One problem: unless you have an endless amount of time, money, patience, and...did I mention patience? that just isn't a viable approach for anything but the smallest of hobby projects
So we just don't build GUI applications unless we understand all of the nuances of layout, text rendering, graphics programming, etc sufficient to implement it ourselves (and without the bugs that even domain experts have introduced but which have been found and fixed over time in libraries)? Or maybe we just say "fuck users who speak languages that aren't easily expressed in ASCII"?
There's a reason libraries exist. It's not like they were the default state of computing and no one has tried to write applications without them. On the contrary, we tried to build applications by writing everything ourselves, but that doesn't survive encounters with the real world. And "well if you can't do it yourself, you don't need it" (which may or may not be your argument, I genuinely can't tell) is just technologically regressive ideology.
Software programmer usually need to solve specific task, not worlds problems. If you go too generalized you will need 10x, 100x or 1000x more amount of time and code.
Look at Big tech, this is what they are doing, they employ thousands workers that write millions of lines of code every day, only to make it work for every case in a world. And still can't compete with specialized solution.
> Software programmer usually need to solve specific task, not worlds problems. If you go too generalized you will need 10x, 100x or 1000x more amount of time and code.
Yes, I accept this is true, but your earlier claim was much more specific: that using dependencies at all makes things worse. I gave you a specific example (GUI libraries) but you completely ignored it. How does your 0-dependencies theory survive an encounter with that basic example?
No, but if your GUI involves displaying text in multiple languages (i.e., virtually everything), you now need to become an expert in text rendering (which implies a significant breadth of knowledge in linguistics, graphics programming, constraint solving systems [for things like word wrapping], etc).
Except KISS is subjective, as are most things. Please don't take this the wrong way, but anyone who touts any one, true "religion" in sw development I have learned to take with 6 grains of salt. There is no one magic way or solution. Everything is trade offs and I've learned this over the last 30 years through trying every new magic elixir that was going to "save us all".
That said, most sw projects are determined by business need. I can't think of a single one I've ever written that hasn't needed dependencies or would have been viable had I not used some. Going to a theory level, there is no reason to think the stdlib is magically immune to the issues of a very popular dependency either. Shun absolutes and make the correct trade offs based on your business goals.
It may not be quite a URL, but it contains the URL. It definitely more than just "sort-of resembles a URL". See how the module path to URL lookup is done here: https://go.dev/ref/mod#vcs-find
I understand your meaning, but that link supports my claims. The package path helps the Go tool infer the actual URL, but it doesn't contain the URL itself (e.g., the actual URL has a scheme/protocol component and potentially a `go-get=1` query string argument which don't exist as part of the path). This is what I meant when I said it "sort-of resembles a URL", but I understand from this conversation how that wording wasn't clear.
Fair. Strictly speaking it doesn't even "contain" a URL. But I think in the context of this conversation it acts like a URL -- it allows the Go tooling to fetch code from an arbitrary domain and path on the internet.
I guess that's fine so long as you're covered by the standard library and/or are willing to reimplement a lot of stuff yourself, but that's a significant trade-off you're asking.
It sounds defensive but Go stdlib is all you need. I believe I'm qualified to say that as last year I challenged myself to only use stdlib, out of several languages I used over the course of the year on big projects, Go was painless and that was a unique experience. So far this year I haven't seen much need to add libraries to my work because everything is already within grasp.
> Intelsat-12 is a bent-pipe satellite, whose "dumb" transponders rebroadcast anything that they receive within their frequency band. Bent-pipe satellites remain the most common technology today, with no real defenses against such attacks.[1][2]
That's something else, that's known plaintext analysis using cribs. If you know that a certain text may be present in the messages then you can try a bunch of different keys and stop searching if your decrypt contains that text to inspect for a 'hit'.
It allows for instance for the de-anonymization of network nodes based on known nodes and it allows for determining which nodes in the network are more important than others.
That's an unusual take on the technical capabilities of the "old and experienced". I agree that it's generally hard to secure, but many "old and experienced" in governments are not against new technology because they understand it, but because they don't understand it.
Watch any senate/congressional/government hearing about technology related subjects from your country's government and you'll see what I mean.
> [...] many "old and experienced" in governments are not against new technology because they understand it, but because they don't understand it.
I think the thought that perhaps they've seen a proposed "huge improvement" many times before and need a little bit more than breathless enthusiasm to endorse it has merit.
Whole Continuous Improvment process is devoted for such changes. Just follow the process. 5 why's, 3 alternatives, trials, statistically significant statistic, etc.
I recall watching the congressional hearing about the Iphone encryption thing that went on a while back and being incredibly surprised at their level of competency.
It somewhat rekindled my faith in politicians, compared to the daily media circus that only focuses on the worst of the lot.
I'd expect politicians who don't understand something to bring experts that does understand that thing, not to ignore everything they don't understand.
