Interesting Links for 26-07-2023

[andrewducker]

1. A Growing Share Of Americans Think States Shouldn't Be Able To Put Any Limits On Abortion

(tags:usa abortion polls )

2. Labour drops pledge to introduce self-ID for trans people - but will still streamline the process, removing the need for a panel

(tags:lgbt transgender labour politics )

3. "What I've learned about having sex with ADHD (and why you should never go nude trampolining)"

(tags:adhd sex )

4. There is no good data on whether attention spans have been declining

(tags:attention psychology research fail )

5. Scottish government approval for £500m hydro scheme

(tags:Scotland electricity hydroelectric GoodNews )

6. To understand Musk's renewed obsession with X you need to understand his history with it

(tags:internet ElonMusk history business finance )

7. On Monotropism, Autism, and ADHD

(tags:autism adhd research )

8. Programming Advice: Before you try to do something, make sure you can do nothing

(tags:advice programming )

9. Wagner gold smuggling critical to keeping Russia's economy afloat

(tags:Russia gold Sudan )

Comments

[fub]

8. One could argue that software framework have gotten too complex -- so complex, that making something that does nothing requires actual software engineering work. That should not really be a thing.

[andrewducker]

If you want, say, a service that doesn't do anything, then you still need all the bits that make it a service (as opposed to a console app or a GUI, or some other kind of application). And so it makes sense to make sure you have gotten that right before you start making your service do something. Because it might look like "nothing" to you, but there's a bunch of stuff that's necessary in there.
And, as far as I can tell, all of that stuff is actually necessary - it's not something which could be left out.

[fub]

Yes, I get that. But ideally, you just had a button in your IDE (or a single statement in your language) that says: "this is a console app" or "this is a service", and the system would take care of it. The code to make it an console app is, arguably, boilerplate because it does not do anything (other than define this piece of software as a console app), and yet it still requires software engineering.

(This is also why I love RPA: it allows you to do "software things" without requiring you to be a software engineer. It can fill a lot of gaps that we simply don't have the development capacity for to fill with 'proper' software.)

[andrewducker]

Oh yes. One button to create it, I agree. Visual Studio does that.

But then, once you've done that, test it, to make sure that it works at all. And then do something simple to make sure that *that* works.

[jducoeur]

To be fair, there are plenty of fancy modern platforms where a "Hello World" program is still only a few lines of code. They sometimes compile to a megabyte of output because there are so many libraries involved, but the actual source code can be pretty concise.

[fub]

That is how it should be! And yes, running a service is complex, so it's only natural that there are a lot of libraries involved -- but all that complexity should be taken care of by the libraries, not by the software engineer! (In most cases, obviously.)