Pacabel

Ruby on Rails apps have started causing a lot of problems for a lot of people. Any small initial gains obtained by getting Ruby on Rails web apps put together and deployed rapidly have time and time again been lost many times over due to performance problems, severe maintenance headaches, security flaws, and other issues such as those.

In short, it hasn't managed to live up to the immense amount of hype that once surrounded it.

Those issues, combined with many other languages now offering web frameworks that are far better than Rails, have caused a lot of developers and organizations to completely abandon it and apps written using it. Few people and organizations have time and other resources to dedicate toward something that is a liability, especially when the alternatives are so plentiful and better these days.

A lot of the problems with JavaScript aren't "caveats and idiosyncrasies" or "quirks". They're rather horrible and unjustifiable flaws, plain and simple.

"Nerds" and "hipsters" are both rather distinct groups of individuals, and within each of these groups the individuals share a number of traits in common. Given that the traits are quite specific and isolated, it's not at all a case of generalization.

As a professional, I work with whomever I have to in order to complete the tasks at hand. But given how many of my fellow colleagues with all sorts of jobs and all sorts of background have similar problems with "hipsters", I'm quite sure the problem is not with me, and it is not with my colleagues, either.

Obnoxiousness and ego just happen to be two of the traits inherently associated with "hipsters". I can't help that, my colleagues can't help that, and even the "hipsters" themselves can't help that. It's just who they are; it's a big part of what makes them "hipsters".

I didn't read the article, and I wasn't responding to it. I was responding to what tpeng wrote.

I'm merely making observations about the situation we have today. I think there is, indisputably, a rather distinct "nerd" culture. I think there's also a distinct "hipster" culture. Recently, we've seen more interaction between them within the software industry, and more interaction between both of those groups with society at large as software has become more widespread and integral to everyday life.

I'm not sure why you're apparently taking this so personally, or why you think my personal opinion of "hipsters" and "nerds" is relevant. This is all about looking at the big picture that currently exists, basically all of which me and my opinions have absolutely no influence or control over.

The Carlton Banks character was not a "nerd". He represented a well-to-do/preppy/Ivy League/conservative/Republican/fratboy/"acting white" persona that contradicted with the poor/street-smart/ghetto/cool persona of the Will Smith character.

And the Sheldon Cooper character was much more a portrayal of a contemporary obnoxious and vane "hipster" than a "nerd". The two male friend supporting characters were much closer to the "nerd" stereotype.

Where do you see "hipsters" fitting in to all of this?

There has, obviously, been a huge influx of "hipsters" into the software industry as of late. And I think they're very distinct from "nerds".

I define "nerds" as those with an interest in technology, science, mathematics, and perhaps science fiction. "Hipsters" are different, however, because they have limited interest in such things, but instead focus on design, aesthetics, fashion, trends, "obscurity", social media, and so forth.

Yet there is a lot of overlap in the areas that you mention. Take the lack of social skills, for example. In the case of "nerds", this often seems to be because they just don't relate well to other people. But in the case of "hipsters", it's more about having an inherently obnoxious attitude and personality. Just look at the severe backlash that is common when a large number of "hipsters" migrate into established neighborhoods, for example. Even dealing with them in professional workplace settings is unpleasant.

In terms of physical attractiveness and appearance, we see "hipsters" going out of their way to look as weird and "unique" as they possibly can. They wear clothing that purposefully clashes. They intentionally style their physical in ways that will make them stand out, in the oddest way possible. Even so-called "nerds" can obviously tell that something is out of place with these people's appearances.

The television/movie representation of these people is perhaps the most interesting. We've seen people who are clearly "hipsters" being mislabeled as "nerds" in sitcoms and other media, for example. That Sheldon character from that American sitcom is a good example of this. His social obnoxiousness is far closer to what we typically see from "hipsters" than from "nerds". And the so-called "Reddit culture", for example, may have involved "nerds" at the very beginning, but they were very, very quickly overwhelmed by "hipsters". "Hipsters" have defined Reddit's culture for years now.

It will be interesting to see how the dynamics of this plays out over time. Even if they've co-existed so far, I expect to see more hostility towards "hipsters" from "nerds". As odd as it may sound, I think that "nerds" tend to have more in common with society at large than "hipsters" do. And I think that society at large is starting to strongly see "hipsters" as greater outcasts than "nerds" are.

Well, the feature that you're suggesting be removed is pretty much the only thing that distinguishes this from low-end text editors.

It's perfectly sensible and appropriate that such a request would be rejected. It's really no different than, say, requesting that the directory listing functionality of the ls command be removed. Yeah, it is a suggestion, but it's surely not a viable one.

