Well tested != used lots. Well tested is something that is static, and fixed. A well used package that contains code paths that are always in flux because we have to keep patching little errors isn't well tested, because no part of it has been stable long enough to test.

Well tested is what happens when you have a concerted QA process and methodical testing, not anecdotally by user experience.

I honestly thought you mean physical address. That was one of the Hard problems I had to solve back in the day before Geolocation as a service. My apologies, and yes for email addresses, unless you're validating for your server; there the best you can do is advise of the RFC, and accept that not everyone follows it.

It is trivial; you pay money to someone who has spent the time, effort, and energy to do it right, and you write if(address.isValid(...)) { ... } and let someone who knows what they're doing do their job.

If it's not general purpose, then really, it's indistinguishable from a sufficiently large eeprom (i.e: a truth table). It's no longer computing, it's compressing a predetermined output.

Somehow, you're imagining this great Harvard machine, with an immutable program register, and the smarts to have logic encoded for every possible data structure that could be stored on it's potentially infinite bitplane? Sounds great, but just one problem; if its turing complete, it will still have the same fundamental problem as a von Neuman state machine; full stop.

You can keep abstracting all day long, but at the end of the day, it all comes down to brainfuck; or something close to it; and the halting problem remains hiding in the shadows... or it's not, and your system is turing incomplete, and cannot solve every computable problem... and is in fact indistinguishable from a very complicated truth table at best.

It can be General Purpose, or Verifiable for a single purpose; but not both.

I made a good chunk of my career on understanding the minutia of calendars ( 1999 treated me very well ); the blessing today is unless you're dense, or intentionally obtuse there's a well tested library in your language.

This is true of all trivial problems; What happens is people write and paste shitty code because they don't bother to ever understand it, and because they're not even bothering with understanding; they never stop to think if there's a better way.

Truth be told, I think we as a collective should spend much less of our time writing code with the mindset of solving a problem, rather thinking of programming as a job where you're mostly gluing together working things and managing exceptional conditions... with novel code being the exception, rather than the rule.

It's sad, but I started in the 80's and now I'm considered "Old Guard"; I can tell you as someone that hacked BPL and FORTRAN on RSTS/E, the niceties of "C" weren't really even on the horizon for a good part of the decade; much less the 60's.

I got my first modem so I could use someone else's C compiler, in 1989... that was my gateway drug to Unix.. and it's been downhill from there;

otherwise, yeah, this right there, 100%. If you don't understand the actual full stack, from the metal up; you're not engineering, you're prophesying.

And what, pray tell, do you have in mind to replace it? Harvard? Bovine Spongiform Whitespace? I hate to break it to you; but one of the fundamental rules of universal computing is that there is no computing machine that can validate all computable inputs.

What you think you want to do can't, won't, and cannot work; and it's a dangerous fiction to imagine that someday they will. At the end of the day, the only solution is hard work and accepting that non-trivial things will contain unanticipated states; and the only way to shrink the latter is through experience, acquired or paid, and experience alone.

To try anything else is just signing up to have a really bad time.

Honestly, I think the philosophy of software engineering has gone wrong. Not that I don't appreciate automagic (I specialize in crafting it), but in our grand quest to be "better" we keep gluing features on through libraries and not through understanding. Between that, and a generation of people who learnt to code through copy and paste; and what did you expect would happen?

If I could change anything, it would be disable Control+V. Not that great minds don't copy, but there is a sublime value in even typing out something verbatim... it makes you think just a little more. If I got a second wish, it would be that we should fully re-embrace abstraction, the Unix way. Do one thing, really well, and embrace a common interface. It's not technically unfeasible, we've been doing the cloud right since System-V; just somehow we lost our way.

Meh, I think I'll go meditate some more.

You know, the reason why they call it then Anthropocene is because there isn't anything left on this rock we haven't marked with signs of intelligent life.

You're totally right, and random is just that; it is possible to find a null patch of earth, but they are excruciatingly rare, and you wouldn't want to be there anyway. They're so exceedingly rare, it's effectively certain that unless you set out to find nothing, you'd find something living in your sample; it's the scientific version of being willfully obtuse about edge cases.

I dunno, maybe that's the right way to think about it though, since despite our best efforts and models, we seem to be an inexplicable edge case, even on our own little rock, much less the other little rocks we've looked at.

If you can't find life in any random 10cm^3 bit of the surface of the earth, you really aren't looking that hard. Life is stupidly pervasive on earth, and if you're looking at unicellular things and spores you'd probably have a hard time finding a cubic decemeter of air devoid of life.

However, you're completely right about the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence... Your metaphors could use a bit of work though ;)

I've always wondered why people really lack imagination, and assume this really defeatist attitude of "Well it'll all be subscriptions"? You know what, it very might well be the case that tools worth using might cost you a penny; somebody might earn some benefit for their labor. Or, like in all of human history, the concept of "ars gratis artis" applies, sometimes people just create and give because they can. I do.

Maybe it's because in internet years, I'm dead, but I remember way back when, when open source started... it was all someone else's computer back then too, we just called it timesharing, and it was a golden age.

Honestly, I'm looking forward to things shifting back toward the way it used to be. The "cloud" is basically nice vt-102's; and sooner, rather than later, there's not going to be a whole lot of need for local applications... and better yet, less concern about local processing power and the associated waste of the upgrade cycle.

I wonder if we're about to see a bunch of cache/redirect based attacks; leveraging 301/302's for keeping state, etc.