Bringing in actual experts would be at odds with the informal duty of a politician to appease to the donors. That's why you see such obscene amounts of absurdity out of modern politics - they don't ask actual experts for advice, they ask their top donors.
> Watch any senate/congressional/government hearing about technology related subjects from your country's government and you'll see what I mean.
Has anyone done some good study / writing on the subject?
I recall, as a young know-it-all, laughing at that one Congress Critter for his "internet is a series of tubes" comment - but as I've gotten older I really just look at most of these things as plumbing data such that I'm not all that sure he was wrong.
Makes me wonder if your assertion is more based on the superficial media takes of the day, and not reality.
> an Internet [email] was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday. I got it yesterday [Tuesday]. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially.
> Makes me wonder if your assertion is more based on the superficial media takes of the day, and not reality.
Again, it's based on watching hearings and other media released by my government when they are talking about technology.
I'm in no way laughing at them for not understanding something. But I am laughing at those who pretend to understand something, or who simply ignore something because they don't understand it. It's not that hard to find experts in certain subjects, and it's really bad that they don't leverage this more for subjects they don't understand.
I love technology as much as anyone, but at the end of the day we're humans, and experience in being a human comes with time. I think detracting from the wisdom of old men because they can't post memes on their smartphone is not the best thing we could do as a society.
I'm not saying because they are "old and experienced" they don't have any value nor wisdom. I'm simply saying that don't trust their opinion on things they don't understand. And if they don't understand something, I expect them to bring themselves up to speed on that thing, or bring in others who do understand that thing. I'm not expecting them to ignore that thing simply because they don't understand it, or worse, pretend like they do understand it when it's clear they don't.
They understand something which most of us have no grasp on and small chances of getting up-to-speed about, which is governing masses of people, with the realities of the situation.
How do you even know they don’t understand, misunderstand, don’t have conflicting agendas or just don’t like an idea? It’s easy to assume, especially when one has never stepped in the backstage of politics.
I'm sorry, I'm not making any pro statement for backstage of politics. I'm saying that people who are not exposed to this, could think that they could run a better society, but ultimately they wouldn't. Coming in with high technological hopes of societal improvements while closing a blind eye to how it's actually done at this point will never work, or so I feel.
I would like a bit more context into how you feel my mentioning of backstage of politics, which is indeed how the world is run today, is detrimental to my point that old men have experience in exactly this.
You were making a broader point about expertise in governing many people, which I would consider as a general positive quality. When you then reduce that expertise to what happens behind closed doors, it (to my mind) becomes explicitly about bribery and corruption. Perhaps folks with experience have more experience with that as well, but it's not germane to their general competence in dealing with groups of people.
Unless of course you think both are intertwined in a way that cannot be separated. In that case we just disagree.
> You were making a broader point about expertise in governing many people, which I would consider as a general positive quality.
I guess this also depends where you lead them. Personally I don't consider it a positive quality, I consider it a dangerous quality.
> When you then reduce that expertise to what happens behind closed doors, it (to my mind) becomes explicitly about bribery and corruption.
I'm sure bribery and corruption are a big part of backdoor deals, but I'm sure also some discussions which would be impossible in the public space are taking place. Could you orchestrate a coup towards a hostile regime out in the public? Could you actually state your support of gay people when in a conservative party? There are a lot of things that can't be said in public space, but must be said in private in order to advance society. I feel.
> Perhaps folks with experience have more experience with that as well, but it's not germane to their general competence in dealing with groups of people.
I feel it is. I've seen a new wave of politicians in my country, they rode off on the excitement of the population for a new political force, but once they managed to get an ounce of power, their holier than thou attitude made it impossible to work with them and kinda crashed them in the polls. They are still getting my vote as they're against the status-quo, but damn it I wish they were a bit more 'backroom' in some aspects.
> Unless of course you think both are intertwined in a way that cannot be separated. In that case we just disagree.
This is actually where I stand. I am also considering the historical context of my country where in more totalitarian times, a bit of backroom dealing managed to create some form of space for revolution to happen.
Disagreement is healthy and I thank you for stating your views clearly. I hope I managed to do the same.
Experience comes from doing, not time. Just because someone is old doesn't mean they are experienced. It just means there is a greater chance they are experienced.
you expect them to be experienced in things that are your priority, but instead they are experienced in things that are their priorities, like corruption, political games to keep being in their comfy seats etc.
I don't expect them to be experienced in anything remotely related to my current life and work, instead I believe that corruption, political games, comfy seats, backdeals are how things are done today at a human level. Is it good? I don't think so. Can we just uplift this with technology and call it a day? I also don't think so.
Sounds like guy is proposing usage of Signal app, and maybe "flashing custom ROM",
"special issue smartphone"? Good luck on that, producing your own smartphone . And you are going to need to produce it to avoid hardware and software backdoors.
The naivesness of the young lad mixed with enthusiasm, grown up in ubiquitous cell and smartphone era. He could use pack of saved money to put to his ear and make call during the war now.
No surprise there.