Comment How can I explain this? (Score 1) 216
I should try being more eloquent. I was obviously in a bad mood when I wrote that comment.
To an extent, it is like being a cabinet maker. There are different kinds of people who make cabinets. Some are in love with wood and form. Some build cabinets to make money. Some people are actually more interested in the tools than the piece they are building.
It is an axiom of the artistic cabinetry world that the best work is done with the fewest and simplest tools. A band saw, a couple hand saws, some chisels, a couple of hand planes, a bit and brace. That's pretty much it. The tools force you to work directly with the thing that matters -- the wood and the construction. With these tools you have complete expressiveness in the material and complete control. You keep track of exactly what the grain of the wood is doing, and how the joints are holding up.
Many of the people who work as custom cabinet makers make a lot of money. Their pieces are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Other people work as laborers in furniture making factories. Of course here the managers apply the "different tools for different jobs" notion, though the employees probably don't care that much -- they get paid by the hour. It is the carefully choosen "different tool" that is most likely to take their fingers off anyway.
One of the programmers I have the most respect for, the one who wrote my favorite programming books, is Donald Knuth. His books contain some of the most advanced consructs I have seen in book form, including a lengthy discussion on garbage collection. But he choose to present his ideas using an assembly language -- MIX. Garbage collection is not the tool, it is a product of the tool. I think the reason I responded so strongly to the assertions of the parent article is because it is like (for instance Java is like) Large Woodworking Corp telling me I cannot use hand saws and chisels anymore. LWC says I have to buy their premolded modular furniture components and join them together with LWC fasteners. Which was not really the intent of the article. The article was just talking about improvements in GC techniques. But the statement about GC being a panacea was absurd -- unless you are working on a nearly trivial problem.
There is a disease amongst Computer Scientists that makes us get lost in the "tools". It is as if our job is to tell other people how to solve problems, instead of pursuing the solution of real problems ourselves. What is the "wood" of computer science? I think the substance is the problem, especially the hard problem. How are we doing with computer vision, with natural language, with common sense and reasoning? Not too good. A couple of decades ago it got hard, despite our initial optimisim. So everyone gave up and started selling "tools" instead of promising solutions. I'm sure that, if anything, all these tools just get in the way.
To an extent, it is like being a cabinet maker. There are different kinds of people who make cabinets. Some are in love with wood and form. Some build cabinets to make money. Some people are actually more interested in the tools than the piece they are building.
It is an axiom of the artistic cabinetry world that the best work is done with the fewest and simplest tools. A band saw, a couple hand saws, some chisels, a couple of hand planes, a bit and brace. That's pretty much it. The tools force you to work directly with the thing that matters -- the wood and the construction. With these tools you have complete expressiveness in the material and complete control. You keep track of exactly what the grain of the wood is doing, and how the joints are holding up.
Many of the people who work as custom cabinet makers make a lot of money. Their pieces are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Other people work as laborers in furniture making factories. Of course here the managers apply the "different tools for different jobs" notion, though the employees probably don't care that much -- they get paid by the hour. It is the carefully choosen "different tool" that is most likely to take their fingers off anyway.
One of the programmers I have the most respect for, the one who wrote my favorite programming books, is Donald Knuth. His books contain some of the most advanced consructs I have seen in book form, including a lengthy discussion on garbage collection. But he choose to present his ideas using an assembly language -- MIX. Garbage collection is not the tool, it is a product of the tool. I think the reason I responded so strongly to the assertions of the parent article is because it is like (for instance Java is like) Large Woodworking Corp telling me I cannot use hand saws and chisels anymore. LWC says I have to buy their premolded modular furniture components and join them together with LWC fasteners. Which was not really the intent of the article. The article was just talking about improvements in GC techniques. But the statement about GC being a panacea was absurd -- unless you are working on a nearly trivial problem.
There is a disease amongst Computer Scientists that makes us get lost in the "tools". It is as if our job is to tell other people how to solve problems, instead of pursuing the solution of real problems ourselves. What is the "wood" of computer science? I think the substance is the problem, especially the hard problem. How are we doing with computer vision, with natural language, with common sense and reasoning? Not too good. A couple of decades ago it got hard, despite our initial optimisim. So everyone gave up and started selling "tools" instead of promising solutions. I'm sure that, if anything, all these tools just get in the way.
