Having used half the IDE's this person outlined, I really really really really wish every single one had a "write Makefile" option. Maybe 1/4 or the IDEs I use do that successfully. I always end up using GDB for debugging, and then the IDE for asm-level tweaking (well, I don't do the tweaking, someone smarter than me does :), but I can do 90% of my work in GDB).
In the "real world" IAR Embedded Workshop is the hands-down winner (licenses are $$$$$$), which is unfortunate because despite being so mature it is awfully clunky.
Agree so much. Every project I run, I start off working with the available IDE (Keil, Eclipse) that the manufacturer likes and then take the effort of writing a Makefile for it. Absolutely hate dealing with IDEs and their buried settings! Terminal, code editor and gdb FTW :)
Yeah, I didn't know that existed but I created my own make environment a while back. My arduinos have been gathering dust for about 5 years, ever since I discovered the ST nucleo64 line ... 80MHz, 1M flash, 256K sram, 4 UARTs, 4 SPI, 4 I2C, 20+ GPIO, 4 ADCs for under US$15 ... I pretty much stopped using Arduino everything.
Me, too. But now that I've found the Teensy 3.6, it's my new goto. It's too expensive, but it has all the power. Also, I've been doing embedded for over 20 years and I'm starting to appreciate the simplicity of Arduino. It does get most of the job done. And when I had to modify the drivres, I was able to write completely low-level code. Only walls I've run into are tweaking the linker file. I haven't been able to locate that :(
I have $2MM in my 401k I can't touch until I'm 59-1/2. I'm in my 40's and I'm worried of being broke when I'm 60. Insane? Probably. It's like no matter how much you have there's always fear. I keep thinking, "Yeah, it's all in funds and could just go poof if the DOW corrects back down to 7,000 because it took 20 years to get to where it is now..." Does the anxiety never end?
Yes you can. If you're actually going to go broke when you're 60, I'd HIGHLY recommend touching at least a bit of that cash at the cost of federal income tax.
OH, right, yes. I can pay the 30% penalty. I was pointing out how irrational my brain is and the anxiety I feel when 70% of the population is nowhere near where I'm at.
You can surely search for 3+ decades of books, studies, and articles on the declining US middle class, stagnant wages, increased housing/college/healthcare costs, etc, right?
Isn't it funny how when you ask for citations, the other person flips out and says do it yourself? Like, I have to spend my time figuring out if you actually did research or pulled something out of your ass? Sorry bro, got better things to do with my time than your work for you.
As a like-/counter-anecdote, I developed semiconductor CAD tools for 10 years, after spending 10 years using them. When they first started being developed with GUIs, GUI meant UI, and its oft-maligned sibling, UX, wasn't a term. In my learnings, Xt (XToolKit) started putting words and code behind the abstract patterns in the late 80's, but our tool usability suffered horribly as more and more (usually nonresizing) Athena widgets were crammed into every goddamn corner of the screen with microscopic b&w pixmaps. Because of the lack of distinction between UI & UX in the tool design process, tools were extremely challenging to navigate with each new feature-rich release.
One of my first tasks as a project manager in 2004 was to introduce the web concepts of UI/UX into what had become essentially commandlines converted to Tcl/Tk (after Xt we went to Tcl/Tk.. ugh).
First challenge was to convince the old timer CAD devs.
Once I was able to explain there the difference between UX and UI, it waslike a light went on over everyone's head: how you use it is different from what it looks like. I know, obvious now, but not 15 years ago. We spent 10 months really driving the new buzzword UX/UI in order to get buy-in for profiling how the top 3 existing CAD tools (formal verification, layout, and timing) were being used via instrumentation and interviews. We then proceeded to completely redesign the GUIs in Qt using a consistent set patterns, icons, and workflows.
Then we had to convince the old timer engineer users.
We put a lot of effort into classes to explain how to migrate, and holy shit did we get yelled at. So much "It worked fine before, why did you change it?!?!?!?" Uhh... because a feature you use 80% of the time required 5x more clicks to get to than a feature you used 20% of the time? FML. It got better, people liked it more on our follow ups months later. [The first product to use the new suite completed in 12 instead of 18 months and I personally believe it was due to the new tools being faster, but I'm biased, and it could have been a variety of factors.]
I agree with your point that it is frustrating as fuck when a UI/UX pattern changes, and it should not be done glibly. But I have also found myself getting angry at having to adapt to a new change that ultimately made me more productive, just because of my own inertia.
