What are you Watching? (Educational)

ScreenSlave · August 8, 2023, 11:26am

Interesting interview with John Chowning

gshaham · August 8, 2023, 6:18pm

He’s Channel is great!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcWZJCQGPVE

cosinekitty · August 10, 2023, 8:12pm

Not a video, but this is the best place I could find to drop this. Apparently this is the schematic for a Roland TR-808 Bass Drum:

Jens.Peter.Nielsen · August 11, 2023, 11:42pm

Mike Engelhardt, author of LTSpice, has recently released QSpice beta.

FiroLFO · August 17, 2023, 5:45pm

fractalgee · August 21, 2023, 9:59am

Ahornberg · September 7, 2023, 6:45am

gc3 · September 7, 2023, 5:00pm

Rack possibilities are obvious…

diimdeep · September 8, 2023, 3:02pm

But this out of context quote is often mishandled (even to mean that we do not care about software being slow)

Full passage is

Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%.

https://wiki.c2.com/?PrematureOptimization

Squinky · September 8, 2023, 3:24pm

I disagree. My comment was entirely in the correct context. They are both about programmers wasting time by optimizing code that is not on the critical path. Many people liked my ancient paper that mentions this it’s here

diimdeep · September 9, 2023, 5:16am

@cmuratori style of delivery might be annoying, but I found his points valid, his angle on “clean code”, not in general sense, but certain Clean Code from book by @unclebobmartin where Bob advocates to write code in certain styles, completely disregarding performance outcomes and not even mentioning in book, while this book is one of the first that is recommended to novices. Here is followup discussion between them where they agree on that and other things.

github.com

unclebob/cmuratori-discussion/blob/main/cleancodeqa.md

**CASEY**: Thanks [@unclebobmartin](https://twitter.com/unclebobmartin) for taking the time to answer these questions! Maybe we can start with just some clarification.

Most explanations on Clean Code I have seen from you include all the things I mentioned in [the video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tD5NrevFtbU) - preferring inheritance hierarchies to if/switch statements, not exposing internals (the "Law of Demeter"), etc. But it sounds like you were surprised to hear me say that. Could you take a minute before we get started to explain more fully your ideas on type design, so I can get a sense for where the disconnect is here?

**BOB**: The disconnect.  Hmmm.  I’m not sure there is one.  

I watched the first half of your video.  After that I figured that I had caught the drift.  I responded in one thread that I thought your analysis was essentially correct. I also thought that your rhetoric was a bit inaccurate in representing “clean code”.  I don’t remember exactly what that inaccuracy was; and it doesn’t really matter.

So…. Yes, absolutely, the structures you were presenting are not the best way to squeeze every nanosecond of performance out of a system. Indeed, using those structures can cost you a lot of nanoseconds.  They are not efficient at the nanosecond level.  Long ago this would have been generally important.  We worried about the cost of function call overhead and indirection.  We even unwound loops if we could.  This was especially true in embedded real time environments.

But the kinds of environments where that kind of parsimony is important are nowadays few and far between.  The vast majority of software systems require less than 1% of a modern processor’s power. What’s more, processors are so cheap and available that it is a trivial matter to add more of them to a system. These facts change the trade-off away from program performance to the performance of the development team, and their ability to create systems, and keep those systems running. And it is those needs where the ideas of Clean Code come into play.

It is economically better for most organizations to conserve programmer cycles than computer cycles. So if there is a disconnect between us, I think it is only in the kinds of contexts that we prioritize.  If you are trying to squeeze every nanosecond from a battery of GPUs, then Clean Code may not be for you; at least in the most taxing of your deepest inner loops.  On the other hand, if you are trying to squeeze every man-hour of productivity from a software development team, then Clean Code can be an effective strategy towards that end.

**CASEY**: Just to get a little bit more concrete, so I understand what you're saying here, can we pick some specific software examples? For instance, I would assume we are both familiar with using Visual Studio and CLANG/LLVM. Would those both be reasonable examples of what you are calling the vast majority of software that requires less than 1% of a modern processor?

**BOB**: No, it seems to me that an IDE is a very specialized software system.  There are only a few in existence, and only a very few that have become popular.  

IDE's are interesting systems in that they span a huge domain of contexts.  There are portions in which nanoseconds are extremely important, and other parts where they matter very little.  A modern IDE has to be able to parse large extents of code on a keystroke by kestroke basis.  Making sure that the parsing code preserves nanoseconds can have a big effect.  On the other hand, the code that sets up a configuration dialog does not need even a tiny fractioin of that kind of efficiecy.

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PaulPiko · September 10, 2023, 9:20am

Some insights into Steven Wilson’s process creating his latest track

PaulPiko · September 17, 2023, 10:13am

Tony Banks’ touring synth

cosinekitty · September 21, 2023, 4:17pm

I’m currently in the process of converting a hardware module’s schematic into a software emulation for VCV Rack. The original schematic consists of op-amps, resistors, and capacitors with some interesting feedback loops. I was thrilled to find this video, which shows how to translate exactly this kind of schematic into differential equations. Once you have the differential equations, it is easy to approximate them as finite difference equations that can be updated on each audio sample.

diimdeep · September 23, 2023, 6:04am

Looks like working at billion dollar company with 8500 employees does not prevents one from making same old awful UX/UI with toolkit from early 200x if one really wants to or clueless in these regards.

gc3 · September 23, 2023, 7:34am

Sure, the widgets are old Windows standard, but what impressed me from a UI perspective is what’s going on inside the canvas. Did you get to ~5m in the video? IMO the interface is a lot more modern than it looks (essentially a popup CLI instead of endless dialogs).

On a technical level (said as a non-specialist) I find this pretty amazing–thanks @Jens.Peter.Nielsen !

diimdeep · September 23, 2023, 3:09pm

Yeah, it is nice that all simulation parameters are right there on canvas, wysiwig style I actually like it, but that’s it, afaik you can not even embed interactive graph in there, and everything else except canvas is not great. It’s more like iteration over awful LTspice, and still by modern computers capabilities and interactive media design knowledge, with examples even from this community; it looks not great not to mention with resources available to them.