This.

I read through the comments to find this comment so that I didn't just post a duplicate if someone else had covered the ground.

Let me be really blunt about the amount of time you are intending to invest in this project. If you were taking a college course, you should expect to spend 2 hours out of class for each hour you spend in class, and given that you only have 10 hours to dedicate to the idea, that's effectively 3 credit hours for every interval. So if you picked a community college, and they offered all the classes you needed, you should expect to have your Bachelor's of Science in any given degree field in about 23 years. That gets you to the necessary 210 credit hours for an Astronomy degree.

Let's say, though that you are a super genius, and can do 1:1 instead of 1:2 for in/out of class. That only cuts your time by 1/3, which means that you get that degree in 15 years instead.

Now add to this that most major contributions in any scientific field occur before someone hits their mid 20's; there are exceptions, but let's say again that you are exceptional. What contributions do you expect to be able to make after age 61 / 53, with your shiny new Bachelor's, since you're unlikely to find someone to hire you at that age, and you're unlikely to be able to afford instrument time on the necessary equipment on your own?

So it closed last year, but you only just noticed and posted an article? It doesn't seem like it's going to be missed very much, if the corpse can decompose and start to smell before someone sends the police to check on aunt Mozlabs.

I would say you have it right.

Apple initially didn't open up the iPhone to Apps at all because Steve was deathly afraid of building another Newton.

Then they wanted to open them up, but there was not rational set of APIs, there was just an internal morass, because it had never been designed with the idea of hardening one app on the iPhone from interference by another app on the phone, or hardening the phones functions against a malicious app.

This is a single App on a single use, incomplete, API, one which was built only to host this App and nothing else. Could that API be exposed, and used for other applications? Yeah. Would that enable all possible NFC applications which you might want to implement in the future? Not a chance in hell.

This is just Apple wanting some bake time so that they can rationally support an API that they happily demonstrated opening hotel doors and other things which they are not prepared to open up at this point in time.

Also because we already betrayed them once and they're not necessarily our best friends because of it.

Mostly by changing allies the way other people change their underwear, yes.

Americans killed two or so orders of magnitude more civilians in the middle east than arab terrorists killed in the USA. Somewhere on that road, the justification became a cruel joke.

We are in a War on Faith, because Faith justifies anything and ISIS takes it to extremes. But in the end they are just a bigger version of Christian-dominated school boards that mess with the teaching of Evolution, or Mormon sponsors of anti-gay-marriage measures, or my Hebrew school teacher, an adult who slapped me as a 12-year-old for some unremembered offense against his faith.

Hm. The covenant of Noah is about two paragraphs before this part (King James Version) which is used for various justifications of slavery and discrimination against all sorts of people because they are said to bear the Curse of Ham. If folks wanted to use the Bible to justify anything ISIS says is justified by God's words in the Koran, they could easily do so.

18 And the sons of Noah, that went forth of the ark, were Shem, and Ham, and Japheth: and Ham is the father of Canaan.
19 These are the three sons of Noah: and of them was the whole earth overspread.
20 And Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard:
21 And he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent.
22 And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without.
23 And Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon both their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father's nakedness.
24 And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him.
25 And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.
26 And he said, Blessed be the Lord God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.
27 God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.

There's no reason they *should*, but they do unless you correct the test. The problem is in the test code, or in the wrapper that runs the test code. But consider an automated login test on an isolated network with a credentials server that races to come up with the browser that's attempting the login in the test case. If the login happens to start before the login server gets up and stable, then your login fails, and so does your test case, even though it's not a problem with the browser you are nominally testing.

This is/was a pretty common failure case with the ChomeOS build waterfall because Chrome was considered an "upstream" product, and therefore changes in Chrome, when they occurred, could throw off the timing. There wasn't a specific, separate effort to ensure that the test environment was free from timing issues. And since you can't let any test run forever, if you intend to get a result that you can act upon it in an automated way, you get transient failures.

Transient test failures can (sort of) be addressed by repeating failed tests; by the time you attempt to reproduce, the cache is likely warmed up anyway, and the transient failure goes away. Problem solved. Sort of. But what if everyone starts taking that tack? Then you end up with 5 or 6 transient failures, and any one of them is enough to shoot you in the foot on any given retry.

Now add that these are reactive tests: they're intended to avoid the recurrence of a bug which has occurred previously, but is probabilistically unlikely to occur again; when do you retire one of these tests? Do you retire one of these tests?

Consider that you remove a feature, a login methodology, a special URL, or some other facility that used to be there; what do you do with the tests which used to test that code? If you remove them, then your data values are no longer directly comparable with historical data; if you don't remove them, then your test fails. What about the opposite case: what are the historical values, necessarily synthetic, for a new feature? What about for a new feature where the test is not quite correct, or where the test is correct, but the feature is not yet fully stable, or not yet implemented, but instead merely stubbed out?

You see, I think, the problem.

And while in theory your build sheriff or other person, who's under fire to reopen the tree, rather than actually root-causing the problem, doesn't have time to actually determine a root cause. At that point, you're back to fear driven development, because for every half hour you keep the tree closed, you have 120 engineers unable to commit new code that's nor related to fixing the build failure. Conservatively estimate their salary at $120K/year, then their TCO for computers and everything else is probably $240K/year, and for every half hour you don't open the tree back up, that's ~$14K of lost productivity, and then once you open it up, there's another half hour for the next build to be ready, so even if you react immediately, you're costing the company at least $25K one of those bugs pops on you and you don't just say "screw it" and open the tree back up. Have that happen 3X a day on average, and that's $75K lost money per day, so let's call it $19.5M a year in lost productivity.

