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A whole big long post about spherical harmonics and electrons aren’t mentioned once!
Some people are just weird! ;)
Seriously, wonderful post.
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I don’t know if language choice has anything to do with it, but the fact remains: the service is now dead. ;)
I agree in 2012 the state of Python3 support was a valid concern, and I have to admit actively discouraging people from learning it at the time, but luckily that part hasn’t aged well. I still want better FP support in Python of course.
My biggest problem with Common Lisp is that it’s a Lisp-2. Why would anyone want different namespaces for functions and other bindings in an ostensibly functional language?
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Why would anyone want different namespaces for functions and other bindings in an ostensibly functional language?
According to this site, one of the arguments was “backwards compatibility”:
Common Lisp was the result of a compromise between a number of dialects of Lisp, most of which had separate namespaces.. [transitioning to a single namespace] would introduce a considerable amount of incompatibility..” There are really more than two namespaces, reducing either the benefit of collapsing these two or the cost of collapsing them all
which I don’t find that convincing, since there were plenty of lisps using dynamic scoping, despite CL using lexical scopes. But I agree, things like these together with, frankly wierd function names always annoy me. I’d guess that in the end, CL shouldn’t be seen as a functional language, since Lisp wasn’t even originally conceived as functional language.
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I’d guess that in the end, CL shouldn’t be seen as a functional language, since Lisp wasn’t even originally conceived as functional language.
There’s a page which I can’t find now which makes the case that the term “functional programming language” evolves over time to mean “the most functional programming language which currently exists”, so different features rotate in and out of defining what it effectively means to be a functional programming language.
(I’d add that each generation has a different boogeyman idea, an idea which the Average Programmer regards as being “too complex” and which others write blog posts or the local equivalent to explain.)
The first generation was when Algol introduced recursion. Recursion is also the boogeyman idea of this era.
The second generation begins with “mature” Lisp (that is, Lisp implementations like MACLISP and Lisp Machine Lisps, not LISP 1.5) and, later, Scheme, where the defining feature is first-class functions and closures, and the boogeyman idea is Scheme’s continuations. Common features are strong dynamic typing and a universal feature is garbage collection. The new-school scripting languages (Perl, Python, Ruby) are languages of this type with object systems bolted on, and Java’s getting there, slowly.
(Some pre-Common Lisp Lisps didn’t have closures. They had the upwards funarg problem, instead.)
The third generation is ML and everything after, including OCaml and Haskell. Now, functional programming includes strong, static type systems with algebraic types, Hindley-Milner type inference, and, at a syntactic level, pattern-matching as flow control. The boogeyman idea is monads, and, more specifically, requiring the use of monads to mark out side-effecting code, as Haskell does.
The underlying point is that “Functional programming is whatever your language of choice doesn’t have yet”: Recursion is now universal. It wasn’t when FORTRAN IV was “your language of choice” for a lot of programmers. Strong dynamic typing and garbage collection aren’t universal, but they’re not weird and wacky ideas only long-haired MIT AI Lab types can make sense of. Marking your side-effecting code in a machine-readable way is still weird and wacky… for now.
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It might be slightly easier to write tooling when you know what’s a function and what’s a variable.
On the other hand, if you use a Lisp-2 in functional style (which poorly suits Common Lisp), you still have the problem of full analysis between the boundary of namespaces + awkward syntax. It looks like Common Lisp is meant to be used in imperative style, without juggling functions as values.
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An extreme example of unportable C is the book Mastering C Pointers: Tools for Programming Power, which was castigated recently. To be fair, that book has other flaws rather than being in a different camp, but I think that fuels some of the intensity of passion against it.
This… rather grossly undersells how much is wrong with that book. The author didn’t understand scope, for crying out loud, and never had a grasp of how C organized memory, even in the high-level handwavy “C Abstract Machine” sense the standard is written to.
There are better examples of unportable C, such as pretty much any non-trivial C program written for MS-DOS, especially the ones which did things like manually writing to video memory to get the best graphics performance. Of course, pretty much all embedded C would fit here as well, but you’ll actually be able to get and read the source of some of those MS-DOS programs.
In so doing, the committee had to converge on a computational model that would somehow encompass all targets. This turned out to be quite difficult, because there were a lot of targets out there that would be considered strange and exotic; arithmetic is not even guaranteed to be twos complement (the alternative is ones complement), word sizes might not be a power of 2, and other things.
Another example would be saturation semantics for overflow, as opposed to wraparound. DSPs use saturation semantics, so going off the top end of the scale plateaus, instead of causing a weird jagged waveform.
As for the rest, it’s a hard problem. Selectively turning off optimization for specific functions would be useful for some codebases, but aggressive optimization isn’t the only problem here: Optimization doesn’t cause your
longtype to suddenly be the wrong size to hold a pointer on some machines but not others. Annotating the code with machine-checked assumptions about type size, overflow behavior, and maybe other things would allow intelligent warnings about stupid code, but… well… try to get anyone to do it.-
Re “Mastering C Pointers,” that’s fair. I included it because it’s one of the things that got me thinking about the unportable camp, but I can see how its (agreed, very serious) flaws might detract from the overall argument I’m making and that there might be a better example.
Re saturating arithmetic, well, Rust has it :)
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My interpretation is that the point of C is that simple C code should lead to simple assembly code. Needing to write
SaturatedArithmetic::addWithSaturation(a, b)instead of justa + bin all arithmetic DSP code would be quite annoying, and would simply lead to people using another language.You could say ‘oh they should add operator overloading’, but then that contravenes the first point, that simple C code (like
a + b) should not hide complex behaviour. The only construct in C that can hide complexity is the function call, which everyone recognises. But if you see some arithmetic, you know it’s just arithmetic.-
You could say ‘oh they should add operator overloading’, but then that contravenes the first point, that simple C code (like a + b) should not hide complex behavior. The only construct in C that can hide complexity is the function call, which everyone recognizes. But if you see some arithmetic, you know it’s just arithmetic.
Not to mention that not everything can be overloaded, causing inconsistencies, and some operations in mathematics have operators other than just “+-/*”. Vector dot product “·”, for example. Even if CPP (or any other language) extends to support more operators, these operators can’t be reached without key composition (“shortcuts”), making it almost unwanted.
vec_dot()might require typing more, but it’s reachable to everyone, and operators don’t need to have hidden meanings.-
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Perl does have more operators than C, but all of them are operators that can be typed using simple key composition, such as [SHIFT+something]. String concatenation for example.
My point, added with what @milesrout said, is that some operators (math operators) aren’t easy to type with just [SHIFT+something]. As result, operator overloading in languages that offer operator overloading will always stay in a unfinished state, because it will only compromise those operators that are easily composed.
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Mastering C Pointers: Tools for Programming Power has several four-star reviews on Amazon uk.
Herbert Schildt’s C: The Complete Reference is often touted as the worst C book ever and here.
Perhaps Mastering C Pointers is the worst in its niche (i.e., pointers) and Schildt’s is a more general worst?
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Mastering C Pointers: Tools for Programming Power has several four-star reviews on Amazon uk.
So? One of the dangers of picking the wrong textbook is thinking it’s great, and using it to evaluate subsequent works in the field, without knowing it’s shit. Per hypothesis, if it’s your first book, you don’t know enough to question it, and if you think it’s teaching you things, those are the things you’ll go on to know, even if they’re the wrong things. It’s a very pernicious bootstrap problem.
In this case, the book is objectively terrible. Other books being bad don’t make it better.
I do agree that Schildt’s book is also terrible.
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MUMPS is still in active usage, I think? A few years ago I interviewed someone out of the midwest (Minneapolis or Michigan, I think) who worked for a large health software vendor. They’ve been around for a long time, and they’re in a lot of hospitals across the US. I’m pretty sure their whole system is built in MUMPS.
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Epic is the vendor iirc. It is also all up in the VA Vista system.
It is part of the fractal of sadness of healthcare.
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I don’t really know enough about the MUMPS ecosystem to answer, but maybe? It seems to fit the COBOL criteria:
- “Outdated”[0] language people don’t really want to work in,
- Relied upon in core parts of large, “boring”, slow-moving companies who have a lot of code and,
- Who are very unlikely to be disrupted out of their space any time soon
I got the impression that this particular company was one of the few/only software games in town, wherever they were, and that they kinda hoovered-up a lot of the engineering talent from the surrounding region. That said, the person I spoke to was very aware that MUMPS is incredibly niche and was looking to build transferable skills in a more mainstream software environment, and was looking in the Bay Area. So, I could guess they might have a retention problem, at least amongst people who are also willing to relocate for work. That’s speculation, though.
Caveat: This is all from memory of an interview a few years ago
[0] I used air-quotes because not everyone has these perceptions
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“Outdated” is a loaded term, sure, but I think we can explore it a bit.
