James Mickens

> Doesn't every freaking mainstream technology suck? I regularly come across rants from significant developers regarding this issue. There probably is no way to prevent this from happening. Because worse is unfortunately better.

Web technology is fundamentally different in that you have a big standards body regulating everything from layout down to color blending, then leave it up to multiple vendors to implement all that stuff at great expense and with long delay. Worse, it's all shoehorned on top of some "document model" than was never designed with applications in mind. It's a waste.

To see what a better platform could look like, consider this:

https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/publications/atlantis-robust-extensible-execution-environments-forweb-applications

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uflg7LDmzI

The key here is reducing surface area. It's entirely possible that WASM will bring us closer to that, but the web developers of today probably won't like that.

> I regularly and seriously consider to leave software development because of this (as I'm really suffering) but then I remember how much power it gives me despite the horrible faults it has.

I don't know what you do, but I find web development to be significantly more frustrating than other areas. That doesn't mean there isn't frustration elsewhere though and it's definitely part of the job.

>"Whenever I go to a conference and I discover that there will be a presentation about Byzantine fault tolerance, I always feel an immediate, unshakable sense of sadness, kind of like when you realize that bad things can happen to good people, or that Keanu Reeves will almost certainly make more money than you over arbitrary time scales. Watching a presentation on Byzantine fault tolerance is similar to watching a foreign film from a depressing nation that used to be controlled by the Soviets — the only difference is that computers and networks are constantly failing instead of young Kapruskin being unable to reunite with the girl he fell in love with while he was working in a coal mine beneath an orphanage that was atop a prison that was inside the abstract concept of World War II."

James Mickens, 'The Saddest Moment' - https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mickens/files/thesaddestmoment.pdf

edit - further wisdom;

James Mickens, Associate Professor, Authority On All Things, Harvard - https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/wisdom-james-mickens

James Mickens is a national treasure.

Go watch his talks on YouTube and read everything he writes.

https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/

Excellence. Quality. Science. These are just a few of the words that have been applied to the illustrious research career of James Mickens. In the span of a few years, James Mickens has made deep, fundamental, and amazing contributions to various areas of computer science and life. Widely acknowledged as one of the greatest scholars of his generation, James Mickens ran out of storage space for his awards in 1992, and he subsequently purchased a large cave to act as a warehouse/fortress from which he can defend himself during the inevitable robot war that was prophesied by the documentary movie “The Matrix.” In his spare time, James Mickens enjoys life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, often (but not always) in that order, and usually (almost always) while listening to Black Sabbath.

Feel free to start here

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=D5xh0ZIEUOE

Nicely ranted.

I'm one who feels that ranting is a kind of art (or can be profitably interpreted that way), and well-formed rant counts as art.

This is a good rant, not great, but heartfelt and sincere with judicious use of curse words and rhetorical flourish.

(For greatness in ranting see the work of Mickens, perhaps our finest performing ranter of the day. https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/wisdom-james-mickens )

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On a tangent, I've been keeping an eye on the Arcan project https://arcan-fe.com/

> Arcan is a powerful development framework for creating virtually anything between user interfaces for specialised embedded applications all the way to full-blown standalone desktop environments.

> At its heart lies a robust and portable multimedia engine, with a well-tested and well-documented interface, programmable using Lua.

(Nothing against Wayland, I'm just mentioning it to say something potentially useful to someone.)

The Night Watch: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1311_05-08_mickens.pdf

> Even as we speak, systems programmers are doing pointer arithmetic so that children and artists can pretend that their x86 chips do not expose an architecture designed by Sauron.

> You might ask, “Why would someone write code in a grotesque
language that exposes raw memory addresses? Why not use
a modern language with garbage collection and functional
programming and free massages after lunch?” Here’s the
answer: Pointers are real. They’re what the hardware understands. Somebody has to deal with them. You can’t just place
a LISP book on top of an x86 chip and hope that the hardware
learns about lambda calculus by osmosis.

Really, I recommend everything by James Mickens every chance I get: https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/wisdom-james-mickens

I was very fortunate to be in a class taught by James Mickens in my undergrad. As he does in this article, he shared his wealth of cybersecurity experience but presented in a very entertaining way.

If you like this paper, he also has many other stories from CS academia that is approachable and fun to read[1]. One of my favorite talks by Mickens is a 30-minute roast of Javascript and web security[2].

[1]: https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/wisdom-james-mickens

[2]: https://vimeo.com/111122950