Why wouldn't you just use a minimalistic text editor like Notepad or nano, then?

They avoid the distractions of spell checking and all that, while still saving files locally, and while still allowing you to delete text you've written.

Yes, a professional should be prepared for unexpected customer requests with tight deadlines. And the response to such a request is to just get the work done. That, of course, involves being prepared for any service outages that might interfere with such work.

Yes, I agree that some Firefox users had moved to Chrome early on, and that Google does have the potential to market Chrome more forcefully than Mozilla can for Firefox.

I don't think that the timing is all that relevant, though. This has been a gradual process over several years now.

The main point is that it wasn't so much what the other browsers and their vendors did that reduced Mozilla's influence, but rather that it was what Mozilla did (or didn't) do that has resulted in Firefox's decline.

Mozilla stopped leading, and instead decided to follow Chrome. While doing this, they've bungled major Firefox features, ranging from automatic upgrades to the UI design, time and time again. They've neglected to sufficiently resolve long-standing resource usage problems. They've ignored feedback from disappointed Firefox users for years now. They've ignored that this direction obviously isn't helping to prevent users from leaving Firefox, while at the same time it's driving a lot of users away, and furthermore it isn't really bringing in any new users.

In my opinion, Mozilla has been its own worst enemy these past several years. They've inflicted more harm on their own cause than any external opponent or competitor could have ever hoped to do.

Blaming Mozilla's decreasing influence on a vague and alleged "Google-Apple-Microsoft industry alliance" isn't really accurate.

While the corporate players involved may just happen to have interests that might align somewhat in this case, Mozilla has made its fair share of mistakes that have driven people away from Firefox. A browser with fewer users results in less influence for its creator and users, obviously.

Phoenix, Firebird and Firefox before version 4 were generally excellent releases. This was back when Mozilla innovated and put out offerings that benefited users. These versions truly made people better off, and much of Firefox's rapid adoption was due to direct word-of-mouth recommendation.

Then around Firefox 4, they decided to imitate Chrome, rather than leading the way. The release schedule changes caused broken add-ons for a very long time. This drove people away. They've also repeatedly made harmful UI changes, to the point where Firefox today is almost visually identical to Chrome. This has driven more people away. Meanwhile, there has only been minimal progress when it comes to improving the performance of Firefox, and reducing its memory usage. This, too, has driven more people away to browsers that manage to perform better, with fewer resources. (Spare us the are-we-fast-yet-style benchmarks that just don't seem to match the actual browsing experience.)

Nobody but Mozilla themselves made Mozilla act in such a manner. Nobody but Mozilla themselves are responsible for driving away so many Firefox users.

And so here we are today, with Firefox at perhaps 15% to 20% of the browser market, if even that. This is a far cry from their peak, when they were above 30%. They no longer offer an appealing product, which causes a decrease in the number of people using it, which directly results in the unfortunate lack of influence that we're seeing in this case.

That's very true. And as more and more people move away from Firefox due to Mozilla's bad design decisions as of late, their limited influence diminishes even further. Their 15% to 20% share of the browser market just can't compare to IE's 20% or more, never mind Chrome's 40% or more.

Don't get me wrong, change to make things truly better is probably worth it. But I'm not convinced that's what we're really seeing with Rust any longer.

Many of the recent changes seem to be what I'd call "oscillation".

So a problem is noted with some specific functionality or feature of an existing programming language. A different approach is initially taken when implementing something similar for Rust. Yet problems are found with this new approach, so a different approach is tried. And problems are found with this, so something else is tried.

The matter discussed in the article appears very much to be yet another example of this.

Continually searching for some vague "optimal" solution seriously impacts the usability of the language, especially when there might not even be a solution with satisfactory trade-offs. It's disappointing when code written a week ago suddenly needs significant updates due to language and library changes, especially when the language is supposedly "stabilizing".

Rust doesn't exist in a bubble. It's facing some stiff competition from languages like C++11, C++14, Go, Scala, and even Java. Maybe they aren't as "perfect" as Rust aims to be, but they offer many of its core benefits, and they let people get work done today, while still undergoing improvement. Rust, on the other hand, appears to be stumbling around, searching in vain for some vague notion of "perfection", while being unusable to real-world developers who need at least some stability.

For a language that's supposed to have its 1.0 release later this year, these sure sound like pretty significant breaking changes.

When the problems no longer exist, I'll have nothing to bring up. The ball's in Mozilla's court now when it comes to resolving these problems.

All sorts of assets have been stored in version control systems for decades now. That includes designs, images, documents, specifications, and so forth.

How many of those are voluntary, active users, though?