Things can be outdated because more work has been done in the space to create technology which is better in every technical respect, but that doesn’t mean the existing technology is going to be changed, because social and political aspects factor in as well. Of course, in both software and buildings, something becomes outdated once flaws are no longer repaired when found, but fixing bugs becomes a political and social football as well.
(Then, of course, there are the sad cases who need to be contrarian to the point they’ll argue that technology which has been superseded and abandoned is in no way outdated. They’re the ones who throw out the most heat, and obscure the most light, when someone’s trying to understand the field.)
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The tag should be
C++, notC. -
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Good talk.
I recently used systemd “in anger” for the first time on a raspi device to orchestrate several scripts and services, and I was pleasantly surprised (but also not surprised, because the FUD crowd is becoming more and more fingerprintable to me). systemd gives me lifecycle, logging, error handling, and structure, declaratively. It turns out structure and constraints are really useful, this is also why go has fast dependency resolution.
It violates unix philosohpy
That accusation was also made against neovim. The people muttering this stuff are slashdot markov chains, they don’t have any idea what they’re talking about.
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The declarative units are definitely a plus. No question.
I was anti-systemd when it started gaining popularity, because of the approach (basically kitchen-sinking a lot of *NIX stuff into a single project) and the way the project leader(s) respond to criticism.
I’ve used it since it was default in Debian, and the technical benefits are very measurable.
That doesnt mean the complaints against it are irrelevant though - it does break the Unix philosophy I think most people are referring to:
Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new “features”.
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If you believe composability (one program’s output is another program’s input) is an important part of The Unix Philosophy, then
lsviolates it all day long, always has, likely always will.lsalso violates it by providing multiple ways to sort its output, whensortis right there, already doing that job. Arguably,lsformatting its output is a violation of Do One Thing, becauseawkandprintfexist, all ready to turn neat columns into human-friendly text. My point is, The Unix Philosophy isn’t set in stone, and never has been.-
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nobody said it’s set in stone; it’s a set of principles to be applied based on practicality. like any design principle, it can be applied beyond usefulness. some remarks:
- i don’t see where ls violates composability. the -l format was specifically designed to be easy to grep.
- the sorting options are an example of practicality. they don’t require a lot of code, and would be much more clumsy to implement as a script (specifically when you don’t output the fields you’re sorting on)
- about formatting, i assume you’re referring to columniation, which to my knowledge was not in any version of ls released by Bell Labs. checking whether stdout is a terminal is indeed an ugly violation.
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i don’t see where ls violates composability. the -l format was specifically designed to be easy to grep.
People have written web pages on why parsing the output of
lsis a bad idea. Usingls -ldoesn’t solve any of these problems.As a matter of fact, the
coreutilspeople have this to say about parsing the output ofls:However ls is really a tool for direct consumption by a human, and in that case further processing is less useful. For futher processing,
find(1)is more suited.Moving on…
the sorting options are an example of practicality. they don’t require a lot of code, and would be much more clumsy to implement as a script (specifically when you don’t output the fields you’re sorting on)
This cuts closer to the point of what we’re saying, but here I also have to defend my half-baked design for a True Unix-y
lsProgram: It would always output all the data, one line per file, with filenames quoted and otherwise prepared such that they always stick to one column of one line, with things like tab characters replaced by\tand newline characters replaced by\nand so on. Therefore, the formatting and sorting programs always have all the information.But, as I said, always piping the output of my
lsinto some other script would be clumsier; it would ultimately result in some “human-friendlyls” which has multiple possible pipelines prepared for you, selectable with command-line options, so the end result looks a lot like modernls.about formatting, i assume you’re referring to columniation, which to my knowledge was not in any version of ls released by Bell Labs. checking whether stdout is a terminal is indeed an ugly violation.
I agree that
lsshouldn’t check for atty, but I’m not entirely convinced no program should.-
just because some people discourage composing ls with other programs doesn’t mean it’s not the unix way. some people value the unix philosophy and some don’t, and it’s not surprising that those who write GNU software and maintain wikis for GNU software are in the latter camp.
your proposal for a decomposed ls sounds more unixy in some ways. but there are still practical reasons not to do it, such as performance and not cluttering the standard command lexicon with ls variants (plan 9 has ls and lc; maybe adding lt, lr, lu, etc. would be too many names just for listing files). it’s a subtle point in unix philosophy to know when departing from one principle is better for the overall simplicity of the system.
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With all due respect[1], did your own comment hit your fingerprint detector? Because it should. It’s extrapolating wildly from one personal anecdote[2], and insulting a broad category of people without showing any actual examples[3]. Calling people “markov chains” is fun in the instant you write it, but contributes to the general sludge of ad hominem dehumanization. All your upvoters should be ashamed.
[1] SystemD arouses strong passions, and I don’t want this thread to devolve. I’m pointing out that you’re starting it off on the wrong foot. But I’m done here and won’t be responding to any more name-calling.
[2] Because God knows, there’s tons of badly designed software out there that has given people great experiences in the short term. Design usually matters in the long term. Using something for the first time is unlikely to tell you anything beyond that somebody peephole-optimized the UX. UX is certainly important, rare and useful in its own right. But it’s a distinct activity.
[3] I’d particularly appreciate a link to NeoVim criticism for being anti-Unix. Were they similarly criticizing Vim?
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[3] I’d particularly appreciate a link to NeoVim criticism for being anti-Unix. Were they similarly criticizing Vim?
Yes, when VIM incorporated a terminal. Which is explicitly against its design goals. From the VIM 7.4
:help design-notVIM IS... NOT *design-not* - Vim is not a shell or an Operating System. You will not be able to run a shell inside Vim or use it to control a debugger. This should work the other way around: Use Vim as a component from a shell or in an IDE. A satirical way to say this: "Unlike Emacs, Vim does not attempt to include everything but the kitchen sink, but some people say that you can clean one with it. ;-)"Neo-VIM appears to acknowledge their departure from VIM’s initial design as their
:help design-nothas been trimmed and only reads:NVIM IS... NOT design-not Nvim is not an operating system; instead it should be composed with other tools or hosted as a component. Marvim once said: "Unlike Emacs, Nvim does not include the kitchen sink... but it's good for plumbing."Now as a primarily Emacs user I see nothing wrong with not following the UNIX philosophy, but at it is clear that NeoVIM has pushed away from that direction. And because that direction was an against their initial design it is reasonable for users that liked the initial design to criticism NeoVIM because moving further away from the UNIX philosophy.
Not that VIM hadn’t already become something more than ‘just edit text’, take quickfix for example. A better example of how an editor can solve the same problem by adhering to the Unix Philosophy of composition through text processing would be Acme. Check out Acme’s alternative to quickfix https://youtu.be/dP1xVpMPn8M?t=551
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akkartik, which part of my comment did you identify with? :) FWIW, I’m fond of you personally.
I’d particularly appreciate a link to NeoVim criticism for being anti-Unix
Every single Hacker News thread about Neovim.
Were they similarly criticizing Vim?
Not until I reply as such–and the response is hem-and-haw.
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To be fair I don’t think the hacker news hive mind is a good judge of anything besides what is currently flavour of the week.
Just yesterday I had a comment not just downvoted but flagged and hidden-by-default, because I suggested Electron is a worse option than a web app.
HN is basically twitter on Opposite Day: far too happy to remove any idea even vaguely outside what the group considers “acceptable”.
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Indeed, I appreciate your comments as well in general. I wasn’t personally insulted, FWIW. But this is precisely the sort of thing I’m talking about, the assumption that someone pushing back must have their identity wrapped up in the subject. Does our community a disservice.
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7289935
The old Unix ways are dying… … Vim is, in the spirit of Unix, a single purpose tool: it edits text.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10412860
thinks that anything that is too old clearly has some damage and its no longer good technology, like the neovim crowd
Also just search for “vim unix philosophy” you’ll invariably find tons of imaginary nonsense:
Please don’t make me search /r/vim :D
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thinks that anything that is too old clearly has some damage and its no longer good technology, like the neovim crowd
That’s not saying that neovim is ‘anti-Unix philosophy’, it’s saying that neovim is an example of a general pattern of people rewriting and redesigning old things that work perfectly well on the basis that there must be something wrong with anything that’s old.
Which is indeed a general pattern.
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That’s not saying that neovim is ‘anti-Unix philosophy’
It’s an example of (unfounded) fear, uncertainty, and doubt.
rewriting and redesigning old things that work perfectly well on the basis that there must be something wrong with anything that’s old.
That’s a problem that exists, but attaching it to project X out of habit, without justification, is the pattern I’m complaining about. In Neovim’s case it’s completely unfounded and doesn’t even make sense.
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It’s not unfounded. It’s pretty obvious that many of the people advocating neovim are doing so precisely because they think ‘new’ and ‘modern’ are things that precisely measure the quality of software. They’re the same people that change which Javascript framework they’re using every 6 weeks. They’re not a stereotype, they’re actual human beings that actually hold these views.
