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Re: A somewhat interesting 'technical debt' article

9-Feb-23 10:58

Very interesting.
Especially...

Quote:

"Thunderbird is literally a bunch of code running on top of Firefox. All the tabs and sections you see in our applications are just browser tabs with a custom user interface."

Quote:
"...including a lot of C++, JS, CSS, and XHTML to ensure everything works properly..."

XHTML!? Interesting, thought that was basically a dead spec.

Interesting article thanks for posting.

dandy7210-Feb-23 3:35

dandy72

10-Feb-23 3:35

Quote:
"Why does Thunderbird look so old"

Oh, god, what are they gonna do to it?

It looks fine.

A tree to show the hierarchical folder structure, a list view to show individual items, and another area to show the details of the selected item. Menus, toolbars, right-click options, tooltips, everything I would expect from a functional application.

There's no need to break the paradigm (and yes, I used that word). Please don't turn it into a phone app.

Re: A somewhat interesting 'technical debt' article

jschell10-Feb-23 10:18

old knowledge vs new, old (tech) books vs new

10-Feb-23 10:18

From that link

"Why does Thunderbird look so old"

That sort of expression always make me wonder why do you care?

Do you use email for the lines around the boxes or for the content of the email itself?

For example myself I don't care what the Print button looks like as long as I can find it and it actually prints.

raddevus9-Feb-23 9:47

9-Feb-23 9:47

I just discovered how to build an NES (Nintendo) emulator on my Linux box.

When I started developing software 30 years ago, I began with C, but I had no idea how to do this build (see the details at this answer on AskUbuntu[^]).

Developing Complete Apps On Linux
The person who explained what I needed to do had so much knowledge and I started thinking about developing apps on Linux -- by complete I mean with a GUI. The emulator has a complete GUI and is quite an amazing project.

I Searched For Books
I decided to set out on a search for a book which would teach me :

How to create a GUI-based app (like an old Windows Forms app on Windows)

>60,000 Books On O'Reilly
I'm a O'Reilly Books subscriber so I searched there, because they have over 60,000 books available and those books go back to the beginning of my career. Quite amazing library actually.

Here's What I Found
I discovered three main things:
1. All the serious (and probably best) books were written in the (distant) past (considering speed of Internet-age)
2. Books that cover truly deep topics (not just HTML, or a JS Framework) are rarely (maybe never) published after 2008 or so.
3. Learning to build a UI while learning to program Linux is not common -- maybe non-existent
note*: there are still good tech books published & I read many of them through the year, but they just don't seem to have the depth of coverage that they used to have.

I found the fantastic book, Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment, 3rd ed[^], by Stephens & Rago. (1st ed published in 1992)

I was able to compile numerous examples and I will go through that book because there is a lot of really good stuff in there.

There is also the new(er) (2010) The Linux Programming Interface, by Michael Kerrisk[^]
That one is amazing, but it's more directed toward systems programming instead of app programming.

What Windows Ubiquity Had Given Us Forms Programmers
I am so amazed what the ubiquity of Windows desktop had given us over the years.
We had this One Place to go to develop desktop apps and it was just beginning to make sense when the Internet hit. Unsure | :~

About Books & Learning Programming
Learning programming feels so "high-level" now & it's even more difficult to know what is really going on under the lid.

1 or 2 Decades
So anyways, it's quite amazing to learn to program Linux by reading books that are 1 or 2 decades old now. Roll eyes | :rolleyes:

You just can't learn it by reading anything newer. Laugh | :laugh:

modified 9-Feb-23 16:25pm.

Jeremy Falcon9-Feb-23 11:51

Jeremy Falcon

9-Feb-23 11:51

I stopped reading books a while back for this very reason. I'm sure there are a few out there that are excellent, but let's just say very few have the same level of quality as classics such as: Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book.

Which btw, if you have the time and money to spare are interested in low level graphics... get that book. It's more for the DOS-ish era but you'll learn a lot, if you want to get raw.

Jeremy Falcon

Jeremy Falcon9-Feb-23 11:52

Jeremy Falcon

9-Feb-23 11:52

Congrats on the emulator btw, that's pretty cool.

Jeremy Falcon

Amarnath S9-Feb-23 15:08

Amarnath S

9-Feb-23 15:08

Nowadays very few people read books. They will prefer to watch a set of YouTube videos and consider themselves as experts.

raddevus10-Feb-23 7:46

10-Feb-23 7:46

Amarnath S wrote:
They will prefer to watch a set of YouTube videos and consider themselves as experts.

I know...

Alas!

Nelek10-Feb-23 9:27

Nelek

10-Feb-23 9:27

Amarnath S wrote:
They will prefer to watch a set of YouTube videos

I do it for woodworking

Amarnath S wrote:
consider themselves as experts.

that's not what my fingers show... Roll eyes | :rolleyes:

M.D.V.

