Comment by gempir

I am a programmer with 22 years of practice and I stand with you.

The churn gets very tiring at one point and you begin to suspect that the people who impose it on you actually have no clue what they're doing and are taking the easy way out because they want to clock out for the week. Which I do understand but pretending that it's for the good of everyone is obviously bogus.

IMO all you scientist folks should work closely with a few programmers and sysadmins and have them author you tools to bring up and down various environments. It's easy and it's much more churn-proof than what we currently do.

I am still in the process of authoring a script to bring up my dev environment everywhere I go, I need to iron out a few kinks in the initial bootstrap (as in, OS and Linux-distro specific ways to install several critically important tools before installing everything else) and I'll just provision a few laptops at home and a VM in the cloud and be done with it.

It's annoying but ultimately a worth investment. Look into it and ask your dev friends.

> I am an academic mathematician, and I've noticed a huge culture difference between academia (at least in mathematics) and software development.

> In the software world, it seems to be universally accepted that everything will change, all of the time, and one needs to keep up. If your dependencies break, it's your responsibility to update those too. Hence software "maintenance", which requires a lot of effort.

> In my world, maintenance is not a concern. If I write a paper, then once it's done it's done. Academic papers, too, have dependencies: "By Theorem 3.4 of Jones and Smith [14], we can conclude that every quasiregular foozle is blahblah, and therefore..." You don't have to worry that Jones and Smith are going to rewrite their paper, change their definition of "quasiregular", or renumber everything.

> Different cultures. Personally, I prefer my own.

Those are the problem with SW developers: they don't have a concept of a finished product and (some of them) never finish the product.

I think this is somewhat unfair. Software doesn’t “require” maintenance anymore than anything else does. If you’re happy with the state of the world as it exists at the moment in time you create the software, it will continue to run that way for as long as you have working hardware to run it on. A compiled application on a computer with a frozen set of software is just as permanent as any academic paper.

The problem is most people aren’t happy with stuff being the same way forever. They want new things and new updates, and that requires changes which in turn creates maintenance.

Software maintenance is less comparable to a single academic paper than it is to the entire field of academia. Sure Freud's papers are all exactly as they were when he published, but if you want to be in the field of psychology you’re going to have a bad time if that’s the most recent version of your academic “software stack”

Formal mathematics is the ONLY aspect of human life where you can get something “right” and it doesnt change.

Supremely unrealistic expectation anywhere else

I think you missed the point of reproducibility. If a stack is maintained with the mindset of reproducibility, then it will do exactly what you said, that it will never change and always works and don’t need to be maintained.

If the software stack is reproducible, then you decouple that to the environment and hence upgrading the OS shouldn’t break it.

(That said it is very difficult to be 100% reproducible, eg your hardware can change from x64 to arm64… that’s why people are suggesting docker. I don’t like docker in the sense that it is a lazy approach to make things reproducible. But the guarantee there is very high.)

> Different cultures. Personally, I prefer my own.

For science, not really - what use is the GP's partner's data if it cannot be reproduced?

I know, I know ... scientists go ahead and publish non-reproducible studies anyway, but it's widely acknowledged as bad science.

For scientists, containers seem to be a much more important than just about anything else, especially for publications, because reproducibility is at the core of the work being done.

Hey I'm in the software world; you're describing the ignorant asshole software world.

Unacceptable. Deferring updates is always absolutely unacceptable. Security updates must always be given absolute priority over all other concerns. If security isn't breaking your workflow then your security is not extensive enough, and if security isn't your absolute top priority then you are doing security wrong. On the defensive side you are either perfect in your compliance or you are penetrated. This is an invariant. TLDR if security isn't breaking your workflow then your security isn't secure and you are part of the problem. You should be thankful when security stops you from working because that means your security is working.

Tools exist to serve its user, and so long as a tool keeps working there's no reason to replace it. In real life this is how tools are. You own a screwdriver and you use it until one day it breaks, and then you go and buy a new screwdriver just like your old one.

This is fundamentally different from the nature of computer software, which can completely change in scope and function from one version to another and introduce changes that "break" something for no good reason as far as the user is concerned.

Imagine for a moment if you will: You use your screwdriver everyday, but one day the handle suddenly changes to something completely new and the shaft falls out because the handle uses a new way of fastening the shaft.

You are told by the manufacturer to come in and have it replaced with the newest model, or if they're not so gracious they tell you to come in and buy the newest model.

And for what reason? The screwdriver was working fine until yesterday. You hate this, because as just a simple user there's no good reason the screwdriver suddenly changed itself. Whether you get it replaced or buy a new one, you're wasting time and even money.

You then realize, one way or another, you can just tell your screwdriver that it cannot change without your assent. Ever. You want, perhaps need your screwdriver to work everyday, so you tell it to never change. The manufacturer keeps changing their screwdriver, but yours never changes and it keeps working.

One day though, the screwdriver finally breaks and you need a new one. So you go and buy a new screwdriver. Except it's completely different. And completely incompatible with the rest of your workshop, and all the tools inside which you likewise told to never change.

Why is the computer world so fucking shit?

VMware is a highly complicated piece of software relying on a lot of internals of how macOS works. I think it's reasonable to expect that it won't "just work"

I don't say you have to update, but in time security updates will no longer come for your version of macOS and in addition to that you will won't even get new features, like in the new macOS Version the openssh version is newer and now almost fully supports yubikey ssh keys stuff like that.