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Thanks :) My attitude is to skip past crap drive-by comments as beneath notice (or linking). But I interpreted you to be saying FUD (about SystemD) that you ended up taking seriously? Any of those would be interesting to see if you happen to have them handy, but no worries if not.
Glad to have you back in the pro-Neovim (which is not necessarily anti-Vim) camp!
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What is FUD is this sort of comment: the classic combination of comparing systemd to the worst possible alternative instead of the best actual alternative with basically claiming everyone that disagrees with you is a ‘slashdot markov chain’ or similar idiotic crap.
On the first point, there are lots of alternatives to sysvinit that aren’t systemd. Lots and lots and lots. Some of them are crap, some are great. systemd doesn’t have a right to be compared only to what it replaced, but also all the other things that could have replaced sysvinit.
On the second point, it’s just bloody rude. But it also shows you don’t really understand what people are saying. ‘I think [xyz] violates the unix philosophy’ is not meaningless. People aren’t saying it for fun. They’re saying it because they think it’s true, and that it’s a bad thing. If you don’t have a good argument for the Unix philosophy not matter, or you think systemd doesn’t actually violate it, please go ahead and explain that. But I’ve never actually seen either of those arguments. The response to ‘it violates the Unix philosophy’ is always just ‘shut up slashdotter’. Same kind of comment you get when you say anything that goes against the proggit/hn hivemind that has now decided amongst other things that: microsoft is amazing, google is horrible, MIT-style licenses are perfect, GPL-style licenses are the devil-incarnate, statically typed languages are perfect, dynamically typed languages are evil, wayland is wonderful, x11 is terrible, etc.
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claiming everyone that disagrees with you is a ‘slashdot markov chain’ or similar idiotic crap
My claim is about the thoughtless shoveling of groundless rumors. Also I don’t think my quip was idiotic.
there are lots of alternatives to sysvinit that aren’t systemd
That’s fine, I never disparaged alternatives. I said: systemd is good and I’m annoyed that the grumblers said it wasn’t.
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Have you watched the video this thread is about? Because you really sound like the kind of dogmatist the presenter is talking about.
If you like systemd, use it and shut up about it
Also, isn’t this a double-standard, since when it comes to complaining about systemd, this attitude doesn’t seem that prevalent.
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I see this kind of vague criticism when it comes to systemd alot. What ecosystem is it really breaking? It’s all still open source, there aren’t any proprietary protocols or corporate patents that prevent people from modifying the software to not have to rely on systemd. This “threat”, thr way I see it, has turned out to be at most a “ minor inconvenience “.
I suppose you’re thinking about examples like GNOME, but on the one hand, GNOME isn’t a unix-dogmatist project, but instead they aim to create a integrated desktop experience, consciously trading this in for ideal modularity – and on the other, projects like OpenBSD have managed to strip out what required systemd and have a working desktop environment. Most other examples, of which I know, have a similar pattern.
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I think that the problem is fanboyism, echo chambers and ideologies.
I might be wrong, so please don’t consider this an accusation. But you writing this sounds like someone hearing that systemd is bad, therefore never looking at it, yet copying it. Then one tries it and finding out that baseless prejudices were in fact baseless.
After that the assumption is that everyone else must have been doing the same and one is enlightened now to see it’s actually really cool.
I think that this group behavior and blindly copying opinions is one of the worst things in IT these days, even though of course it’s not limited to this field.
A lot of people criticizing systemd actually looked at systemd, really deep, maybe even built stuff on it, or at least worked with it in production as sysadmin/devop/sre/…
Yes, I have used systemd, yes I understand why decisions we’re taken, where authors if the software were going, read specs of the various parts (journald for example), etc.
I think I have a pretty good understanding compared to at least most people that only saw it from a users perspective (considering writing unit files to be users perspective as well).
So I could write about that in my CV and be happy that I can answer a lot of questions regarding systemd, advocate its usage to create more demand and be happy.
To sum it up: I still consider systemd to be bad on multiple layers, both implementation and some ideas that I considered great but then through using it seeing that it was a wrong assumption. By the way that’s the thing I would not blame anyone for. It’s good that stuff gets tried, that’s how research works. It’s not the first and not the last project that will come out sounding good, to only find out a lot of things either doesn’t make a difference or make it worse.
I am a critic of systemd but I agree that there’s a lot of FUD as well. Especially when there’s people that blame everything, including own incompetence on systemd. Nobody should ever expect a new project to be a magic bullet. That’s just dumb and I would never blame systemd for trying a different approach or for not being perfect. However I think it has problems on many levels. While I think the implementation isn’t really good that’s something that can be fixed. However I think some parts of the concept level are either pretty bad or have turned out to be bad decisions.
I was very aware that especially in the beginning the implementation was bad. A lot got better. That’s to be expected. However next to various design decisions I consider bad I think many more were based on ideas that I think to most people in IT sound good and reasonable but in the specific scenarios that systemd is used it at least in my experience do not work out at all or only work well in very basic cases.
In other words the cases where other solutions are working maybe not optimal, but that aren’t considered a problem worth fixing because the added complexity isn’t worth it systemd really shines. However when something is more complex I think using systemd frequently turns out to be an even worse solution.
While I don’t wanna go into detail because I don’t think this is the right format for an actual analysis I think systemd in this field a lot in common with both configuration management and JavaScript frameworks. They tend to be amazing for use cases that are simple (todo applications for example), but together with various other complexities often make stuff unnecessarily complicated.
And just like with JavaScript frameworks and configuration management there’s a lot of FUD, ideologies, echochambers, following the opinion of some thought leaders, and very little building your own solid opinion.
Long story short. If you criticize something without knowing what it is about then yes that’s dumb and likely FUD. However assuming that’s the only possible reason for someone criticizing software is similarly dumb and often FUD regarding this opinion.
This by the way also works the reverse. I frequently see people liking software and echoing favorable statements for the same reasons. Not understanding what they say, just copying sentences of opinion leaders, etc.
It’s the same pattern, just the reversal, positive instead of negative.
The problem isn’t someone disliking or liking something, but that opinions and thoughts are repeated without understanding which makes it hard to have discussions and arguments that give both sides any valuable insides or learnings
Then things also get personal. People hate on Poetteing and think he is dumb and Poetteing thinks every critic is dumb. Just because that’s a lot of what you see when every statement is blindly echoed.
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That’s nice, but the implication of the anti-systemd chorus was that sys v init was good enough. Not all of these other “reasonable objections” that people are breathless to mention.
The timbre reminded me of people who say autotools is preferrable to cmake. People making a lot of noise about irrelevant details and ignoring the net gain.
But you writing this sounds like someone hearing that systemd is bad, therefore never looking at it, yet copying it.
No, I’m reacting to the idea that the systemd controversy took up any space in my mind at all. It’s good software. It doesn’t matter if X or Y is technically better, the popular narrative was that systemd is a negative thing, a net-loss.
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In your opinion it’s good software and you summed up the “anti-systemd camp” with “sys v init was good enough” even though people from said “anti-systemd camp” on this very thread disagreed that that was their point.
To give you an entirely different point of view, I’m surprised you don’t want to know anything about a key piece of a flagship server operating systems (taking that one distro is technically an OS) affecting the entire eco system and unrelated OS’ (BSDs etc.) that majorly affects administration and development on Linux-based systems. Especially when people have said there are clear technical reasons for disliking the major change and forced compliance with “the new way”.
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you summed up the “anti-systemd camp” with “sys v init was good enough” even though people from said “anti-systemd camp” on this very thread disagreed that that was their point.
Even in this very thread no one has actually named a preferred alternative. I suspect they don’t want to be dragged into a discussion of details :)
affecting the entire eco system and unrelated OS’ (BSDs etc.)
BSDs would be a great forum for demonstrating the alternatives to systemd.
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It violates unix philosohpy
That accusation was also made against neovim. The people muttering this stuff are slashdot markov chains, they don’t have any idea what they’re talking about.
i don’t follow your reasoning. why is it relevant that people also think neovim violates the unix philosophy? are you saying that neovim conforms to the unix philosophy, and therefore people who say it doesn’t must not know what they’re talking about?
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are you saying that neovim conforms to the unix philosophy, and therefore people who say it doesn’t must not know what they’re talking about?
When the implication is that Vim better aligns with the unix philosophy, yes, anyone who avers that doesn’t know what they’re talking about. “Unix philosophy” was never a goal of Vim (”:help design-not” was strongly worded to that effect until last year, but it was never true anyways) and shows a deep lack of familiarity with Vim’s features.
Some people likewise speak of a mythical “Vim way” which again means basically nothing. But that’s a different topic.
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To be fair, they should also mark as “Not Secure” any page running JavaScript.
Also, pointless HTTPS adoption might reduce content accessibility without blocking censorship.