If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.

jschell10-Feb-23 10:22

10-Feb-23 10:22

And some use to read the book and consider themselves an expert. And even more so they would write a book and then proclaim themselves and expert (and force their students to buy it.)

The source of the knowledge doesn't matter as long as learning can take place.

megaadam10-Feb-23 4:23

megaadam

10-Feb-23 4:23

Another perspective is that it often makes sense to think in terms of cross platform, for desktop applications. (I refuse to use the word "app" for desktop Cool | :cool:

)
VS Code and Slack are two such widespread applications (written in Electron). Another approach is Qt. I think the Xamarin framework was around, but might be dead? Google have their own such framework (JS based just like Electron), the name evades me.

Of course, if you want to learn Linux, such options will not help, so maybe I am just speaking into to void here.

"If we don't change direction, we'll end up where we're going"

raddevus10-Feb-23 7:50

10-Feb-23 7:50

megaadam wrote:
VS Code and Slack are two such widespread applications (written in Electron).

My own app is written using ElectronJS also and it runs cross-platform also.
See my github for GitHub - raddevus/CYaPass-Electron: The official C'YaPass desktop app built on Electron (runs on Windows, Linux, Mac)[^]

My app is in the Windows Store[^], SnapStore (Linux)[^], and runs as a native app on Macs.

Is there a really a problem with safety?

Andre Oosthuizen10-Feb-23 5:19

Andre Oosthuizen

10-Feb-23 5:19

Saying this with tongue in cheek Blush | :O

Ask ChatGPT to write the book, seems everyone else does. Hopefully it learned from some old scripts and might give a good example OR, it might all be bull$#% like every other return it gives... Just joking!

jschell9-Feb-23 9:06

9-Feb-23 9:06

Following is a link from the Code Project newsletter.

Value-Oriented Programming[^]

Besides being a bit long (academic journal so of course) it does have quite a bit about language maintaining 'safety'. If you are not familiar and do not want to read the article, think of it as the problem with using a pointer which is null when you expect it to be not null. Since that is the one most talked about.

Although the article does have an example about 'int' overflow in C++. Which doesn't seem like a great example to me.

Myself language problems have not been a significant source of problems since in the 90s. And that was once I learned to always initialize pointers (C++) and then when reviewing code insist that others do the same. Numeric overflow was sometimes considered but has always been found to not ever to be a problem (I even dealt with the analysis of one of in the recent past - it could never be a problem.)

Now following is a list of the problems that I do deal with. And have been dealing with for decades.
1. Failures in design.
2. Failures in requirements.
3. Failures in customer expectation management.
4. Failures is misunderstandings (or total ignorance) about what some change might do.
5. Failures caused by complexity in massive systems. And sometimes not so massive.
6. Failures caused by prioritization (so same problem comes up and is never fixed even when fix is known.)
7. Failures caused by programmers implementing something and either explicitly ignoring stuff either in the code base or in the domain space (very often associated with databases and/or any network protocol.)

There are probably some others.

Now myself I just go in every day hoping that the most complicated new thing that I must prioritize immediately is a null pointer exception. Because those are easy to find and fix.

I haven't worked in the same business domain either. But perhaps it is because I have only been working with C# and Java since the 90's (mostly)?

Do others find that they must spend all of their time fixing null pointer errors and numeric overflows?

obermd9-Feb-23 10:18

obermd

9-Feb-23 10:18

The answer to your question is unequivocally YES. I can say that because every cyber-vulnerability is ultimately a failure of safety as elucidated in the article.

jschell10-Feb-23 9:57

10-Feb-23 9:57

obermd wrote:
because every cyber-vulnerability is ultimately a failure of safety

I don't see the reference. The word "cyber" does not appear in the article at all. Nor does security.

And as I read it is discussing safety as an attribute of a programming language and not how the programming language is used.

As a counter example as far as I can recall most of the security problems related to SSL over the years had to do either with design or implementation. And not anything like a null pointer exception (could be some but not most.)

BernardIE53179-Feb-23 13:00

BernardIE5317

9-Feb-23 13:00

just yesterday i dealt w/ a value problem (C++) . i was maintaining references to items stored in a vector via push_back() i.e. the items not the references were in the vector . i expected the references to still be valid since i was pushing back and not altering anything in the vector . oops . my mistake . it took a while to finally discover the vector size was being altered w/ each push_back . the fix was easy i.e. to wit merely set the initial capacity to a large number . recently i've been encountering a number of "tell my grandchildren about" kind of bugs . this may be one of them . another was due to merely omitting a "_" character in a file name . others i have yet to figure out as they disappeared on their own . i am assuming one of those was Explorer changing its mind .