This very quickly leads to a "We Fear Change" mentality for anyone making commits. At the very least, it leads to a "We Fear Large Change" mentality which won't stop forward progress, but will insure that all forward progress is incremental and evolutionary. The problem then becomes that you never make anything revolutionary because sometimes there's no drunkard's walk from where you are to the new, innovative place you want to get to (eventually). So you don't go there.

The whole "We Fear Large Change" mentality - the anti-innovation mentality - tends to creep in any place you have the Agile/SCRUM coding pattern, where you're trying to do large things in small steps, and it's just not possible to, for example, change an API out from everyone, without committing changes to everyone else at the same time.

You can avoid the problem (somewhat) by adding the new API before taking the old API away. So you end up with things like "stat64" that returns a different structure from "stat", and then when you go and try to kill "stat" after you've changed everywhere to call "stat64" instead, with the new structure, you have to change the "stat" API to be the same as the "stat64" API, and then convert all the call sites back, one by one, until you can then get rid of the "stat64".

That leads to things like Solaris, where the way you endure binary compatibility is "give the hell up; you're never going to kill off the old stat, just live with carrying around two APIs, and pray people use the new one and you can kill off the old one in a decade or so". So you're back to another drunkard's walk of very slow progress, but at least you have the new API out of it.

And maybe someday the formal process around the "We Fear Change" mentality, otherwise known as "The Architectural Board" or "The Change Control Committee" or "Senior VP Bob" will let you finally kill off the old API, but you know, at that point, frankly you don't care, and the threat to get rid of it is just a bug in a bug database somewhere that someone has helpfully marked "NTBF" because you can close "Not To Be Fixed" bugs immediately, and hey, it gets the total number of P2 or P3 bugs down, and that looks good on the team stats.

You said something above... "I am not a writer so can’t speak with authority".

Didn't you mean to say "I am not a writer so can’t write with authority"?

Thanks, enjoy the veal!

The wrong kind of TDD leads to FDD of the type where you're afraid to break the build.

The problem with TDD that leads to this is that TDD is almost totally reactive; that is, you find a bug, you write a test for the bug so you can tell when it's gone; you get rid of the bug, and now you have this test which is going to be run on each build, as if you are not already hyperaware, having both experienced and fixed the bug, of the conditions leading up to the bug. The annoying part, of course, is when you start taking longer and longer amounts of time to get through the build to an acceptance of the build, for each test you add. Then to make things even worse, add to that the occasional false failure because the test is flakey, but it's someone's baby and it "usually works" and the failure is "timing related", and now you're testing the test, and rejecting a perfectly good build because you're unwilling to either rip out the test completely, or make it non-fatal and assign the bug on it back to the person who wrote the original test.

TDD with test cases written up front, and not added to without an associated specification change: Good.

TDD with test cases written to cover historical bugs identified through ad hoc testing: Project Cancer.

The second worst thing you can possibly do is write tests for no good reason because you're able to write tests, but unable to contribute to the core code, and you still want to contribute somehow. The worst thing is being the code reviewer and letting that type of mess into your source tree because you want the person submitting the tests to not feel bad about them not getting accepted.

I'm guided by the experience of the airlines. While you must, obviously, have the right sort of pilot's license, they also want a four year university degree. Not because it necessarily enhances your flying, but because it shows you can learn and accomplish things. If you can learn and accomplish things, and know your way around computers, I'd love to talk to you.

The big problem at most places I've worked is getting promising resumes past HR people who only count buzzwords.

...laura

Are you sure that's not the intent for /.?

I've followed Minix development with interest. The internal architecture is different from most OSs out there. Not different for the sake of being different, but different to show different solutions to problems. The way we do things in Linux et al is powerful, but it's not the only way.

I haven't come up with a compelling reason to use it in my work (yet... :-), but I install each new release on a virtual machine and play with it.

...laura

Given that Boeing will already be 3 years late to the party, when SpaceX has manned capability up and running this coming January? We're supposed to wait another couple of years for manned launch capability, when the Russians have already said they wouldn't be hailing our asses into orbit any more? I don't think "Time To Market" is a difficult argument.

One thing Swift will address... There are currently 3 memory management models in use in Objective-C, and for some of those models, you don't get a retain count automatically (for example, this is the case for a number of collection objects when doing an insertion).

Swift has the opportunity to rationalize this, which is not something you could do with the Objective-C libraries themselves, since doing so would change historical APIs and thus break old code.

It wasn't really until Metrowerks basically became incompatible with the Intel switchover and the 64 bit support had to drop certain types of support from Finder due to 64 bit inode numbers, and while I happily would have made them new header files so that they would have continued to work with the UNIX Conformance work, where Ed Moy and I basically broke their local private copies of their header files, since Motorola sold off the Intel version of the Metrowerks C the week because Apple announced Intel, it was pretty much DOA at that point.

So it basically took an Act Of God to get some people to get the hell off some of the old APIs we had been dooming and glooming about for half a decade.

Swift is another opportunity for that type of intentional non-exposure obsolescence to clean up the crappy parts of the APIs and language bindings that haven't been cleaned up previously due to people hanging onto them with their cold, dead hands. Hopefully, they will advantage themselves of this opportunity.