(Disclaimer: this does not mean that you shouldn’t adopt HTTPS for sensible contents! It just means that using HTTPS should not be a matter of fashion: there are serious trade-offs to consider)-
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[Comment removed by author]
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Because it’s part of The Process. (Technical Dark Patterns, Opt-In without a clear way to Opt-Out, etc.)
Because you’ll be laughed at if you don’t. (Social expectations, “received wisdom”, etc.)
Because Do It Now. Do It Now. Do It Now. (Nagging emails. Nagging pings on social media. Nagging.)
Lastly, of course, are Terms Of Service, different from the above by at least being above-board.
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Yes SRI mitigate some of the JavaScript attacks that I describe in the article, in particular the nasty ones from CDNs exploiting your trust on a harmless-looking website.
Unfortunately several others remain possible (just think of jsonp or even simpler if the website itself collude to the attack). Also it needs widespread adoption to become a security feature: it should probably be mandatory, but for sure browsers should mark as “Not Secure” any page downloading programs from CDNs without it.What SRI could really help is with the accessibility issues described by Meyer: you can serve most page resources as cacheable HTTP resources if the content hash is declared in a HTTPS page!
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WIth SRI you can block CDNs you use to load JS scripts externally from manipulating the webpage.
I also don’t buy the link that claims it reduces content accessiblity, the link you provided above explains a problem that would be solved by simply using a HTTPS caching proxy (something a lot of corporate networks seem to have no problem operating considering TLS 1.3 explicitly tries not to break those middleboxes)
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As much as I respect Meyer, his point is moot. MitM HTTPS proxy servers have been setup since a long time, even though usually for a far more objectionable purposes than content caching. Some companies even made out of the box HTTPS URL filtering their selling point. If people are ready or forced to trade security for accessibility, but don’t know how to setup HTTPS MitM proxy, it’s their problem, not webmasters’. We should be ready to teach those in needs how to setup it of course, but that’s about it.
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MitM HTTPS proxy servers have been setup since a long time, even though usually for a far more objectionable purposes than content caching. […] If people are ready or forced to trade security for accessibility, but don’t know how to setup HTTPS MitM proxy, it’s their problem, not webmasters’.
Well… how can I say that… I don’t think so.
Selling HTTPS MitM proxy as a security solutions is plain incompetence.
Beyond the obvious risk that the proxy is compromised (you should never assume that they won’t) which is pretty high in some places (not only in Africa… don’t be naive, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link), a transparent HTTPS proxy has an obvious UI issue: people do not realise that it’s unsafe.
If the browsers don’t mark as “Not Secure” them (how could them?) the user will overlook the MitM risks, turning a security feature against the users’ real security and safety.
Is this something webmasters should care? I think so.
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Selling HTTPS MitM proxy as a security solutions is plain incompetence.
Not sure how to tell you this, but companies have been doing this on their internal networks for a very long time and this is basically standard operating procedure at every enterprise-level network I’ve seen. They create their own CA, generate an intermediate CA key cert, and then put that on an HTTPS MITM transparent proxy that inspects all traffic going in an out of the network. The intermediate cert is added to the certificate store on all devices issued to employees so that it is trusted. By inspecting all of the traffic, they can monitor for external and internal threats, scan for exfiltration of trade secrets and proprietary data, and keep employees from watching porn at work. There is an entire industry around products that do this, BlueCoat and Barracuda are two popular examples.
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It is, it’s just that word security is better understood as “who” is getting (or not) secured from “whom”.
What you keep saying is that MitM proxy does not protect security of end users (that is employees). What they do, however, in certain contexts like described above, is help protect the organisation in which end users operate. Arguably they do, because it certainly makes it more difficult to protect yourself from something you cannot see. If employees are seen as a potential threat (they are), then reducing their security can help you (organisation) with yours.
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I wonder if you did read the articles I linked…
The point is that, in a context of unreliable connectivity, HTTPS reduce dramatically accessibility but it doesn’t help against censorship.
In this context, we need to grant to people accessibility and security.
An obvious solution is to give them a cacheable HTTP access to contents. We can fool the clients to trust a MitM caching proxy, but since all we want is caching this is not the best solution: it add no security but a false sense of security. Thus in that context, you can improve users’ security by removing HTTPS.
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I have read it, but more importantly, I worked in and build services for places like that for about 5 years (Uganda, Bolivia, Tajikistan, rural India…).
I am with you that HTTPS proxy is generally best to be avoided if for no other reason because it grows attack surface area. I disagree that removing HTTPS increases security. It adds a lot more places and actors who now can negatively impact user in exchange for him knowing this without being able to do much about it.
And that is even without going into which content is safe to be cached in a given environment.
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And that is even without going into which content is safe to be cached in a given environment.
Yes, this is the best objection I’ve read so far.
As always it’s a matter of tradeoff. In a previous related thread I described how I would try to fix the issue in a way that people can easily opt-out and opt-in.
But while I think it would be weird to remove HTTPS for an ecommerce chart or for a political forum, I think that most of Wikipedia should be served through both HTTP and HTTPS. People should be aware that HTTP page are not secure (even though it all depends on your threat model…) but should not be mislead to think that pages going through an MitM proxy are secure.
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HTTPS proxy isn’t incompetence, it’s industry standard.
They solve a number of problems and are basically standard in almost all corporate networks with a minimum security level. They aren’t a weak chain in the link since traffic in front of the proxy is HTTPS and behind it is in the local network and encrypted by a network level CA (you can restrict CA capabilities via TLS cert extensions, there is a fair number of useful ones that prevent compromise).
Browser don’t mark these insecure because to install and use a HTTPS proxy requires full admin access to a device, at which level there is no reason to consider what the user is doing as insecure.
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Browser don’t mark these insecure because to install and use a HTTPS proxy requires full admin access to a device, at which level there is no reason to consider what the user is doing as insecure.
Browsers bypass the network configuration to protect the users’ privacy.
(I agree this is stupid, but they are trying to push this anyway)The point is: the user’s security is at risk whenever she sees as HTTPS (which stands for “HTTP Secure”) something that is not secure. It’s a rather simple and verifiable fact.
It’s true that posing a threat to employees’ security is an industry standard. But it’s not a security solution. At least, not for the employees.
And, doing that in a school or a public library is dangerous and plain stupid.
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Nobody is posing a threat to employees’ security here, a corporation can in this case be regarded as a single entity so terminating SSL at the borders of the entity similar to how a browser terminates SSL by showing the website on a screen is fairly valid.
Schools and public libraries usually have the internet filtered yes, that is usually made clear to the user before using it (atleast when I wanted access to either I was in both cases instructed that the network is supervised and filtered) which IMO negates the potential security compromise.
Browsers bypass the network configuration to protect the users’ privacy.
Browsers don’t bypass root CA configuration, core system configuration or network routing information as well as network proxy configuration to protect a user’s privacy.
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Schools and public libraries usually have the internet filtered yes, that is usually made clear to the user before using it [..] which IMO negates the potential security compromise.
Yes this is true.
If people are kept constantly aware of the presence of a transparent HTTPS proxy/MitM, I have no objection to its use instead of an HTTP proxy for caching purposes. Marking all pages as “Not Secure” is a good way to gain such awareness.
Browsers don’t bypass root CA configuration, core system configuration or network routing information as well as network proxy configuration to protect a user’s privacy.
Did you know about Firefox’s DoH/CloudFlare affair?
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Yes I’m aware of the “affair”. To my knowledge the initial DoH experiment was localized and run on users who had enabled studies (opt-in). In both the experiment and now Mozilla has a contract with CloudFlare to protect the user privacy during queries when DoH is enabled (which to my knowledge it isn’t by default). In fact, the problem ungleich is blogging about isn’t even slated for standard release yet, to my knowledge.
It’s plain and old wrong in the bad kind of way; it conflates security maximalism with the mission of Mozilla to bring the maximum amount of users privacy and security.
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TBH, I don’t know what you mean with “security maximalism”.
I think ungleich raise serious concerns that should be taken into account before shipping DoH to the masses.
Mozilla has a contract with CloudFlare to protect the user privacy
It’s bit naive for Mozilla to base the security and safety of milions of people world wide in the contract with a company, however good they are.
AFAIK, even Facebook had a contract with his users.
Yeah.. I know… they will “do no evil”…
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Security maximalism disregards more common threatmodels and usability problems in favor of more security. I don’t believe the concerns are really concerns for the common user.
It’s bit naive for Mozilla to base the security and safety of milions of people world wide in the contract with a company, however good they are.
Cloudflare hasn’t done much that makes me believe they will violate my privacy. They’re not in the business of selling data to advertisers.
AFAIK, even Facebook had a contract with his users
Facebook used Dark Patterns to get users to willingly agree to terms they would otherwise never agree on, I don’t think this is comparable. Facebook likely never violated the contract terms with their users that way.
