It occurs to me that this post was a draft for a long while. I wrote a paragraph, tossed it out because it was rubbish (wait, I thought all my musings on this blog were) and probably should have a part 1 to a series that would be more tongue in cheek to have a part 0.
But to write this entry I have to get behind why I wrote the title, couldn't come up with anything sound for this post, and gave up on it for 2 months. In simplest terms, I am an idiot and I have a hard time understanding complicated things I haven't spent years developing habits and muscle memory to recognize. As a result, when in software-land, there are a trifecta of problems that contribute to this - software complexity is huge, people try to minimize it, the means by which they minimize it specialize the industry and make trying to be a "master of computers" like I keep trying to pull off a lost cause. It is why I keep going back to wanting to do my own computing environment, because the most fundamental problem is that none of this was ever expected. New things happen every day, and the unexpected contributes to all the complexity in this industry today.
If I wanted to hack on a software project someone else made, I would need to get it out of source control, so I need to understand the syntax and behavior of that properly. I'm putting it on a hard drive, so I need to know how disk caching works, how the IO bus handles requests, how it determines spin speed, how a laser magnetizes a platter spinning at thousands of RPM, why they settled on 5v power (even though the damn power connector gives 3.3, 5, and 12 volt power, and nobody uses 3.3 volts, I wonder why, hey power supplies why you gotta break AC into 3 DC voltages and barely use 2 of them?). How the file system works (b trees, allocation tables (distributed or contiguous) file distribution on the drive (aka Windows vs Linux style), how solid state storage memory works using capacitors rather than transistors like processor cache, how the south bridge and north bridge interconnect sends data, how SAS and SATA differ, how an operating system can recognize a SATA bus, determine the verison of the connection, schedule writes, treat a PCI, USB, SATA, or IDE hard drive as basically the same thing even when they are radically different. And we haven't even gotten to the files in a folder yet, just where we are putting them. We didn't even touch on TCP, UDP stacks, the different sockets, different variations of CAT cable, how hertz modulation over an ethernet line determines the bandwidth, how to differentiate power from data, analog vs digital signal processing.
The amount of stuff is huge. And a lot of it is hard stuff. Yet somehow a 5 year old can use a tablet computer to play a game, utilizing all of this and more (graphical interconnects, switching video and physical memory, caching, synchronization, SIMD instructions, opengl driver implementations, DMI interfacing) and doesn't know a wink of it. And it may be my greatest crime that there is almost nothing I can use without understanding to a degree that I could put it back together by hand with a welding iron and a few billion dollars worth of silicon fabrication and imprinting of transistors.
So the necessary time commitments to understand the entire beast are honestly too large. So I prioritize the things I care about most, and often end up iteratively moving through the process - a CPU composed of ALUs, FPUs, caches, registers, a TLB, maybe a power modulator, the northbridge logic, a memory interconnect, physical RAM operating at certain timings, refresh rates, clock rates, channel sizes, how the operating system utilizes page tables to manage memory, how TLBs cache pages in layered cache on the processor.
And just the hardware itself is overwhelming. So you get past that and you arrive in software land, and start at a bios that exists in battery run ROM on a motherboard (and don't get me started on all that circuitry) that initializes memory and devices, and depending on if you are running EFI or BIOS you end up either executing code from a partition table or you search partitions for a system partition to find executables to run.
And on top of all this hardware complexity, we have dozens of ways of writing an OS, different binary formats, different assembly languages for different processors, different dialects of C that usually ends up at the base of it all (because we are stupidly set in our ways, to be honest. C is so flawed... ) We pile on top of that extreme language complexity (C++) or extreme environment complexity (Java / C#) or extreme interpreting complexity (Python, JS) where something is extremely complicated to understand but essential to actually understanding what is going on. And then you have your programming paradigms, and have Perl, Haskell, Clojure, and a dozen other functional languages or other strange syntaxes out there people use just to make your brain explode. Yet people much smarter than myself can read these like real second languages.
It might be the fault that after 6 years of Spanish going in one ear and out the other, I am firmly grounded in English with no hope to speak anything else. Mainly because my brain is crappy. But in the same sense, I like my programming languages being new vocabularies rather than new languages that break my brain. But I don't think it is even my problem entirely - it is evident from the amount of failure in software space, the extreme desire for "talent", and the general cluelessness of both developers and customers in building and using this stuff that things have, just under the surface, gotten really out of hand. And I really think that the best way to fix it is a clean slate now, so we don't end up with the Latin Alphabet problem (which coincidentally is the other blog I'm posting at the same time as this one).
So even though this post comes out 6 entries into this series on software, it does establish the baseline for why I rant about the things I do - everything is broken, and wrong, and nobody wants to take the time to just do it right. Mainly because we are fleshy meatbags that only persist for a blink of time in space, require the flesh of living things to persist, and have an unhealthy obsession with rich people doing stupid crap.
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