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Re: +DO and programming without stack manipulation words

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Albert van der Horst wrote:

> I've thought about going the direction of defining a test sequence for
> the whole of the Windows API's. Then write your own that pass the
> test, and require to have those installed before you guarantee your
> banking program. The end would be (hopefully) that everybody uses
> GPL-ed versions of libraries.

The way Ulrich Drepper maintained glibc showed that GPL by itself doesn't 
help.  The GPL helps in so far that you can look at the stuff, and decide 
that it's a waste of time, and the maintainer can't be trusted.  Last 
Drepper I was angry about: The glibc has debugging hooks for memory 
allocation.  The default hook is to print a backtrace and terminate the 
program.  This is pretty useless for Gforth, you don't want to see the C 
backtrace, you want to see the Forth backtrace.  So I did set my own 
debugging hooks.

However, these debugging hooks only work on single-threaded programs.  This 
is an undocumented "feature", as Ulrich Drepper stated that this is a 
"wontfix".  Now maybe I can reopen the bug, because Ulrich Drepper is no 
longer the glibc maintainer...

Bugs do happen.  High quality libraries have good isolation of features, and 
do a lot of tests on them.  This is all expensive, and we programmers like 
to write code, not to write tests.  Usually, programmers are ok when they 
have a proof that their program does the required functionality.  Proof by 
existence (you know, the way mathematicians say "for condition A, there 
exists a B in the number space C, but we haven't found it yet").

From the quality point of view, Dalvik reminds me a lot of Windows.  This is 
very likely the result of a large corporate team working on it.  If you 
consider that many companies in America drive their employees into at least 
some burnout syndromes within years, and it takes a decade to become 
actually good at programming, you can see why this is like that: The 
programmer has no time to become good, because once burned out, he's not 
able to improve his skills (rather the contrary).  Google is a very typical 
"we want young people, because everybody else is bad" shop, with a few 
exceptions like Ken Thompson.  And I'm sure, compared to the average 
Googler, Ken is like Bai Mei in Kill Bill Volume II.  "Hahaha, you so-called 
fine art of Java programming is only good for fat bloatware!"

-- 
Bernd Paysan
"If you want it done right, you have to do it yourself"
http://bernd-paysan.de/

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+DO and programming without stack manipulation words anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2014-03-18 13:41 +0000
  Re: +DO and programming without stack manipulation words Bernd Paysan <bernd.paysan@gmx.de> - 2014-03-18 17:30 +0100
    Re: +DO and programming without stack manipulation words anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2014-03-18 16:50 +0000
      Re: +DO and programming without stack manipulation words Bernd Paysan <bernd.paysan@gmx.de> - 2014-03-18 18:56 +0100
        Re: +DO and programming without stack manipulation words anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2014-03-18 18:25 +0000
          Re: +DO and programming without stack manipulation words Bernd Paysan <bernd.paysan@gmx.de> - 2014-03-18 22:21 +0100
            Re: +DO and programming without stack manipulation words albert@spenarnc.xs4all.nl (Albert van der Horst) - 2014-03-19 11:42 +0000
              Re: +DO and programming without stack manipulation words Bernd Paysan <bernd.paysan@gmx.de> - 2014-03-19 14:59 +0100
                Re: +DO and programming without stack manipulation words Andrew Haley <andrew29@littlepinkcloud.invalid> - 2014-03-20 02:13 -0500
                Re: +DO and programming without stack manipulation words albert@spenarnc.xs4all.nl (Albert van der Horst) - 2014-03-20 12:50 +0000
            Re: +DO and programming without stack manipulation words Alexander Skobelev <al.skobelev@gmail.com> - 2014-03-19 20:47 -0700
            Re: +DO and programming without stack manipulation words Alexander Skobelev <al.skobelev@gmail.com> - 2014-03-19 21:24 -0700
            Re: +DO and programming without stack manipulation words Alexander Skobelev <al.skobelev@gmail.com> - 2014-03-19 23:35 -0700
          Re: +DO and programming without stack manipulation words Mark Wills <markwills1970@gmail.com> - 2014-03-20 01:27 -0700
        Re: +DO and programming without stack manipulation words Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2014-03-18 12:24 -0700
    Re: +DO and programming without stack manipulation words albert@spenarnc.xs4all.nl (Albert van der Horst) - 2014-03-18 19:23 +0000
    Re: +DO and programming without stack manipulation words Assad Ebrahim <assad.ebrahim@alum.swarthmore.edu> - 2014-03-19 18:36 +0000
      Re: +DO and programming without stack manipulation words Spam@ControlQ.com - 2014-03-19 17:32 -0400
        Re: +DO and programming without stack manipulation words Bernd Paysan <bernd.paysan@gmx.de> - 2014-03-19 23:48 +0100
      Re: +DO and programming without stack manipulation words Bernd Paysan <bernd.paysan@gmx.de> - 2014-03-19 23:17 +0100
        Re: +DO and programming without stack manipulation words Assad Ebrahim <assad.ebrahim@alum.swarthmore.edu> - 2014-03-20 01:47 +0000
          Re: +DO and programming without stack manipulation words Bernd Paysan <bernd.paysan@gmx.de> - 2014-03-20 23:00 +0100
      Re: +DO and programming without stack manipulation words albert@spenarnc.xs4all.nl (Albert van der Horst) - 2014-03-20 13:00 +0000

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