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Security maximalism disregards more common threatmodels and usability problems in favor of more security. I don’t believe the concerns are really concerns for the common user.
You should define “common user”.
If you mean the politically inepts who are happy to be easily manipulated as long as they are given something to say and retweet… yes, they have nothing to fear.
The problem is for those people who are actually useful to the society.Cloudflare hasn’t done much that makes me believe they will violate my privacy.
The problem with Cloudflare is not what they did, it’s what they could do.
There’s no reason to give such power to a single company, located near all the other companies that are currently centralizing the Internet already.But my concerns are with Mozilla.
They are trusted by milions of people world wide. Me included. But actually, I’m starting to think they are much more like a MitM caching HTTPS proxy: trusted by users as safe, while totaly unsafe.-
So in your opinion, the average user does not deserve the protection of being able to browse the net as safe as we can make it for them?
Just because you think they aren’t useful to society (and they are, these people have all the important jobs, someone isn’t useless because they can’t use a computer) doesn’t mean we, as software engineers, should abandon them.
There’s no reason to give such power to a single company, located near all the other companies that are currently centralizing the Internet already.
Then don’t use it? DoH isn’t going to be enabled by default in the near future and any UI plans for now make it opt-in and configurable. The “Cloudflare is default” is strictly for tests and users that opt into this.
they are much more like a MitM caching HTTPS proxy: trusted by users as safe, while totaly unsafe.
You mean safe because everyone involved knows what’s happening?
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I don’t believe the concerns are really concerns for the common user.
You should define “common user”.
If you mean the politically inepts who are happy to be easily manipulated…So in your opinion, the average user does not deserve the protection of being able to browse the net as safe as we can make it for them?
I’m not sure if you are serious or you are pretending to not understand to cope with your lack of arguments.
Let’s assume the first… for now.I’m saying the concerns raised by ungleich are serious and could affect any person who is not politically inept. That’s obviously because, anyone politically inept is unlikely to be affected by surveillance.
That’s it.they are much more like a MitM caching HTTPS proxy: trusted by users as safe, while totaly unsafe.
You mean safe because everyone involved knows what’s happening?
Really?
Are you sure everyone understand what is a MitM attack? Are you sure every employee understand their system administrators can see the mail they reads from GMail? I think you don’t have much experience with users and I hope you don’t design user interfaces.A MitM caching HTTPS proxy is not safe. It can be useful for corporate surveillance, but it’s not safe for users. And it extends the attack surface, both for the users and the company.
As for Mozilla: as I said, I’m just not sure whether they deserve trust or not.
I hope they do! Really! But it’s really too naive to think that a contract is enough to bind a company more than a subpoena. And they ship WebAssembly. And you have to edit about:config to disable JavaScript…
All this is very suspect for a company that claims to care about users’ privacy!-
I’m saying the concerns raised by ungleich are serious and could affect any person who is not politically inept.
I’m saying the concerns raised by ungleich are too extreme and should be dismissed on grounds of being not practical in the real world.
Are you sure everyone understand what is a MitM attack?
An attack requires an adversary, the evil one. A HTTPS Caching proxy isn’t the evil or enemy, you have to opt into this behaviour. It is not an attack and I think it’s not fair to characterise it as such.
Are you sure every employee understand their system administrators can see the mail they reads from GMail?
Yes. When I signed my work contract this was specifically pointed out and made clear in writing. I see no problem with that.
And it extends the attack surface, both for the users and the company.
And it also enables caching for users with less than stellar bandwidth (think third world countries where satellite internet is common, 500ms ping, 80% packet loss, 1mbps… you want caching for the entire network, even with HTTPS)
And they ship WebAssembly.
And? I have on concerns about WebAssembly. It’s not worse than obfuscated javascript. It doesn’t enable anything that wasn’t possible before via asm.js. The post you linked is another security maximalist opinion piece with little factual arguments.
And you have to edit about:config to disable JavaScript…
Or install a half-way competent script blocker like uMatrix.
All this is very suspect for a company that claims to care about users’ privacy!
I think it’s understandable for a company that both cares about users privacy and doesn’t want a marketshare of “only security maximalists”, also known as, 0%.
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An attack requires an adversary, the evil one.
According to this argument, you don’t need HTTPS until you don’t have an enemy.
It shows very well your understanding of security.The attacker described in threat model are potential enemies. Yorr security depends on how well you avoid or counter potential attacks.
I have on concerns about WebAssembly.
Not a surprise.
Evidently you never had to debug neither an obfuscated javascript nor an optimized binary (without sources or debug symbols).
Trust one who did both: obfuscated javascript is annoying, understanding what an optimized binary is doing is hard.
As for packet loss caching at all, you didn’t reas what I wrote, and I won’t feed you more.
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According to this argument, you don’t need HTTPS until you don’t have an enemy.
If there is no adversary, no Malory in the connection, there is no reason to encrypt it either, correct.
It shows very well your understanding of security.
My understanding in security is based on threat models. A threat model includes who you trust, who you want to talk to and who you don’t trust. It includes how much money you want to spend, how much your attacker can spend and the methods available to both of you.
There is no binary security, a threat model is the entry point and your protection mechanisms should match your threat model as best as possible or exceed it, but there is no reason to exert effort beyond your threat model.
The attacker described in threat model are potential enemies. Yorr security depends on how well you avoid or counter potential attacks.
Malory is a potential enemy. An HTTPS caching proxy operated by a corporation is not an enemy. It’s not malory, it’s Bob, Alice and Eve where Bob wants to send Alice a message, she works for Eve and Eve wants to avoid having duplicate messages on the network, so Eve and Alice agree that caching the encrypted connection is worthwile.
Malory sits between Eve and Bob not Bob and Alice.
Evidently you never had to debug neither an obfuscated javascript nor an optimized binary (without sources or debug symbols).
I did, in which case I either filed a Github issue if the project was open source or I notified the company that offered the javascript or optimized binary. Usually the bug is then fixed.
It’s not my duty or problem to debug web applications that I don’t develop.
Trust one who did both: obfuscated javascript is annoying, understanding what an optimized binary is doing is hard.
Then don’t do it? Nobody is forcing you.
As for packet loss caching at all, you didn’t reas what I wrote, and I won’t feed you more.
I don’t think you consider that a practical problem such as bad connections can outweigh a lot of potential security issues since you don’t have the time or user patience to do it properly and in most cases it’ll be good enough for the average user.
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Another system where division by zero is possible is wheel theory, which is similar to the system described here in that 1/x is not always the multiplicative inverse of x, as indeed it isn’t when x = 0.
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A realization I recently had:
Why don’t we abstract away all display affordances from a piece of code’s position in a file? That is, the editor reads the file, parses its AST, and displays it according to the programmer’s preference (e.g., elastic tabstops, elm-like comma-leading lists, newline/no-newline before opening braces, etc). And prior to save, the editor simply runs it through an uncustomized
prettierfirst.There are a million and one ways to view XML data without actually reading/writing pure XML. Why not do that with code as well?
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And once you take it a step further, it’s clear that it shouldn’t be in a text file in the first place. Code just isn’t text. If you store it as a tree or a graph in some sort of database, it becomes possible to interact with it in much more powerful ways (including displaying it any way you like). We’ve been hobbled by equating display representation with storage format.
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This talk touches on this issue, along with some related ones and HCI in general: Bret Victor: The Future of Programming
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God, I have been trying to recall the name of this talk for ages! Thank you so much, it is a great recommendation
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Text is great when (not if) your more complicated tools fail or do something you can’t tolerate and you need to use tools which don’t Respect The Intent of designers who, for whatever reason, don’t respect your intent or workflow. Sometimes, solving a problem means working around a breakage, whether or not that breakage is intentional on someone else’s part.
Besides, we just (like, last fifteen or so years) got text to the point where it’s largely compatible. Would be a shame to throw that away in favor of some new AST-database-thing which only exists on a few platforms.
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I’m not sure I get your point about about intent. Isn’t the same already true of, say, compilers? There are compiler bugs that we have to work around, there are programs that seem logical to us but the compiler won’t accept, and so on. Still, everybody seems to be mostly happy to file a compiler bug or a feature request, and live with a workaround for the present. Seems like it works well enough in practice.
I understand your concern about introducing a new format but it sounds like a case of worse-is-better. Sure, we get a lot of convenience from the ubiquity of text, but it would nevertheless be sad if we were stuck with it for the next two centuries.
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I’ve never seen anyone casually swap out the compiler for production code. Also, for the longest time, if you wrote C++ for Windows, you pretty much had to use the Microsoft compiler. I’m sure that there are many embedded platforms with a single compiler.
If there’s a bug in the compiler, in most casss you work around it, then patiently wait for a fix from the vendor.
So that’s hardly a valid counterpoint.
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Yes, I’m aware of that, but what does it have to do with anything I said?
