because I am familar with the complexity, but because something that has worked for a very long time, now does not work, not because it doesn't do what it always did, but because I want it to do something it hasn't done before. Even if the platform (or framework) provides the capavcity to customize the behaviour of its complexity hiding, that only serves to increase the complexity of the platform. Marc Clifton wrote: From a metaphysical point of view, we're not really screwed, because each new generation comes "equipped" to handle the new complexity. Handle it, or become dependent on how it was solved before? Seriously, there are many "developers" who are completely unable to write straight C code (not that this is a bad thing) or assembler, or whatever. Part of me says that this is driving the price up for those developers who possess these low-level capabilities, but part of me knows that in reality, we are becoming dependent on previously hidden complexity and dependent on how that complexity was dealt with. Marc Clifton wrote: We are rapidly becoming a society that can do everything and understand nothing. I thought we reached that point a long time ago. There actually is a seriousness in my postings because I feel that the software industry needs a major mind-shift. I do not know what the shift must be, maybe MS is on the right track with .NET (actually, the BCL and CLR), but I think there is something else that needs to be done.

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                    CodeGuy
                    wrote on last edited by
                    #30

                    Have you seen this article? Definitely along the same lines as what you're talking about.

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                    • R Roger Wright

                      The ones that flew in Mercury had to have been certifiably insane, but Apollo wasn't a whole lot better - just roomier. Don't worry about the 737s - the vacuum tubes on their flight control circuits help keep the wings warm and ice free. "Your village called -
                      They're missing their idiot."

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                      Matt Gullett
                      wrote on last edited by
                      #31

                      :-D

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                      • C CodeGuy

                        Have you seen this article? Definitely along the same lines as what you're talking about.

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                        Matt Gullett
                        wrote on last edited by
                        #32

                        Yep. Read it quite some time ago. Thanks for the link though.

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