As someone who conferenced some basic ML research in early 2000s and then left academia for a boring/stable software engineering gig in a non IT org to escape the hype bubble only to end up having to talk to people about ML/AI frequently this article speaks to me.
I used to use rsync to copy data from my storage array on one machine to an external and an off site backup. Since a lot of it was code, it always took forever to scan all the small files, and I had to script unlocking remote partitions.
With encrypted ZFS, I can just zfs snap then zfs send, and it does the same thing at the block level, raw, so way faster, less data transfer, and no need to send a key or passphrase unless I need to mount it at the destination (meaning a cloud provider could never know the data, for instance).
ZFS is also recursive, so if I have s/storage and /storage/stuff defined, I can snap and send either level, which makes it as versatile as rsync.
C was originally created as a “high-level” language, being more abstract (aka high-level) than the other languages at the time. But now it’s basically considered very slightly more abstract than machine code when compared to the much higher level high-level languages we have today.
Other way around, actually; C was one of several languages proposed to model UNIX without having to write assembly on every line, and has steadily increased in abstraction. Today, C is specified relative to a high-level abstract machine and doesn’t really resemble any modern processing units’ capabilities.
Incidentally, coming to understand this is precisely what the OP meme is about.
To add on to @azdle 's comment, “High Level” in terms of programming languages means further away from how the computer processes things and “Low Level” means very similar to how machines process things. For example, binary and hexadecimal (16 bit) machine code such as “assembly language” are both low level.
Imagine if program interpreters were building blocks, then 6 layers of abstraction would be very tall or higher level.
This is pedantic, but assembly languages get “assembled” to machine code. This is somewhat similar to higher level languages being “compiled,” which eventually becomes assembly which gets assembled. The major reason why these are different is because a compiler changes the structure of the code. Assembly is a direct mapping to instructions. It just converts the text into machine code directly, which is why it’s easy to go from machine code to assembly but decompiling doesn’t give you identical results to the original source code.
Also, binary and hexadecimal are just different ways to view the same binary data and aren’t different things. There is only “machine code” which is a type of binary data but you can view binary with any arbitrary base, though obviously powers of 2 work better.
I don’t think I said assembly is abstracted. It’s pretty much just a translation.
Hexidecimal isn’t binary. They’re both just ways to represent numbers. A number displayed in hexadecimal and binary are the same number even though they look different. FF(base 16) = 1111 1111(base 2) = 255(base 10). They’re all identical.
Assembly is a direct mapping to instructions. It just converts the text into machine code directly,
Kinda… yes and no? At least with x86 there’s still things like encoding selection going on, there’s not a 1:1 mapping between assembly syntax and opcodes.
Also assemblers, at least those meant for human consumption (mostly nasm nowadays) tend to have powerful macro systems. That’s not assembly as such, of course.
But I think your “a compiler changes the structure of the code” thing is spot-on, an assembler will not reorder instructions, it won’t do dead code elimination, but I think it’s not really out of scope of an assembler to be able to do those things – compilers weren’t doing them for the longest time, either.
I think a clearer division would be that compilers deal with two sets of semantics: That of the source language, and that of the CPU. The CPU semantics don’t say things like “result after overflow is undefined”, that’s C speaking, and compilers can use those differences to do all kind of shennanigans. With assemblers there’s no such translation between different language semantics, it’s always the CPU semantics.
I remember joining the industry and switching our company over to full Continuous Integration and Deployment. Instead of uploading DLL’s directly to prod via FTP, we could verify each build, deploy to each environment, run some service tests to see if pages were loading, all the way up to prod - with rollback. I showed my manager, and he shrugged. He didn’t see the benefit of this happening when, in his eyes, all he needed to do was drag and drop, and load the page to make sure all is fine.
Unsurprisingly, I found out that this is how he builds websites to this day…
I really like the GPL license for that reason. Take it, use it, be merry. But don’t you dare use it in a closed source project, and you have to give me credit
Just use a GPL license instead. It allows use with credit, but requires that usage also be released for free. Meaning that it can’t be used by corpos and their closed-source projects.
This is from before my times, but… Deploying an app by uploading a pre built bundle? If it’s a fully self-contained package, that seems good to me, perhaps better than many websites today…
That’s one nice thing about Java. You can bundle the entire app in one .jar or .war file (a .war is essentially the same as a .jar but it’s designed to run within a Servlet container like Tomcat).
PHP also became popular in the PHP 4.x era because it had a large standard library (you could easily create a PHP site with no third-party libraries), and deployment was simply copying the files to the server. No build step needed. Classic ASP was popular before it, and also had no build step. but it had a very small standard library and relied heavily on COM components which had to be manually installed on the server.
PHP is mostly the same today, but these days it’s JIT compiled so it’s faster than the PHP of the past, which was interpreted.
programmer_humor
Hot
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.