Comments on: Don’t Upgrade

By: Jonathan Goldberg

Jonathan Goldberg — Tue, 08 Jun 2004 16:16:26 +0000

Re: no-one would trust them with something like a transactional database, an air-traffic control system or an electricity grid. Applications for stuff like that are usually written in languages you have never heard of, like APL. If you think anything like the above is or should be written in APL then I really, really, really hope you never write one. And I am totally confident you won’t. APL, marvelous for what it’s for (up to a point), is not for any of those things. Like others here, I went though a period of infatuation with APL. Later I began to see its limitations. One of which, in the dim and distant days when I used it, was a tendency to crash the machine. Although that’s not among the reasons I was thinking about above…

By: John Quiggin

John Quiggin — Sat, 05 Jun 2004 22:05:17 +0000

I loved the structured procrastination link – this is precisely how all my filing, tidying and similar jobs get done. Contrary to Perry, I find a paid job with a genuine deadline best, since it really encourages procrastination. The cost is that you have to actually do the job in the hours left after fear of failure overrides desire for delay. But how does all this tie in with the Dilbertian principle of active waiting, namely that if you ignore a problem long enough, someone will fix it for you?

By: novalis

novalis — Sat, 05 Jun 2004 22:00:16 +0000

I know at least one person who programs in Perl these days because it reminds him of APL. And if you really want APL back, Perl6 will allow unicode operators.

By: infoshaman

infoshaman — Sat, 05 Jun 2004 20:07:24 +0000

Thanks for the entry. You connected me with a part of my intellectual past. I programmed in APL in the 70s for a professor of sociology named Nick Mullins, who forced me to read papers by Ron Breiger. I vaguely remember reading a part of Ron’s PhD thesis. Ron’s subdiscipline, social network analysis, is evidence to the contrary that “anyone can do sociology”! I now support the US air traffic control system. The current US ATC software is written in a mix of “C”, Jovial and assembly language. The software’s ancient (early 1980s design) and held together by a small cadre of very dedicated engineers. If the Bushies don’t keep cutting Federal civil agency funding, the next version of the US’s ATC software will be fielded around 2010. And it will be written in “C++”. I suspect that, as with many major software projects, the Royal Bank of Canada cut corners on its development effort. Only about one of every six hours of SUCCESSFUL software projects is spent writing code. But since managers are in a hurry, they don’t let the designers do their up-front job properly, then they insist on cutting over to new software before the testers are finished. The consequence is not surprizing: “Pay me now, or pay me later!” Bryan: “k” is available at http://kx.com I discovered it about two months ago, and it’s a blast…like APL on speed! Give it a look. Finally, not all APL code is unreadable. In the mid-1980s, the General Accounting Office reviewed my implementation of an econometric model of the US military compensation system. Once I taught the auditors the APL basics, they could understand the model well enough to approve it for use.

By: Mary Kay

Mary Kay — Sat, 05 Jun 2004 19:03:33 +0000

I don’t do software upgrades myself, that’s why I have a husband. A husband whose doctoral thesis was, in effect, an enormous computer program. (An Automated Search for Supernovae—for a PhD in astrophysics.) A husband whose hobby is hardware geeking. Who knows I am a more than competent user but totally uninterested in programming. So I just had to try to explain to him why I was laughing hysterically at a blog entry about programming languages and upgrading software. Finally I said, “It’s Kieran Healy. Everything he writes is both good and funny.” MKK—still snickering

By: bryan

bryan — Sat, 05 Jun 2004 16:54:47 +0000

Well nobody seems to have linked to J yet, so after APL two other Vector languages rose to compete, J, by Iverson with help from Roger Hui available at http://www.jsoftware.com say “APL but only using the ASCII character set” although of course there is more to it than that, and K, used by many top finance companies and totally unreadable IMHO found I can’t remember where. “Applications for stuff like that are usually written in languages you have never heard of,” or in C (eerhh), C++ (aaarggh), Java (ugh)…

By: consigliere

consigliere — Sat, 05 Jun 2004 15:26:46 +0000

My brief love affair with APL (a “write-only” language) was 25 years ago. It was the perfect programming language for undergraduate students of analytic philosophy – especially those who wrote miserable, confused senior theses on Frege.

By: Mike Huben

Mike Huben — Sat, 05 Jun 2004 13:44:49 +0000

APL was my first programming language. I loved it, but it warped me in many ways that took years to unlearn. Funny how I can still read and understand it 30 years and roughly 16 languages later.

By: Carlos

Carlos — Sat, 05 Jun 2004 01:27:45 +0000

Ah, APL. APL is the Zukofsky of programming languages.

By: Chris

Chris — Sat, 05 Jun 2004 01:02:00 +0000

Back in 2002 at a big company that no longer exists (for unrelated reasons), we used a 1996 or so version of Lotus Notes. It was annoying as heck to use but we never got viruses and there were never any upgrade hassles.

By: yabonn

yabonn — Sat, 05 Jun 2004 00:22:31 +0000

Upgrading : old bugs out, new bugs in.

By: Jeff Doyle

Jeff Doyle — Fri, 04 Jun 2004 22:58:15 +0000

Since we are telling jokes: The difference between hardware and software is that you can change hardware. Seriously, the question to ask before upgrading is: why? The answer is seldom compelling. (usually reduces to raw neophilia.)

By: Mr Bill

Mr Bill — Fri, 04 Jun 2004 22:23:14 +0000

Joke told by former NCR (remember them?)softwear developer: What’s the difference between softwear salesmen and used-car salesmen? The used-car salesmen know they are lying.

By: liberal japonicus

liberal japonicus — Fri, 04 Jun 2004 22:20:48 +0000

To paraphrase Johnson, upgrading software represents the triumph of hope over experience

By: q

Fri, 04 Jun 2004 22:02:22 +0000

Bundled functions and requirements depend on trust and give greater flexibility which is not always a good thing. If customers were charged for the service of “how much money is in their accounts” a cost 5 dollars a year, the bigwigs would not have allowed the error to happen, as the mistake would have cost them 50 million dollars. If George Bush was charged a million dollars for every person who died in Iraq during war and occupation since 20 March 2003 maybe he would have thought more clearly about a clearly defined exit strategy.