On 10/4/2019 8:17 AM, Lamar Owen wrote:
On 10/4/19 10:40 AM, Valeri Galtsev wrote:
My impression is younger generation doesn't value rules that
programmers were following 2-3 decades ago. One of which is:
Do not make any changes [in the program] unless they are absolutely
necessary.
I have in the past agreed with this assessment more than once. And I
_am_ somewhat of an old hand at this, having run Unix and Unix-like
systems for a bit over 30 years.
The fact of the matter is that, even though some of the old ways work
just fine and don't need to be changed, many more times I've seen
that, if the old way was a kludge to begin with, maybe there really is
a better way to do it. Take the transition from horse and buggy to
automobile for instance. Iron rim tires work just great for the
buggy, not so great for the automobile; a change had to be made in an
old technology (the wheel) to meet the needs of the new automobile.
Lots of wheelwrights probably fought that change, too.
...
Today, I'm doing things with containers, virtualization, dynamic load
balancing, software-defined infrastructure/IaaS, etc that the old ways
simply cannot handle. NetworkManager/systemd/etc in CentOS are far
from perfect, but at least they're trying to solve the newer problems
that the old ways in many cases simply cannot.
This is a bit orthogonal, though. (Witness the effort to remove systemd
requirements from containers.) An engineer is expected to understand the
component parts rationally to arrive at some sort of professional
conclusion that something is likely to work properly. This is not helped
by a switch from imperative and deterministic to declarative and
dynamic, which underlies many of the changes we've had to deal with in
the past decade. There is a time and place for the latter, and it's good
to have options available... but there are many times and places
(especially in the Enterprise space) where the opposite is necessary,
and it's FAR more reasonable to layer dynamic manipulation on top of a
deterministically-configured core than the other way around.
-jc
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