EDIT: Hey, I went to Canterbury :)
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“I’ve never seen anyone casually swap out the compiler for production code” sounded like you were saying people didn’t tend to compile the same production code on multiple compilers, which of course anyone that compiles on windows and non-windows does. Sorry if I misinterpreted your comment!
My first comment is in response to another Kiwi. Small world. Pretty cool.
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This, this, a thousand times this. Text is a good user-interface for code (for now). But it’s a terrible storage and interchange format. Every tool needs its own parser, and each one is slightly different, leaving begging the amount of cpu and programmer time we waste going from text<->ast<->text.
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Yeah, it’s obviously wasteful and limiting. Why do you think we are still stuck with text? Is it just sheer inertia and incrementalism, or does text really offer advantages that are challenging to recreate with other formats?
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The text editor I use can handle any computer language you can throw at it. It doesn’t matter if it’s BASIC, C, BCPL, C++, SQL, Prolog, Fortran 77, Pascal, x86 Assembler, Forth, Lisp, JavaScript, Java, Lua, Make, Hope, Go, Swift, Objective-C, Rexx, Ruby, XSLT, HTML, Perl, TCL, Clojure, 6502 Assembler, 68000 Assembler, COBOL, Coffee, Erlang, Haskell, Ocaml, ML, 6809 Assembler, PostScript, Scala, Brainfuck, or even Whitespace. [1]
Meanwhile, the last time I tried an IDE (last year I think) it crashed hard on a simple C program I attempted to load into it. It was valid C code [2]. That just reinforced my notion that we aren’t anywhere close to getting away from text.
[1] APL is an issue, but only because I can’t type the character set on my keyboard.
[2] But NOT C++, which of course, everybody uses, right?
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To your point about text editors working with any language, I think this is like arguing that the only tool required by a carpenter is a single large screwdriver: you can use it as a hammer, as a chisel, as a knife (if sharpened), as a wedge, as a nail puller, and so on. Just apply sufficient effort and ingenuity! Does that sound like an optimal solution?
My preference is for powerful specialised tools rather than a single thing that can be kind of sort of applied to a task.
Or, to approach from the opposite direction, would you say that a CAD application or Blender are bad tools because they only work with a limited number of formats? If only they also allowed you to edit JPEGs and PDFs, they would be so much better!
To your point about IDEs: I think that might even support my argument. Parsing of freeform text is apparently sufficiently hard that we’re still getting issues like the one you saw.
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I use other tools besides the text editor—I use version control, compilers, linkers, debuggers, and a whole litany of Unix tools (grep, sed, awk, sort, etc). The thing I want to point out is that as long as the source code is in ASCII (or UTF-8), I can edit it. I can study it. I might not be able to compile it (because I lack the INRAC compiler but I can still view the code). How does one “view” Smalltalk code when one doesn’t have Smalltalk? Or Visual Basic? Last I hear, Microsoft wasn’t giving out the format for Visual Basic programs (and good luck even finding the format for VB from the late 90s).
The other issue I have with IDEs (and I will come out and say I have a bias against the things because I’ve never had one that worked for me for any length of time without crashing, and I’ve tried quite a few over 30 years) is that you have one IDE for C++, and one for Java, and one for Pascal, and one for Assembly [1] and one for Lua and one for Python and man … that’s just too many damn environments to deal with [2]. Maybe there are IDEs now that can work with more than one language [3] but again, I’ve yet to find one that works.
I have nothing against specialized tools like AutoCAD or Blender or PhotoShop or even Deluxe Paint, as long as there is a way to extract the data when the tool (or the company) is no longer around. Photo Shop and Deluxe Paint work with defined formats that other tools can understand. I think Blender works with several formats, but I am not sure about AutoCAD (never having used it).
So, why hasn’t anyone stored and manipulated ASTs? I keep hearing cries that we should do it, but yet, no one has yet done it … I wonder if it’s harder than you even imagine …
Edited to add: Also, I’m a language maven, not a tool maven. It sounds like you are a tool maven. That colors our perspectives.
[1] Yes, I’ve come across several of those. Never understood the appeal …
[2] For work, I have to deal with C, C++, Lua, Make and Perl.
[3] Yeah, the last one that claimed C/C++ worked out so well for me.
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For your first concern about the long term accessibility of the code, you’ve already pointed out the solution: a defined open format.
Regarding IDEs: I’m not actually talking about IDEs; I’m talking about an editor that works with something other than text. Debugging, running the code, profiling etc. are different concerns and they can be handled separately (although again, the input would be something other than text). I suppose it would have some aspects of an IDE because you’d be manipulating the whole code base rather than individual files.
Regarding the language maven post: I enjoyed reading it a few years ago (and in practice, I’ve always ended up in the language camp as an early adopter). It was written 14 years ago, and I think the situation is different now. People have come to expect tooling, and it’s much easier to provide it in the form of editor/IDE plugins. Since language creators already have to do a huge amount of work to make programs in their languages executable in some form, I don’t think it would be an obstacle if the price of admission also included dealing with the storage format and representation.
To your point about lack of implementations: don’t Smalltalk and derivatives such as Pharo qualify? I don’t know if they store ASTs but at least they don’t store text. I think they demonstrate that it’s at least technically possible to get away from text, so the lack of mainstream adoption might be caused by non-technical reasons like being in a local maximum in terms of tools.
The problem, as always, is that there is such a huge number of tools already built around text that it’s very difficult to move to something else, even if the post-transition state of affairs would be much better.
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Text editors are language agnostic.
I’m trying to conceive of an “editor” that works with something other than text. Say an AST. Okay, but in Pascal, you have to declare variables at the top of each scope; you can declare variables anywhere in C++. In Lua, you can just use a variable, no declaration required. LISP, Lua and JavaScript allow anonymous functions; only the latest versions of C++ and Java allow anonymous functions, but they they’re restricted in that you can’t create closures, since C++ and Java have no concept of closures. C++ has exceptions, Java has two types of exceptions, C doesn’t; Lua kind of has exceptions but not really. An “AST editor” would have to somehow know that is and isn’t allowed per language, so if I’m editing C++ and write an anonymous function, I don’t reference variables outside the scope of said function, but that it can for Lua.
Okay, so we step away from AST—what other format do you see as being better than text?
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I don’t think it could be language agnostic - it would defeat the purpose as it wouldn’t be any more powerful than existing editors. However, I think it could offer largely the same UI, for similar languages at least.
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And that is my problem with it. As stated, I use C, C++ [1], Lua, Make and a bit of Perl. That’s at least what? Three different “editors” (C/C++, Lua/Perl (maybe), Make). No thank you, I’ll stick with a tool that can work with any language.
[1] Sparingly and where we have no choice; no one on my team actually enjoys it.
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Personally, I’m not saying you should need to give up your editor of choice. Text is a good (enough for now) UI for coding. But it’s a terrible format to build tools on. If the current state of the code lived in some sort of event-based graph database for example, your changes could trigger not only your incremental compiler, but source analysis (only on what’s new), it could also maintain a semantic changelog for version control, trigger code-generation (again, only what’s new).
There’s a million things that are currently “too hard” which would cease to be too hard if we had a live model of the code as various graphs (not just the ast, but call graphs, inheritance graphs, you-name-it) that we could subscribe to, or even write purely-functional consumers that are triggered only on changes.
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Inertia, arrogance, worse-is-better; Working systems being trapped behind closed doors at big companies; Hackers taking their language / editor / process on as part of their identity that needs to be defended with religious zeal; The complete destruction of dev tools as a viable business model; Methodologies-of-the-week…. The causes are numerous and varied, and the result is software dev is being hamstrung and we’re all wasting countless hours and dollars doing things computers should be doing for us.
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I think that part of the issue is that we haven’t seen good structured editor support outside of Haskell and some Lisps.
Having a principled foundation for structured editor + a critical mass by having it work for a language like Javascript/Ruby, would go a long way to making this concept more mainstream. After which we could say “provide a grammar for favorite language X and get structured editor support!”. This then becomes “everything is structured at all levels!”
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I think it’s possible that this only works for a subset of languages.
Structured editing is good in that it operates at a higher level than characters, but ultimately it’s still a text editing tool, isn’t it? For example, I think it should be trivial to pull up a list of (editable) definitions for all the functions in a project that call a given function, or to sort function and type definitions in different ways, or to substitute function calls in a function with the bodies of those functions to a given depth (as opposed to switching between different views to see what those functions do). I don’t think structured editing can help with tasks like that.
There are also ideas like Luna, have you seen it? I’m not convinced by the visual representation (it’s useful in some situations but I’m not sure it’s generally effective), but the interesting thing is they provide both a textual and a visual representation of the code.
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Smalltalk. The word you’re looking for is Smalltalk. ;)
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Possibly, but I’m only talking about a single aspect of it: being able to analyse and manipulate the code in more powerful ways than afforded by plain text. I think that’s equally possible for FP languages.
