smittyoneeach's Journal: Using Emacs Key Bindings Be Like C-x C-w C-t C-f

http://irreal.org/blog/?p=4407

Well that sucks!

[fustakrakich]

All the silly vi comments I wanted to make were already there in the link. Now C-w C-t C-f is there to talk about?

the 1960's called

[Bill Dog]

They want the pathetically outdated notion that what makes a good editor is something that runs on a dumb terminal and uses a user-hostile endless number of cryptic keyboard combinations back.

Seriously, it'll be 2060 and its ilk like VMS and DOS will have long been forgotten, but there'll still be UNIX luddites clutching to their clumsy, antiquated operating system and editors.

By then we'll be have neural inputs into computers, and just think our messages and commands, and get basic operations with computer

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[smittyoneeach]

By then we'll be have neural inputs into computers

My guess is that, other than very limited medical devices, the amount of cyborg augmentation is less than the sci-fi crowd predicts. Because hacking.

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[Bill Dog]

I was thinking sensor technology, not implant technology. Borgifying people creeps them out, but if a computer can eventually read and interpret my brain waves or something, without having to drill any holes (!), then that would take off.

p.s. Polygraph administerers would be out of a job, I guess.

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[smittyoneeach]

Nah, you'll just breed countermeasures.

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[Bill Dog]

Presumably easier interaction with computers would be considered a positive adaptation by the magic god of Evolution, and would be selected for.

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[smittyoneeach]

SELECTed for? Was that a database gag?

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[Bill Dog]

I've been in SQL hell the last couple of weeks, so I'm definitely not making jokes about it. The brilliant non-engineers where I work basically put all of the non- UI-related business logic in the fucking data layer, so the powerful and modern language C#, with its extensive .NET library at its disposal, is used merely for marshalling data from the UI to SQL Server, and all of the business logic has to be written in a fucking scripting language (T-SQL).

I like T-SQL, but not for doing 90% of the application

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[smittyoneeach]

I've seen the opposite case, where developers used J2EE to do a watered down database engine and re-invent a "find unmatched" query badly.
T-SQL, besides having that special "brown chicken, brown cow" syntax hailing from the 70s, is compiled and runs kinda quickly. Take that logic from the data layer, re-do it in C#, and then benchmark the results. Note what, if any, performance hit you take.

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[Bill Dog]

If performance were the top criteria, I'd advocate writing web sites all in assembly language. Fortunately, it's not; readability and maintainability are.

Which means that besides being a software engineering best practice, doing the business logic in a modern, powerful middle-tier language typically also means less code to express the same logic (which then is more readable and maintainable).

But you're right about the 70's part. The last time developers thought it was a good idea to implement business log

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[smittyoneeach]

I've got a side project where the original developers were meticulous about separating presentation, business, and data layers. The upside is that any reasonably qualified person can tell the action at a glance. You can also test these layers readily, as there is little coupling.
And yet, when you're taking an HTTP request in the presentation layer, writing it to a dictionary for the business layer, and then calling a stored procedure in the data layer, all that extra string handling is costly.

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[Bill Dog]

Proper software design is slightly costly, in performance. Luckily for typical web CRUD apps, it doesn't make any difference. Except for the gains in all the other desirable qualities of code.

One thing the kid at work said I do agree with: It's a lot easier to scale the web site than it is the database.

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[smittyoneeach]

Timely article [bloombergview.com]

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[Bill Dog]

I don't believe the technical parts of that article. It could've started small, and iterated over the 3 years to be ready on "Day One". And I don't believe it was a "very hard technical problem". Silicon Valley is full of good communist techies; they built the Obama campaign a kick-ass system. They could've built a good Obamacare web site.

But I do agree on the federal contracting system. To avoid corruption, the rules are they have to choose the lowest bidder, not the vendor they think is most likely a

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[smittyoneeach]

Note that major pieces of legislation are referred to as "programs". The Affordable Care Act was so much spaghetti code. Which is why they just blew it right the heck off in the Executive Branch, and the Judicial Branch was all about emoting its way through the exception trace.
Stuck in foopid, our government is.

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[Bill Dog]

The Affordable Care Act was so much spaghetti code.

Well measures to avoid spaghetti code would probably be deemed "overkill" [slashdot.org], by you and him and whoever else around here is in the Cowboy Coder's Club.

The ACA was only just to get us started down the path to socialized medicine, so why try to make it solid and lasting?

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[smittyoneeach]

In my perfect future, some git-like environment is used to make all legislation and its production far more coherent.

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[Bill Dog]

I attended a talk on Git earlier this year. I didn't, pardon the pun, git it at all, and I'm a pretty smart fellow, who's been around a while in technology circles. Part of it could've been the presenter, who just talked about HEAD and MASTER and branching and jumping all over the place, with some labels sticking and some moving, and didn't bother to map out Git's unorthodox terminology to saner system's "check out", "check in", etc. Not to mention he screwed up his repository by making a mistake in ment

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[smittyoneeach]

Git is a graph editor. Once you get your mind around the fact that revision control is just its main entre, possibilities open up. Like Emacs, I don't pretend to have plumbed its depths.