My boss (and mentor) from 25 years ago told me to think of the problems I was solving with a 3-step path:
1. Get a solution working
2. Make the solution correct
3. Make the solution efficient
Most importantly, he emphasizes that the work must be done in that order. I've taken that everywhere with me.
I think one of the problems is that quite often, due to business pressure to ship, step 3 is simply skipped. Often, software is shipped half-way through step 2 -- software that is at best partially correct.
The pushes the problem down to the user, who might be building a system around the shipped code. This compounds the problem of software bloat, as all the gaps have to be bridged.
I'll admit, my perspective is now 16, almost 17 years out-of-date, but my read of this article is that nothing much has advanced beyond what I was doing in the field back then.
My job? Data plumber and analyst, same as now. I scripted the nuts-and-bolts of matching the mass/time/time data off the instrument being developed by much more qualified PhD candidates and their advisor while I finished up my own degree. They did the heavy lifting. I was paid for by F&A funds to do the boring work. Great job for a student.
The job lead to a failed business venture. Water under the bridge. My last foray in data analysis was Principal Component Analysis of the data, trying to cluster detected proteins for visual analysis. I got the plots working outside of Matlab, and then my position was eliminated.
I have a rag-mag credit I could chase down to support my war story. To be honest, I read the article looking for familiar names and faces.
I’m pretty sure this article is out of date, or at least the lab they interviewed is. The latest Bruker TOF quadrupole ion trap mass spec is able to sample (tens of?) thousands of ion or m/z datapoints per minute with an optional electrospray ionizer that can handle 100s of kilodaltons so that’s no longer the bottleneck for most proteomics. Actually discriminating charge ratios and data analysis now is.
However I don’t think many academic labs have those mass specs because CROs and pharmaceutical companies have been buying out Bruker’s entire production line and running them almost 24/7 to analyze samples from clinical trials. Since they’re limited in how much blood they can draw per patient, those mass specs significantly expand the number of analytes they can test for and they’re willing to pay serious money for that.
As noted above, I was working out of an academic lab developing new equipment. We had current-level commercial equipment at the time to use in comparisons. I matched data to the data dictionary, recovered backups, scripted backups, sent alerts to grad students that their results were done, maintained and expanded the visualization software, consulted and contributed code to a Monte Carlo simulation to demonstrate that data collected was better than random and by how much... Great little projects for a budding software developer. I had to learn just enough Chemistry and Physics beyond what I already knew to be dangerous (and also understand the what and why of what I was doing and be able to ask clarifying questions). It was fun.
Writ-large, isn't what the article is referring to the plot of 生きる(Ikiru, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikiru)? My suspicion is that the solution to lack of ability for government to enable building in the US will be the same, writ-large, as in the movie. That is, it will happen, but (I'll stop here, least I spoil the movie for you).
For my sins, I work in Education supporting PeopleSoft. That means that I do work in COBOL on occasion. I am not tasked with writing anything new in COBOL, but I so quite a bit of analysis and support. That is: I _read_ COBOL more than I write it.
There are three flavors of COBOL that I deal with: PeopleSoft delivered, Vendor delivered, and University modified. Most of the work I do in COBOL breaks down to reading the code to determine why a given behavior is observed. Only once (in University modified code) have I needed to make an actual edit. The rest of the times I either modify the flow of information into the COBOL code or I modify the resultant after the code has run.
Worked at a large insurance company in the late 90s where leadership touted a big benefit of converting to PeopleSoft Financials as part of their Y2K remediation was the elimination of their dependency on the archaic COBOL language, blissfully unaware that their new PeopleSoft applications were using Micro Focus COBOL under the covers. Oops! https://blogs.oracle.com/peoplesoft/post/take-note-significa...
Going on thirty years ago, I had some experience with Peoplesoft. I'm interested to hear that it still uses COBOL, though on the other hand, why shouldn't it?
This brought back shades of 20 years ago to me. I went back to school to add a credential after my name to make myself employable. My experience running the back office for a long-distance reseller (FoxPro 2.6 database: application support, running customer service, billing, reporting, and being the networking yeoman) didn't look impressive on my resume without some additional alphabet soup.
This was my programming languages -- interpreters class. Dr Daniel Friedman ran a teach-along that culminated in implementing miniKanren in scheme. First day of class, the front row was empty. I was ten years older than every other student in the room (with the exception of Will Byrd). I sheepishly shrugged and took one of the offered seats in the row. For the next hour, the sheer force of scheme being written on the whiteboard blew my mind open. That continued for 16 weeks, three days a week. I highly recommend the experience.