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Ultimately I think this is the only teneble solution. I feel I must be in the minority in having an extreme dislike of columnar-style code, and what I call “white space cliffs” where a column dictates a sudden huge increase in whitespace. But I realize how much it comes down to personal aesthetics, so I wish we could all just coexist :)
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Yeah, I’ve been messing around with similar ideas, see https://nick.zoic.org/art/waste-web-abstract-syntax-tree-editor/ although it’s only vapourware so far because things got busy …
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You can’t convert to elastic-tabstop style from that, and without heavy language-grammar knowledge you can’t do this for 4-space “tabs” generally.
Every editor ever supports this for traditional indent style, though: http://intellindent.info/seriously/
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To be clear, you can absolutely render a file that doesn’t have elastic tabstops as if it did. The way a file is rendered has nothing to do with the actual text in the file.
It’s like you’re suggesting that you can’t render a file containing a ton of numbers as a 3D scene in a game engine. That would be just wrong.
Regardless, my point is specifically that this elastic tabstops thing is not necessary and hurts code readability more than it helps.
The pefantics of clarifying between tabs and tabstops is a silly thing as well. Context gives more than enough information to know which one is being talked about.
It sounds like this concept is creating more problems than it solves, and is causing your editor to solve problems that only exist in the seveloper’s imagination. It’s not “KISS” at all, quite the opposite.
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Because presentation isn’t just a function of the AST. Indentation usually is, but alignment can be visually useful for all kinds of reasons.
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I laughed when I saw this as historical. I was working on a Z Series security project last year. They’re everywhere.
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Another youngster who equates “intuitive” with “like Unix” (I assume, since no other definition is given). :)
She is shocked to find that “a data set is a file”, despite the term “data set” being the older one. When called on this in the comments, she says “the term “data set” refers to a broad collecting of constructs that have wildly different behavior and purposes” — well, the “Unix philosophy” is literally “everything is a file”, and it’s hard to find a broader collection of constructs than that!
Surprise, computer systems still exist that aren’t Unix and don’t share any heritage with it. You know what? They all used to be like that.
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Another youngster who equates “intuitive” with “like Unix” (I assume, since no other definition is given). :)
Like Unix, which is like VMS, which is like MS-DOS, which is like Windows except to the extent Windows has moved away from MS-DOS and become more like either VMS or Unix. MS-DOS itself is CP/M with more Unix grafted onto it, which you can see if you try to name a file CON.
My point is, intuitive means familiar, and Unix is what’s familiar outside of a few insular realms. Acting all surprised at this is odd, at this point.
Surprise, computer systems still exist that aren’t Unix and don’t share any heritage with it. You know what? They all used to be like that.
Quiet, or you’ll awaken the people who know OSes which don’t share any heritage with CTSS! ;)
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The systems that exist in the Serious IBM Business world are not very accessible to outsiders. Unix is everywhere, Unix has won, of course “like Unix” is intuitive for most of us.
Also, seriously,
touch some.fileis objectively easier than filling out a form with 16 (sixteen!) fields :D-
Windows, Mac OS X, UNIX, iOS, and Android. Those collectively won. The intuitive feel will connect to one or more of them depending on audience background.
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Look at the man page of find and then talk to me about intuitive. :)
Oh, mentioning the form reminds me of another thing that bugged me — not realizing a 327x terminal is page-based, not character stream based. You fill out forms on the screen and submit the whole page at once. So of course you have to type the command in the right place. Just like in a web browser, which I’m guessing is “intuitive” now, but sure wasn’t in, e.g., 1994.
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I have a half-formed idea in my head, based on reading this and a lot of other things, so I might as well post:
You can’t run a society with only nice people. Not that you need to be not-nice to run a society, although that might also be the case, but that there’s no consistent set of nice people in the world, both as society changes and what was nice becomes not-nice and vice-versa, and, more importantly, as people exist and are people and bounce off each other and leave bruises in that bouncing. Nobody’s perceived as nice all the time, regardless of their intentions, and the Fundamental Attribution Error (“I did that because I had a bad day, they did that because they’re fundamentally shitty people we must now shun forever.”) fundamentally guarantees that good faith will not always be assumed.
You might be able to hold organizations to higher standards, if you realize that organizations don’t have morals, they have interests, which might not always align with yours. Not understanding that leads you into errors like thinking the ACLU is fundamentally opposed to Christians: They’ve defended Christians in the past, and will do so in the future, but they’ve also not taken the side of Christians. The ACLU’s stance is very consistent, but if you view the world in terms of Christian/Anti-Christian or Nice/Not-Nice or any other single axis, and won’t budge, it seems either random or evil.
All the echo chambers are open. The center cannot hold, and mere Not-Niceness is loosed upon the world.
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Painting in broad strokes and without acknowledgment of context and history is not a good way to have a conversation.
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Having PRIMARY and CLIPBOARD is a good thing and once you get used to it, it’s like having two clipboards.
Shame he never tells how to actually use them both. Afaict only the primary selection is usable with the default binds.
XTerm.VT100.translations: #override \n\ Ctrl Shift <Key>C: copy-selection(CLIPBOARD) \n\ Ctrl Shift <Key>V: insert-selection(CLIPBOARD)Now if only I could get all the other software to support them both as well.
EDIT: Another tip. If you find the font sizes available in the menu to be ridiculous, they’re pretty easy to change.
XTerm*faceSize1: 8 XTerm*faceSize2: 10 XTerm*faceSize3: 13 XTerm*faceSize4: 16 XTerm*faceSize5: 20 XTerm*faceSize6: 26faceSize1 corresponds to “Unreadable.”
Now would someone give me key binds to decrease/increase font size? :-)
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You might want to read X Selections, Cut Buffers, and Kill Rings for how to use the PRIMARY and CLIPBOARD selections in X Windows.
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It doesn’t, and can’t really explain how to use them because there is no way to use them in X. Instead, you have to use them in applications running under X and each application does its own thing. I still don’t know if there’s a way to copy to clipboard in xterm without creating a custom bind.
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I’m pretty sure “X Windows” is much older than that (as is MS Windows). I vaguely recall reading about “X Windows” in Byte magazine in 1993 or so.
The comp.windows.x newsgroup goes back to at least 1987 (https://groups.google.com/forum/message/raw?msg=comp.windows.x/TtNRIfTKqsw/i7hzWBiDfkgJ), a month after X11 was created. They even refer to it as “x-windows”.
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Could it have been a different implementation? Cuz I remember doing the RTFM thing way back when, and it was very clear about not being “X Windows”, though didn’t specify why.
Sorry if this is explained in the link. Can’t be arsed with Google. Usenet used to come without opt-in spying.
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Now would someone give me key binds to decrease/increase font size? :-)
i have the following
*VT100*translations: #override \ Meta <Key> minus: smaller-vt-font() \n\ Meta <Key> plus: larger-vt-font() \n\ Super <Key> minus: smaller-vt-font() \n\ Super <Key> plus: larger-vt-font() \n\and either meta/super keys work as expected.
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This is a parody of the GWAN web server. These Hacker News discussions have some context about GWAN:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8130849
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4109698
And about their insane attempt at a CATPCHA:
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I believe the website is made in a parody style, but the project itself appears real.
references:
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Is this supposed to be designed for female programmers? If so what makes it specific to women?
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About and contributing
This tutorial is maintained by DjangoGirls.
Following the link gets us this (emphasis mine):
Django Girls is a non-profit organization and a community that empowers and helps women to organize free, one-day programming workshops by providing tools, resources and support. We are a volunteer run organization with hundreds of people contributing to bring more amazing women into the world of technology. We are making technology more approachable by creating resources designed with empathy.
To me, it looks like they created high quality approachable documentation as material for their workshops, to further their goal of bringing women into tech. “Designed with empathy” probably means it avoids using exclusive language, anecdotes, analogies, and so on. So less “designed for female programmers” and more “doesn’t assume programmers are typically male.”
Otherwise, nothing. I don’t reckon a bunch of women were about to write the “Django Bros Tutorial.”
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As others have said, the tutorial name just comes from the organisation.
It’s notable in that it is tutorial meant for people with 0 knowledge and possible contact issues with computers.
Also, FWIW, the “Girls” name for those organisations (coming from “Rails Girls” is widely regarded a mistake now. The chapter I help out with (Rails Girls Berlin) has recently renamed into “Code Curious”. Turns out that grown women don’t feel spoken to by “Girls”.
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Turns out that grown women don’t feel spoken to by “Girls”.
This is a cultural thing, by which I mean there are women in the US, at least, who are older than I am (34) who wouldn’t be troubled by being called “girls” or would actively appreciate it as a sign of informality.
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It’s not that people saw it insulting or something, we had a lot of people that just didn’t feel addressed at first contact! The amount of people we found passing on the project on first contact for the reason that they thought it was for people under 18 was notable.