I see them more as "victims" of it, who are subjected to it without giving much consent at all. Somebody loads a blog article or some other web page that uses Disqus for accepting and showing comments, and without necessarily wanting to use it the page's visitors have become "users" of Disqus.

Umm, we used to call those "personal websites". They were the norm during much of the 1990s.

They did take some time, effort, skill and money to set up, but they did give far more control over what information was shared, and who had access to it.

Those kind of problems you mention aren't isolated to C, though. The exact same, or very similar, problems exist when using scripts written in Perl, Ruby, Python, and other scripting languages.

How do you figure that? That comment that you replied to matches reality very well.

Perl 6 is nearly 15 years old now. There have been many attempts to implement it during this time, and none of them have really been usable like Perl 5's implementation is.

I can recall hearing about Rakudo Star, Pugs, Niecza, v6.pm, Yapsi, and Sprixel. There are probably others that I've forgotten about. And that's ignoring NPQ, Perlesque, Parrot and all of the other intermediate implementations and runtimes that have been dabbled with.

There has been a lot of wheel-spinning when it comes to getting Perl 6 implemented. It's like they've tried everything except the proven approach of just writing a plain interpreter using C, like we've seen work well for earlier versions of Perl, Ruby, Python, and so many other languages.

Yes, I think Mozilla has collectively made some very bad choices these last few years. And, yes, I will express my displeasure when Mozilla and their actions are the topic of discussion.

I know I'm not alone in these beliefs. Just look at how Firefox's market share has plunged, for example. Look at how Persona saw minimal adoption. Notice how Firefox OS is suffering from a very similar lack of adoption.

Mozilla has a lot of potential to do a lot of good. This was exhibited quite well during the early years of Firefox and Thunderbird. They produced useful offerings that benefited millions of people. But since then they've been acting in ways that don't help their users, and that don't help themselves. At this point, they're just going on inertia they earned years ago.

I, for one, would really like to see them return to their former glory as a true leader, rather than an imitator and a maker of bad decisions.

On one hand, it's good that such extensions exist. But it's getting very tedious having to install so many these days to replace functionality that was removed, or to fix up functionality that has been broken or made worse.

What's the current roadmap for getting Rust 1.0 out the door?

Last I saw, there were over 1500 issues in the project's GitHub issue tracker. Even assuming a lot of those may no longer be relevant, and assuming minimal growth, that's still not a small number of potential problems to deal with.

And we're still seeing disruptive/breaking language and library changes, like the box-related ones recently. I know, I know, I've heard the "let's break it now rather than later" argument from you guys before. But these kind of changes don't instill confidence.

2014 is nearly half over. I know that production-grade programming language implementations don't just happen over night. It takes a lot of effort, a lot of thorough testing, and many bug fixes to result in a truly stable release. All of that takes a lot of time.

While I'd like to be wrong about this by the end of 2014, the current state of affairs is not very encouraging.

Well, after each desktop Firefox update I ask myself, "Am I better off now than I was with the last version?"

In the Phoenix, Firebird and Firefox pre-4 days, I'd quite often find myself answering with "Yes". Since Firefox 4, though, I'm not sure if I've answered with "Yes" even once. Sometimes I'm not any better or worse off, but most times I'm worse off.

For example, extensions would break very frequently for a long time after Firefox 4 was released, although they eventually managed to get that straightened out. Then there's been the progressive dumbing-down of the UI, to the sorry state of affairs after the recent Firefox 29 release containing the Australis disaster. Useful functionality has also been removed, such as the status bar and the ability to disable JavaScript through the preferences dialog. With each update, a lot of us users now have to install more and more extensions just to restore useful functionality that has been removed.

Worst of all, I don't think there's been any significant improvement in its RAM usage, its speed, and other factors like those. Yeah, I know about the are-we-fast-yet style benchmarks, but those don't translate well to the actual experience when using Firefox. Chrome, as much as I dislike its UI, still feels far more responsive and efficient than Firefox.

As for Mobile Firefox, yeah, I'm comparing it to other mobile browsers from Google and Opera, for instance. I find it slower, I've had it crash more, and I don't think it really offers any significant benefits. If it's no better than its competitors, and worse in some ways, it inherently can't offer a good experience.

And it's nonsense to suggest that Persona was "widely used". It saw basically no adoption, compared to its competitors. The same seems to be happening with Firefox OS. Some people try it out, and there is some hype, but it's still a very, very marginal player in the big picture. It won't have any impact on "walled gardens" when almost nobody actually uses it. And in many ways it forces developers into a "walled garden" worse than that of its competitors, with JavaScript/HTML5/CSS basically being the only option for developing applications.