/shrugs/
PS. Ironically, as a sad end to this story: the GUI's my team made in the early/mid-2000's eventually bloated after 10 years in almost the same way the original AIX/Sparc GUI's I used in the early 90's did. New coders came on board, and new managers, and they just crammed new buttons into to the tools without thinking about the UX. That was ca 2010 when I left, so I don't know where they at today, but I did have a "the more the things change, the more they stay the same" moment!!
Fascinating! As somebody who uses that kind of software, old timer electrical engineers seem to be very very unforgiving to UI problems and even more unforgiving to any change for better or worse. I learned that while volunteering for UI/UX at horizon-EDA which aims to become a more usable kiCAD¹
I have never seen worse UX/UI than in electrical engineering tools and I worked a lot with 3D software. They are completely inconsistent with other software, often even with themselves. It often resembles the heating room of a 500 year old building were everybody added things but nobody deared to clean up the things that were already there.
My suffering as a user of such tools motivated me to change things for the better. I never got the idea behind resisting change in UI/UX. It seems to be rooted in the believe that change in UX always means change for the worse and never for good. Which is weird, because even someone like a carpenter is very much interested in the usability of their own tools.
Maybe the problem is that each change in the software means they have to adapt and this demands a certain adaptability, or a will to stay on top in a changing world. It certainly costs energy to do that.
> So much "It worked fine before, why did you change it?!?!?!?" Uhh... because a feature you use 80% of the time required 5x more clicks to get to than a feature you used 20% of the time? FML.
Well, they're not wrong because every other CAD tool simply rearranged the UI for no reason.
In addition, the problem with semiconductor CAD tools is that any feature which isn't used by everybody is effectively broken because it has zero users, to an engineering approximation. I wish my CAD tools had a "CAUTION: this feature was used N times in the last 180 days by all users of the tool where N < 10. Expect bugs".
Although, in terms of UX I've never understood why CAD tools don't use Pie menus--games adopted them eons ago. (Fusion 360 is the exception, and it's a wonderful breath of fresh air).
I'm really curious where you worked now, as I don't remember any of my VLSI CAD tools getting an effective UI makeover (and we used a lot of them). Although I'm pretty sure we skipped most Mentor tools.
>"CAUTION: this feature was used N times in the last 180 days by all users of the tool where N < 10. Expect bugs"
I doubt it would work, power users turn off tracking. Presumably you can't trust that the tracking will return only what they say it will (and not your internet history) but you can trust that opting to turn it off will turn it off.
Given the 768K Day discussion I figured it might be helpful to post this. I've been referring to it since 1996 (same HTML1.0 format!) but it has jumped around the web to many hosts over the decades.
Have you tried an HSA? What are the caveats on yours? Does the money roll over? Are there limits on how much you can put it? Does the bank that owns your HSA invest it? HSA's look like they were designed to save people money, but they are really just another way for banks to get more capital to invest, which is why there are so many caveats on them. I think it is abhorrent that an HSA even has to exist. An easier sol'n would be to allow no minimum limit on tax deductions, it just makes more paperwork for people. But I think HSAs are a bandaid to a broken system.
Yet here we are. Remember when Obama fought to have healthcare prices made transparent so that we could shop for the cheapest medical treatment, and that was beaten back severely by the lobby? The compromises the ACA made to bend over backward for for-profit insurance companies were an example of how much power the lobby has. I think if we've learned anything is that we need to go all in on single payer and completely remove for-profit insurance, IMHO, because of exactly what you're saying about the free market: it doesn't work for certain things (if anything, really): military, education, healthcare all the three classic failures of the freemarket. I think this is why all the dems are embracing Healthcare for All: everyone is getting screwed by healthcare except the 1%.
I think the free market does a good job of solving problems, just not of deciding which ones are worth solving. The military follows a hybrid model that (mostly) works, where a semi-free market is created and guided exclusively through governmental leverage, theoretically giving the best of both worlds. Utility companies work a similar way, as do (I think) some first-world government-run healthcare systems. I think the ACA was aiming for this type of thing, but was so hamstrung by compromises and by the sheer complexity of the system it was trying to reshape, that it ended up being a pretty mixed bag.
Maybe in the case of American healthcare, the current state of things is just such a horrible rat's nest of problems that we really do need to burn it all down and start over.
The insurance companies and the AMA were vehemently against Medicare when it was initially proposed. They fight for it now. Given all of the established interests in the medical system, and the amount of money flowing around, any reform that is actually going to make a major difference is going to be one that they strenuously oppose.
In the "real world" IAR Embedded Workshop is the hands-down winner (licenses are $$$$$$), which is unfortunate because despite being so mature it is awfully clunky.