Great idea and great general model as a recipe or planning tool. The possibilities seem endless - adding structure (popular sequences of groups of exercises, complements or foci, etc.), adding voting, comments or open signup to plans, adding consequent metrics, expectations or cautions. Time reasoning and sequencing are hard for people. Workable representations can be challenging too. This excites the imagination in other application eras. Great stuff.
I was not saying it was lacking those features. Feature plans are aces up sleeves for new releases. Multi-release planning turns out to be a great way to "time box" the current release.
Our lack of universal and convenient primary care hinders the formation of small or new large businesses. Our medical care quality is low due to lack of data sharing that national health services enjoy for free. Our oddly expensive but low performing healthcare is a pathetic vestige of our apartheid racist labor history here in the USA. These issues do not concern fancy elective medicine we also sadly fetishize amidst our ongoing dysfunctioning. We prefer endless pitches of futuristic delusions than reliable heartbeat services. We will continue to suffer this needless hamstringing until we catch up with civilized people who can add, subtract, multiply and divide.
Seems like every ten years or so a new architecture comes along and quickly devolves into into being yet another distributed RPC mechanism. There was CORBA, SOAP, SOA and now micro services. All promised to fix what came before and all ended up repeating the same mistakes in practice.
Can any of the old timers here name any predecessors to CORBA?
Java RMI, which had the misguided goal of making objects (the whole world was fully in the grip of OO religion) appear the same, regardless of whether they were local or remote to you.
I was going to mention RMI, but couldn't recall the TLA. Does anyone else remember LANS and Windows NetDDE? That got end user machines involved in "distributed" computations.
I played a tiny part in debugging early XML-RPC implementations. XML-RPC had most of the efficiency and representational flexibility of JSON today. Then SOAP came barreling in. Software is full of heartbreaks :/
I've waited 50 years for an organization like Strong Towns to combine a) sound accounting and b) urban architecture in a USA context. These guys are sobering consequentialists, testing principles against their realized potential. That's a breath of fresh air cutting across party electioneers, subsidy seekers, wishful thinkers and noisy promoters. Great publication.
This is a lovely article. Software is a possibly a) errant and b) misinterpreted operational semantics of some other semantic horizons of contractual or implicit expectations. Knuth's Literate Programming was onto something. We inhabit a world of word problems and even faulty realizations of rarer formal specifications. Claims concerning "phenomena in the world" drive maintenance and enhancement regimens.
The hard part is reaching a committed niche in the user base, whether paying customer or audience kinds. Software tools generalize from and for niche sponsors with more specific needs. Software growth is then the "consensual delusion" of feature set and paying constituency accretion. Platform heterogeneity "churn" offers both big risks and big opportunities. Never a dull moment in software development.
You may be joking, but I think the way in which this is true explains Apple’s success, even though they’ve generally released products that are less featureful and significantly more expensive than their competition.
Some permutation of "pair programming" helps with "mission critical" software execution risks. We call this "the bus test" in DC no-nonsense engineering. Project execution must survive anyone getting "hit by a bus."
It does not have to be pair-teams. It can be 3-teams that review each other's code. Crafting shared libraries also helps focus multiple developers around code, docs, calling semantics and help surface implicit performance expectations or penalties early.
I have been the hero developer cranking 10K lines of C per month. But divide and conquer where software development MATTERS isn't very wise. Methods make sense when dozens of jobs, thousands of lives or millions of dollars are at stake every week and month of a project.
We used to call virtuous redundancy "belt and suspenders."
Think schedules, skills and resources against relocation patterns and not just proportions abstracted from schedules. Think of the housing industry as a CPU. Think of babies as data coming across buses and switches. Never forget mortgage deductions were never states of "American dream" grace but subsidized and still subsidize wealthier purchasers. Tons of Americans purchased and are still purchasing depreciating "Levittown" type assets all over the USA. We are not just cutting ribbons for bad purchases. All the policy details matter where and when they matter. Rentals are just as important as purchases. Many Americans move quite frequently and do not enjoy corporation relocation bonuses.
I don't watch TV, cable or NFLX. I read newspapers, nerd papers, old Project Gutenberg philosophy books and watch YouTube lectures or instrumental music. Amazon is great for my never shopping habit. Hobbyist sites are better than magazines used to be for user product reviews.
But I never enjoyed speaking with people who watch TV. That's why I found the Ultrix and the Net in the 1980's back at Harvard. I live in DC and like cities for policed walkable streets (I don't drive), live jazz, museums, book clubs and small ethnic restaurant venues.
But our consumer Net has been been a waste of time just like roadside American life has always been.
This is like the film "China Town" with cable utilities filling in for water utilities. I know I'm an old man, but nothing has changed much despite our SFX propaganda fictions.
I typed this to let younger folks know that plenty of older Netizens do not care one little bit about any consumers or programmers making money off consumers. I wrote the late 80's Harvard Ultrix manual and worked with Steve Crocker, Brad Cox, Mark Pincus (pre-Zynga) and many others. None of us let our kids near the consumer Web (or TV's). The faster our consumer Net dies on the vine the better. Wield code to automate solutions or feed better decision support. Folks coding to sell pizza, porn and distractions need better careers and motivations.
While I respect your opinion, it seems to me that your use of the internet is just as vulnerable to the net-neutrality doomsday scenario as everyone else's.
Your basic internet is only $50/mo, but you'll need to purchase the "hacker" package for an additional $25/mo to get access to the Ultrix forums.
In defense, the scope, scale, timeline and ripple effects of change were different (slower and slower spreading) for most of human history before trains, automobiles, airplanes or widespread literacy, photography and now film and TV.
His distinguishing states from civilization here is also instructive. We can further analytically carve "civilization" into different histories - industrial, arts, literary, architecture, agriculture, etc. - that divide our timelines into different overlapping periods of sin waving ascent, descent, advance or retreat.
First, I worked with Arnold Kling. He's a wonderful guy. I appear in his old book Under the Radar.
Second, Kurzweil is a creepy promoter of "inevitability." He is a bright guy with good access to privileged programmatic research. But he is a provocative peddling Howard Stern styled futurist.
I prefer Bill Joy's rightfully highlighting our policy options and virtues of learned caution. There are many things people can do we police against for good reasons.
Theoretical and now even many applied sciences deliver more cautionary signals than go-go-go signals. Software folks should take that as good news. Solving problems makes problems go away. Nice architecture and good food are their own problems without creating new ones.
