Re: The joy of FORTRAN

On 3/1/25 12:05 AM, rbowman wrote:

On Fri, 28 Feb 2025 23:02:07 -0500, c186282 wrote:
 

On 2/28/25 9:59 PM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

On Fri, 28 Feb 2025 15:35:00 -0800, John Ames wrote:
>

On Fri, 28 Feb 2025 22:30:51 -0000 (UTC)
Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
>

In any piece of Free software, such a limitation would sooner or
later be seen as a bug, and a patch would be available to fix it.

>
Ristretto is ~18 years old by now, and there's still no option to
disable its Windows Picture & Fax Viewer-esque "index the whole
directory on launch" behavior. There are multiple threads on r/xfce
about the performance penalties this imposes when viewing images
from large-ish directories.

>
Obviously nobody cares. At least, nobody with any ability to offer a
fix.

>
So your argument is that all problematic Free Software limitations get
fixed, except for the ones that don't get fixed, which are, ipso
facto,
not problematic, even when they cause well-documented and
oft-discussed problems?

>
I figure, if a problem affects something like 100 people, then one of
those 100 would have some programming skills to be able to offer a fix.

>
>
    "Programming skills" ? More like one in 100,000 users.

  I don't know what Ristretto is but I am familiar with bug fixes, Sometimes
you look at a non-critical problem that affects few users, examine the
possible fixes, realize it is a gigantic black pit filled with IEDs, and
assign it a priority of 5 (which in our system meant 'when hell freezes
over')
 And that is for commercial software that people are paying money for...
One of the problems with skilled programmers is they are adept at sniffing
out rats.

   There MAY be a near-future fix for this mess - "AI" code
   analysis/rewrite. Explain the fault and the "AI" can put
   the equiv of 10k human hours into tracking it down and
   fixing it - before lunch. Inside 10 years that'll improve
   to 100k human-equiv hours before lunch. It'll be kind of
   an uninspired brute-force analysis. However it will be
   cheap and quick and the "AI" won't unionize or need
   maternity leave.
   In 10-15 years humans won't write commercial code at all,
   you will explain the needs to the "AI" and it'll write it
   from "Lego"-like modules in some lang made to be EZ for
   "AI" to work with (but not for humans to understand). It
   will be reasonably tight code.
   All those 'C' macros and ultra-compacted unreadable
   lines some wags create ... stuff we've talked about ...
   that's gonna be the means and look of the code.
   Beyond that we've created our own Creature and humans
   will just be OUT of the software biz except at the
   highest, most abstract, levels. The 'Jobs-ian'
   "concept" people will be all that's left - until
   the "AI" can do that better too.