Name: Anonymous 2018-04-19 7:08
the tooling for normal software development might suck but it usually offers you shit like syntax highlighting, build and testing automation, well-understood file formats for configs, decent scripting languages and often a lot of open-source software. that's something you usually take for granted and don't even notice until you find yourself without it.
now enter the fucking embedded/microcontroller/electronics/FPGA/radio world. you have to pay crazy money for compilers, debuggers and maybe IDEs if your're are lucky - and their're are all huge proprietary blobs with the least intuitive multi-window GUIs you can think of, a lot of the shit is Windows-only (and sometimes requires a specific old version of Windows because it was programmed in 1995 and nobody thought of updating it because 'works for me'), the scripting and automation is done through piece of shit proprietary languages which look kind of like the languages you normally use but are 100 times clunkier, the assemblers are fragile (with significant whitespace, significant capitalization and column-width limits), the documentation is old and/or non-existent and everything is held together by duct tape and wishful thinking. programers (of the purely functional typefag formal proof variety) who tend to complain that their work lacks rigor associated with other types of engineering clearly haven't seen the mess behind the engineering of hardware they rely on.
and you know the crazy thing? it's all a pain in the ass but there's a charm to it. sure, I like open sores and I'd want that stuff to be free software, but at least its proprietary and expensive nature keeps webshits and appers out so you don't have to listen about some stupid CoC. there's something old-school about this ad-hoc clunkiness, it's not unlike using an old microcomputer. I dunno guys, it sucks but it just gives me nostalgia for times that will never come back
now enter the fucking embedded/microcontroller/electronics/FPGA/radio world. you have to pay crazy money for compilers, debuggers and maybe IDEs if your're are lucky - and their're are all huge proprietary blobs with the least intuitive multi-window GUIs you can think of, a lot of the shit is Windows-only (and sometimes requires a specific old version of Windows because it was programmed in 1995 and nobody thought of updating it because 'works for me'), the scripting and automation is done through piece of shit proprietary languages which look kind of like the languages you normally use but are 100 times clunkier, the assemblers are fragile (with significant whitespace, significant capitalization and column-width limits), the documentation is old and/or non-existent and everything is held together by duct tape and wishful thinking. programers (of the purely functional typefag formal proof variety) who tend to complain that their work lacks rigor associated with other types of engineering clearly haven't seen the mess behind the engineering of hardware they rely on.
and you know the crazy thing? it's all a pain in the ass but there's a charm to it. sure, I like open sores and I'd want that stuff to be free software, but at least its proprietary and expensive nature keeps webshits and appers out so you don't have to listen about some stupid CoC. there's something old-school about this ad-hoc clunkiness, it's not unlike using an old microcomputer. I dunno guys, it sucks but it just gives me nostalgia for times that will never come back