[talk] OpsMops Halted (probably OT but tangentially related to April 3 talk)

[Raul Cuza]

On Mon, Apr 1, 2019 at 10:00 PM Edward Capriolo <edlinuxguru at gmail.com> wrote:
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> "We get tired, and we let things just go. We use what other people are using. We run clouds on top of our freaking clouds for no reason, and we are much more interested in tech fashion than what makes us productive. We tolerate software with thousands of bugs."
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> Really? but Ansible which wraps python on top of shell commands is more productive? I used some of the first versions of ansible.They were bad, in particular the entire "this sexy python thing does not work with RHEL, because of strange python ssh library and having to patch ssh server to involve pipelining", and it "worked" out of the box but ran as slow as dirt because it would uses some python math module instead of c-code to do ssl :) Touching a file was wrapped in multiple levels of python, ow and the YAML files... And out for every command I wanted to run it was running 19 other commands to "fact check" my system.
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> Most programers don't know much about operating systems or networking, most ops people hate writing code. All dev-ops is now is now just what every sysadmin calls themselves when getting a new job. If you reject the devops labelgo going even more cutting edge and call yourself an SRE. lol
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> Open source software feeds off interaction. And this is my diagnosis basically - widescale burnout. It's been coming in slow but we didn't see it. Agile and DevOps are the burnout. IMHO we are *poorer* technologically than we were 6 years ago in some areas. Why
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> Not really what is going on. In the 60s people theorized that computing would soon enter the conceptual age. IE I tell my compiler "make me a program with 2 text boxes and a button that when I click on the text boxes it adds them". https://www.techrepublic.com/article/developers-rejoice-now-ai-can-write-code-for-you/
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> If a AI program can write code, why should a human have to write code to setup a system.Think like back to the future 2....
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> "You have to use your hands....thats like a baby toy"
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I'm not going to argue that using hands isn't like a baby toy. Like a
baby, adult brains are stimulated by body movement. This is different
from person to person, but I think the whole body is part of thinking.
My fingers help me remember phone numbers for example.

As for "make me a program..." that is fascinating. I think we agree
that there is a difference between the levels of abstraction in
telling the compiler the steps of building something (e.g. "make 2
text boxes and a button" can be done with English or with Python with
equal results) to the level of abstraction of "make me an application
that attracts 10,000 paying customers."  I agree that a compiler can
get to the point that you can use English to program it. I have no
clue if it will ever get to the point that you can tell it the goal of
the application and it will be able to write it.

Now if a system is doing everything to setup another system, we've
left Comp Sci and entered biology.

Raúl