Comment by ncmncm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ncmncm | Hacker News Reader

Patterns failed because they aren't patterns. But if the GoF had published a Glossary of Software Things We Find We Use, few would have bought it.

In one sense DP wasn't a failure, because it made its authors boatloads of money. That's usually considered enough, if your expectations are not unreasonable. It didn't revolutionize software development, but software development already was and still is dead in the middle of a continuous revolution, with no end in sight.

That revolution is driven by programming languages getting better at enabling programmers to capture ideas in libraries. Progress mostly happens by existing languages adopting good ideas. Sometimes the ideas have been tried out first in a new language, but as often not. If you have a good language idea, you stand an overwhelmingly better chance of people using it if you get it into a widely used language. As a consequence, C++ has, over the past 20 years, turned into a language that is enormously more fun than its first standardized version. C++11 is more fun than C++98, C++14 is more fun than 11, 17 is more fun than 14, and 20 will be more fun than 17.

The bleeding edge is discovering how to express good ways to control the non-von Neumann hardware whose computational capacity completely overwhelms the pile of cores we are handed. It's not clear that libraries will be able help very much with that.

Selling bureaucracy is a lovely business.

DP are actually useful in some situations, but its importance is oversold.

Selling bureaucracy is a lovely business.

Hence, the profitability of most business software.

Also a bunch of letters that are not enough to ensure any certificate holder can turn on the computer, but hey, it sounds fancy, like CMMI or ITIL

> The bleeding edge is discovering how to express good ways to control the non-von Neumann hardware whose computational capacity completely overwhelms the pile of cores we are handed

Namely? What non-von-Neumann hardware are you thinking of here? Certainly not the very-much-von-Neumann innards ubiquitous today in consumer or workstation machines, mobiles, embedded/wearable/IoT gadgets, game consoles, I reckon.. so what are you thinking of here, custom-designed ASICs / FPGAs / SoC or ...?

I think ncmncm means “people”. The cutting edge of computational systems organization is finding ways to effectively work with the complex multiagent systems running on wetware.

This is my reading of that comment too. Having a great language is no use if you can’t get the wetware to express ideas in that language.

GPUs have enormously more computational capacity than CPUs, and are very weird. They can be programmed in C or C++, but it is not not a natural fit. Near-future chips will have FPGAs on board. Programming FPGAs is much stranger. You can shoehorn them into doing familiar things, but it's wasteful.

> GPUs have enormously more computational capacity than CPUs, and are very weird. They can be programmed in C or C++, but it is not not a natural fit.

Neither is C or C++ for most "ordinary" CPUs.

I find it odd you mentioned libraries and C++ in the same paragraph, when C++ can only deliver libraries in source form and can barely do that.

For instance, all C++ classes are fragile, so their callers have to know their exact memory layout.

And your private ivars and methods, which should be secret, all have to be declared in the header…?

Lack of experience with C++?

I have successfully used plenty of binary libraries throughout the years.

Libraries in source form are libraries. The most useful and used libraries for C++ are all, or almost all, source, and there's nothing wrong with that

A pattern, in the DP sense, is something you use over and over but can't be put in a library. As the language gets better, the patterns become ordinary library components. Then people start to notice patterns in use of the language plus library, and either capture them in another component, extend the language to enable capturing them, or just rewrite again every time.

So a catalog of patterns is really a list of language weaknesses. For an unfixably weak language like C, a list of patterns might be actually useful over the long term. But ambitious people will have moved on to a more powerful language, leaving the incurious, who will not be interested.

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