Interestingly, the US version (and precursor) of Rails Girls is called RailsBridge for reasons of not typecasting.
It’s a thing to write books about :D. I’m quite interested how Code Curious turns out. RG is quite a successful brand, which is lost in the process.
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Reminds me of an old saying: “Bloat” is any feature I don’t use right now.
It’s impossible to say something is “bloated” based only on its size. You don’t know why all of that code is there, and you don’t know if there are smaller ways to solve all the same problems. (Stated differently, if you do know there are smaller ways to solve all the same problems, propose them to the Linux people.) And it’s dishonest to cut things out of the problem in the name of cutting them out of the solution: If your project doesn’t solve all the same problems, it’s meaningless to compare it to something which does. It would be like saying a Nissan is bloated compared to a go-kart.
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If you want the smallest binary possible, you’ll have to cut out a lot of abstractions (libc? dynamic linking? nobody needs that!), employ tricks like these, make use of programming styles that are unorthodox even for assembly programmimng, and use specialised packers and unpackers (like this one, this one, this one, …).
Of course, the project maintainers will call you nuts and not accept your patches.
Besides, the extra size (and worse performance, etc. etc.) doesn’t always happen because of adding features, but rather because of (I think unnecessary) abstraction layers piled on top of one another, mostly things that can be done at compile-time. Here’s an essay describing a thought experiment making it a little more clear.
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I don’t think any of those tricks should be necessary for targetting a 1.5 meg base system. After all, 1.5 meg base systems were extremely common twenty-five years ago, produced by regular C compilers from regular C code by people who weren’t making any particular effort to trim them down.
You can do incredible things in 4k if you employ those tricks. But, 4k is the size of a completely empty file on unix!
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Yeah, I know someone who runs a keyserver and they are getting absolutely sick of responding to the GDPR troll emails.
Love the idea to use activitypub (the same technology involved in mastadon) for keyservers. That’s really smart!
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Offtopic: Excuse me.
I think it depends on some conditions, so not everybody is going to see this every time. But when I click on medium links I tend to get this huge dialog box come up over the entire page saying some thing about registering or something. It’s really annoying. I wish we could host articles somewhere that doesn’t do this.
My opinion is that links should be links to some content. Not links to some kind of annoyware that I have to click past to get to the real article.
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Use the cached link for Medium articles. It doesn’t have the popup. Just the content.
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I started running uMatrix and added rules to block all 1st party JS by default. It does take a while to white list things, yes, but it’s amazing when you start to see how many sites use Javascript for stupid shit. Imgur requires Javascript to view images! So do all Square Space sites (it’s for those fancy hover-over zoom boxes).
As a nice side effect, I rarely ever get paywall modals. If the article doesn’t show, I typically plug it into archive.is rather than enable javascript when I shouldn’t have to.
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How timely! Someone at the office just shared this with me today: http://makemediumreadable.com
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From what I can see, the popup is just a begging bowl, there’s actually no paywall or regwall involved.
I just click the little X in the top right corner of the popup.
But I do think that anyone who likes to blog more than a couple of times a year should just get a domain, a VPS and some blog software. It helps decentralization.
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I use the kill sticky bookmarklet to dismiss overlays such as the one on medium.com. And yes, then I have to refresh the page to get the scroll to work again.
On other paywall sites when I can’t scroll, (perhaps because I removed some paywall overlay to get at the content below,) I’m able to restore scrolling by finding the overflow-x CSS property and altering or removing it. …Though, that didn’t work for me just now on medium.com.
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I run an SKS keyserver, have some patches in the codebase, wrote the operations documents in the wiki, etc.
Each keyserver is run by volunteers, peering with each other to exchange keys. The design was based around “protection against government attempts to censor keys”, dating from the first crypto wars. They’re immutable append-only logs, and the design approach is probably about dead. Each keyserver operator has their own policies.
I am a US citizen, living in the USA, with a keyserver hosted in the USA. My server’s privacy statement
is at https://sks.spodhuis.org/#privacybut that does not cover anyone else running keyservers. [update: I’ve taken my keyserver down, copy/paste of former privacy policy at: https://gist.github.com/philpennock/0635864d34a323aa366b0c30c7360972 ]You don’t know who is running keyservers. It’s “highly likely” that at least one nation has some acronym agency running one, at some kind of arms-length distance: it’s an easy and cheap way to get metadata about who wants to communicate privately with whom, where you get the logs because folks choose to send traffic to you as a service operator. I went into a little more depth on this over at http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2017/12/10/1
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Thanks for this info.
Fundamentally, GDPR is about giving the right to individuals to censor content related to themselves.
A system set out to thwart any censorship will fall afoul of GDPR, based on this interpretation
However, people who use a keyserver are presumably A-OK with associating their info with an append-only immutable system. Sadly , GDPR doesn’t really take this use case into account (I think, I am not a lawyer).
I think what’s important to note about GDPR is that there’s an authority in each EU country that’s responsible for handling complaints. Someone might try to troll keyserver sites by attempting to remove their info, but they will have to make their case to this authority. Hopefully this authority will read the rules of the keyserver and decide that the complainant has no real case based on the stated goals of the keyserver site… or they’ll take this as a golden opportunity to kneecap (part of) secure communications.
I still think GDPR in general is a good idea - it treats personal info as toxic waste that has to be handled carefully, not as a valuable commodity to be sold to the highest bidder. Unfortunately it will cause damage in edge cases, like this.
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gerikson you make really good points there about the GDPR.
Consenting people are not the focus of this entirely though , its about current and potential abuse of the servers and people who have not consented to their information being posted and there being no way for removal.
The Supervisory Authority’s wont ignore that, this is why the key servers need to change to prevent further abuse and their extinction.
They also wont consider this case, just like the recent ICANN case where they want it to be a requirement to store your information publicly with your domain which was rejected outright. The keyservers are not necessary to the functioning of the keys you upload, and a big part of the GDPR is processing only as long as necessary.
Someone recently made a point about the below term non-repudiation.
Non-repudiation this means in digital securityA service that provides proof of the integrity and origin of data. An authentication that can be asserted to be genuine with high assurance.KeyServers don’t do this!, you can have the same email address as anyone else, and even the maintainers and creator of the sks keyservers state this as well and recommend you check through other means to see if keys are what they appear to be, such as telephone or in person.
I also don’t think this is an edge case i think its a wake up call to rethink the design of the software and catch up with the rest of the world and quickly.
Lastly i don’t approve of trolling, if your doing it just for the sake of doing it “DON’T”, if you genuinely feel the need to submit a “right to erasure” due to not consenting to having your data published, please do it.
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Thank you for the link: http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2017/12/10/1, its a fantastic read and makes some really good points.
Its easy for anyone to get hold of recent dumps from the sks servers, i have just hunted through a recent dump of 5 million + keys yesterday looking for interesting data. Will be writing an article soon about it.
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I’m thinking of setting up a blog platform, like Medium, but totally free of bullshit for both the readers and the writers. Though the authors pay a small fee to host their blog (it’s a personal website/blog engine, as opposed to Medium which is much more public and community-like).
If that could be something that interests you, let me know and I’ll let you know :)
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lmao you don’t even get paid when someone has to pay for your article?
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No, but it’s on my list of potential features to consider when Lobsters gets several times the comments it does now. For now the ‘off-topic’ votes do OK at prompting people to start new top-level threads, but I feel like I’m seeing a slow increase in threads where promoting a branch to a top-level comment would be useful enough to justify the disruption.
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I’m surprised this doesn’t use sixels to get real graphics:
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Wouldn’t hurt to have an alternative to elinks, but Firefox would pull in such an amount of dependencies that it would hurt the elinks use case :(
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Ah they tricked me with this one, it’s a Medium article hidden behind another domain.
(Whenever I see “medium.com” next to lobsters articles I know not to click, since the result will be a weak thinkpiece by a frontend developer, wrapped in obtrusive markup.)
i had literally the exact same response. “Ah, a medium article….about frontend dev……(tab closed)”.
Interesting ‘hot take’!
You judge people based on the ‘medium’ that they use.
“The medium is the message” ;)
I have to admit though that seeing a medium link is generally a negative signal for me. Still click on many of them.
I think Medium’s original USP was “only quality content”.
Predictably, that didn’t scale.
Many confuse Marshall McLuhan’s original meaning of that phrase. It didn’t really mean that the way a message was delivered was part of the message itself. It actually meant that the vast majority of messages were medium or average.
It would have been better said, “meh, the message is average.”
Interesting interpretation. I am not sure how he originally came to that phrase, but his book certainly spent a lot of time and effort arguing for the now prevalent meaning.
This didn’t really make sense to me, so I looked it up, and I don’t think that’s right. The original meaning is exactly what we’ve come to understand it as:
I wonder where you’ve heard your interpretation?
This comment is obviously a troll. Fitting, given that McLuhan himself was a troll.