From a technical standpoint, the Asm.js versus Native Client debate is over. Native Client is a much more general, technologically-superior approach. Asm.js is basically just a human-unfriendly subset of JavaScript, without the benefits that a more general approach offers.

I think the Rust crew could have pulled off Rust 1.0 by the end of the year had they stabilized the language and standard library a few months back. But that didn't happen, and we're still seeing relatively significant breaking changes happening to this day. It just doesn't leave them much time all to freeze the language and libraries, and to then give it the significant amount of testing and bug fixing required of a respectable 1.0 release, before the end of 2014.

I occasionally use Firefox and other offerings from Mozilla. And so I'd be very willing to directly donate money to them, as well.

However, a lot of their recent actions have seriously dissuaded me from doing so.

Desktop Firefox, for example, has gotten progressively worse over time. A lot of useful functionality has been stripped out, and the Chrome-like UI these days is much less efficient and effective than the Firefox 3.5.x UI was.

Mobile Firefox on Android doesn't exactly offer a very pleasant experience.

They basically gave up on Thunderbird.

They've wasted resources on unnecessary and unwanted efforts like Persona and Firefox OS.

Asm.js is not a very sound approach, especially compared to technology like Native Client.

Rust seems promising, but won't be seriously usable until at least Rust 1.0, which still seems a long way off. As the year progresses, I get more and more doubtful that it'll be out during 2014, like was claimed earlier this year.

As it stands now, Mozilla is now offering me far less useful products than they once were. I've also seen them squander a lot of the resources they already had on unnecessary products. And their future offerings aren't very inspiring, either. I just can't convince myself that any donation I do make would be used in a productive manner, I'm sad to say.

Yes, that's obvious.

What you've missed is the overarching issue here, though.

Mozilla will strip out useful functionality from Firefox (like the status bar, for example), and anyone desiring such functionality is told to install some extension to restore the now-missing functionality.

If such an attitude is acceptable when it comes to functionality that Firefox users find useful, then it is just as acceptable when it comes to functionality that Mozilla may find useful.

Mozilla should offer this as an optional extension. If users wish to financially support Mozilla in this way, then they are free to install it and provide such financial support. Otherwise, Firefox users aren't subjected to financing Mozilla in a way that may not be considered acceptable.

If this functionality really must be supported, then why isn't it just offered via an extension? Those Firefox users who want this functionality have the option of installing that extension. Otherwise, it doesn't interfere with other users who do not desire its presence.

That is a very academic way of looking at it.

In practice, it's often good to have comments that explain what the code is doing, even if the code itself is quite understandable. It can be a lot quicker to read and understand a one-sentence English description than it can be to read 10+ lines of good code. If the code in question generally has accurate comments of this nature, then working with this code becomes far easier.

And then there are always those cases where rather poor code was written in the first place, it lacked comments, and then a maintenance programmer needs to figure out what it does in order to make some changes to it. Real-world constraints prevent the code from being completely rewritten, but adding comments explaining what it does can be invaluable for anyone else who will ever need to deal with the code.

Like I said in the comment you replied to, if you have a better term, please mention it here.

I don't think that these people, or more specifically their attitude and their approach toward software UI design, are "nebulous" nor "ill-defined". It's extremely easy to identify incidents involving them: Windows 8, GNOME 3, Firefox 4 and later, this new version of Google Maps, and the Slashdot beta website, among others.

There are some common traits we see with these cases:

1. They hijack an existing, well-established software product.

2. They throw out years, if not decades, of accumulated knowledge and experience.

3. They usually come in with little to no relevant experience themselves.

4. They consider appearance far more important than usability, efficiency or productivity.

5. They create a design that's obviously flawed in many different ways.

6. They refuse to accept or even acknowledge these many flaws in their designs, no matter how loudly long-time users point them out.

7. They release their changes into the wild, often forcing them upon users who absolutely abhor the changes.

8. Their design efforts drive away more users than they could ever hope to bring in.

The fourth and sixth points are the key ones here. They are the very essence of the "hipster" attitude, regardless of whether we're talking about clothing, food, software UI design, or pretty much anything else they're involved with.

Right. If there's bytecode of any sort that needs to be converted to machine code on the fly, then we aren't dealing with a native app.

We wouldn't consider a Java app running on HotSpot on a desktop or server Linux system to be considered a "native app". Thus we shouldn't consider a Java app running on Dalvik on a mobile Linux system to be considered a "native app" either.

Maybe that will change in the Android case if ART and its AOT compilation approach is more widely adopted. But that'll still be some time in the future, if ever at all.