I (probably) still have a pre-press copy of The Reasoned Schemer in a box in my attic. It was one of the goodies handed out on the last day of class.
I wrote some FoxPro thing for a long-distance reselling operation circa 1994. It had to handle agent commissions on a multi-level scheme and whatnot, import call detail records from telco equipment and such.
This gives me an idea. I'm going to create a super complex and unintuitive programming language where the only error message you get is "no", and call it miniKaren. :-P
I'm not certain is if this is because I live in a city with a well-known law school, or if Lawrence Lessig dropped the idea into my thoughts first.
The idea: The first duty of any court of law is to defend its own existence.
My thesis is that this first duty colors in the rest of the legal profession, including why laws, orders, and proclamations are written in a certain way.
Minor point: The article calls out in-place definitions. Useful, if unwieldly, when footnote and endnote conventions have yet to have been defined and practiced.
The argument you and the other poster are having has been useful to me. Thank you.
For context, my family and I just returned from a lap around Lake Huron. I invite you and yours to take a similar trip in the US, just to see the differences. Earlier in the year, my family and I went to Wyoming. Once we got off the freeways, we saw what I call The Real America.
What does it look like? It looks like a place that has been repeatedly punched in the face by big corporations for 50 years. The two trips showed quite the contrast: Middle Ontario, while rural, looked quite hopeful in comparison.
Here to your South, simple solutions won again. Mostly because the losing party did not make The Vast Middle feel like their problems were seen and heard.
The machine from 30+ years ago that I regularly took apart and put back together had about 35 user-cleanable parts for the milkshake side and 12 for the ice cream side. The worst part of the ordeal was removing the rubber o-rings They went on easily enough, but removing took quite a bit of patience. The whole process took about 30 minutes, start-to-finish, including soaking the washed parts in bleach -- no dishwasher as the blades used to cut the frozen ice cream base from the inside of the machine would dull and ding causing damage to the machine.
The new machines came in long after I moved on to other jobs. In ideal situations, they re-pasteurize the mix overnight, leading to a drop in 1-2 person-hours of labor.
This thing we call The Internet has always been "funny smelling" if not a bit crap. Dead? Not really. Just more and more obvious about the nature of the creation.
It is the ultimate duality. Correct use requires holding two can-be-seen-as-divergent ideas in your head at once and then making a decision as to which better applies to the current situation. It simultaneously holds a lot of information -- asymptotically approaching the sum of all human knowledge. It is also a dark mirror, containing all the assorted sins and vagaries of humankind.
To say The Internet is Dead is, in a way, to say that Humanity is Dead. Maybe, in the minority, it is. Maybe that minority is encroaching on the majority and will reach parity. Or even surpass it.
This view is an easy path towards Nihilism. It is a struggle to acknowledge the negative and push back against it anyway.
I also got strong whiffs of nihilism from this post.
Your comment reminded me of Camus's interpretation of Sisyphus:
> As a life filled entirely of mundane and trivial labor, Sisyphus’s existence is meant to illustrate the futility (and absurdity) we confront in our own lives. Camus observes that a person’s life can become, essentially, a mundane routine: “Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday and Sunday according to the same rhythm…” (12-13). Yet, for Camus, Sisyphus is not to be pitied. Sisyphus represents the “absurd hero” because he chooses to live in the face of absurdity. This “choosing to live” is a matter of consciousness, for through his attitude and outlook, Sisyphus can free himself from his punishment and triumph over his situation without being able to change it. Sisyphus is aware of the full extent of his punishment: he is fully conscious of the fate imposed on him by the gods and the utter futility of his existence. His passion, freedom, and revolt, however, make him stronger than the punishment intended to crush him.
Try the classic from 1976 to get an idea of what thinking on this was at the time funding for sleep science started: Some Must Watch While Some Must Sleep (Dement, 1976, 1978): https://archive.org/details/somemustwatchwhi00dem_3n2 (1978 edition)
My boss (and mentor) from 25 years ago told me to think of the problems I was solving with a 3-step path:
1. Get a solution working
2. Make the solution correct
3. Make the solution efficient
Most importantly, he emphasizes that the work must be done in that order. I've taken that everywhere with me.
I think one of the problems is that quite often, due to business pressure to ship, step 3 is simply skipped. Often, software is shipped half-way through step 2 -- software that is at best partially correct.
The pushes the problem down to the user, who might be building a system around the shipped code. This compounds the problem of software bloat, as all the gaps have to be bridged.