[HN Gopher] Is the madness ever going to end?
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Is the madness ever going to end?
Author : zaik
Score : 73 points
Date : 2022-01-11 21:15 UTC (1 hours ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (unixsheikh.com)
| the_only_law wrote:
| I mean, I don't necessarily disagree with the main point, but
| this feels like a short argument with straw-men and poor faith.
|
| Personally, I think another commenter got it right pointing to
| commoditization (interestingly I find the commoditization of
| computing in general has greatly decreased my interest in it, but
| that's a me problem), though I always find the ire towards web
| dev as the root of all evil to be a little too strong. There's a
| lot of bullshit, but I see bullshit in plenty of other domains as
| well. Web development just has the status of being the largest
| platform at the time.
|
| Also over abstracting is bad, so is over/pre-optimization and
| frameworks can add a ton of unnecessary overhead, but y'know,
| something about hammers. That being said, I'd rather inherit an
| overcomplicated Laravel application from someone that an
| overcomplicated raw-PHP monolith.
| kokanator wrote:
| Agree but confused....
|
| Asking a few questions in response would be meaningful:
|
| Do you ever write scripts to solve routine tasks so you don't
| have to do them over and over again?
|
| Of course you do. Most ( not all ) of these examples are
| attempting to abstract a problem. In some cases they do that well
| in other cases they don't.
|
| Have you upgraded your OS in the last 20 years?
|
| Again, of course you have. Each of those upgrades have some
| useful and some not so useful things.
|
| Did you upgrade your vehicle to a Tesla?
|
| I can't answer this one but the same applies here. If you want to
| state "well yes because it helps the environment." My response
| would be simply a large number of auto advancements over the last
| 20-30 years makes the vast majority of that a reality for you.
|
| So no, you will not stop attempts at progress. Some will win and
| others will become Studebakers but this is the activity that
| drives innovation.
| creamytaco wrote:
| It's called "commoditization". Since programming is now a
| commodity, the barrier to entry had to be lowered in order to
| pump up the numbers. Growth at all costs!
|
| There is still rock-solid engineering to be found, usually in
| domains where the stakes are high (for example, fintech), but
| anything web-related is best kept away from if one is allergic to
| bullshit.
| [deleted]
| root_axis wrote:
| The author is fighting a strawman. Rather than engage with the
| specific problems these solutions were built to solve they
| dismissively regard them as just flavor of the week trends purely
| for the sake of chasing newness. This is true of the entire post,
| but I'll tackle just one since it's emblematic of my issues with
| all the rest:
|
| The argument for Electron and React Native isn't "it's modern",
| it's "it's much cheaper". Hiring experienced desktop application
| devs to build a quality native app for each platform is going to
| be expensive, hiring a few JS bootcampers to build one react UI
| that works on every platform is extremely cheap - shittier
| performance is the tradeoff to instantly have access to every
| platform. It's not a coincidence that Electron apps like e.g.
| Slack, Spotify, Discord are massively dominant players in their
| markets, I doubt you'd look the engineering leads of these
| companies in the face and tell them that you believe they put no
| thought into the tradeoffs of Electron and that they're just
| following trends.
| bengale wrote:
| The whole "newness" idea seems odd anyway considering electron
| must be coming on ten years old now.
|
| > The argument for Electron and React Native isn't "it's
| modern", it's "it's much cheaper".
|
| This is spot on. I've worked on a big electron project before
| for a massive firm and a lot of work was done before picking
| that direction. Proof of concept was done for a couple of
| alternatives but electron ended up better on balance.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| It's not going to end until companies realise the waste or there
| are enough developers to satisfy demand.
|
| Right now developers are in demand, they can charge a premium and
| they need to justify a career by filling their resume with
| accomplishments.
|
| OSS (unmaintained or overengineered is fine) is unfortunately one
| of these.
|
| This problem would be greatly diminished if we had small
| companies delivering value and getting paid based on that -
| thriving or ceasing to exists if needed. Instead big corps lead
| the way and pay politicians to complicate regulations and keep
| the status quo.
|
| The bigger the corp the more it resembles a government:
| inefficient, full of useless layers and completely detached from
| actual performance.
|
| Most engineers will live all their career in a place where their
| input doesn't influence much the success of the company and they
| will be awarded plenty of time to dedicate to new non-
| innovations.
| dave333 wrote:
| Interesting that the Unix command line is still just as
| functional and useful as it was 40 years ago and yet the UI
| frameworks have been thrown away and replaced every 2 or 3 years.
| My personal experience with UI has been Openwindows, X/Motif,
| Java, HTML/CSS, pLain old Javascript, ExtJS, jQuery, Dojo,
| Angular - various incompatible versions, and React. Glad I
| finally got to retire!
| andrewstuart wrote:
| >> They keep inventing "revolutionary new ways" of doing the
| exact same thing that could be done in a dozen ways already.
|
| This is not true - we are not doing the same things as years ago.
| The rest of the argument falls apart after this is understood.
| dexwiz wrote:
| No it probably won't end. No you are not a dinosaur, but
| development has changed. Decades ago you could build an app from
| the ground up. This gave you a bunch of different layers to
| compose, and probably made the app overall simpler. Now most
| developers are given a box to create their feature in whether
| it's a Spring Bean, a React Component, or a serverless function,
| with an entire application stack under it. You could have each
| developer or team manager their own stack, and thus get
| microservices. But now you have just pushed your complexity from
| a single monolithic app to the space between all the individual
| apps.
|
| At the end of the day, naked tech has no value. It's only the
| end-user features that make money. The industry has optimized for
| this, and that is what gives rise to all these seemingly insane
| practices. They aren't great from a pure tech perspective, but
| they help speed up feature development.
|
| Paradoxically, the community still values naked tech much higher
| than end-user features. That is why the community heroes are
| those who write kernels and frameworks. So you have a million
| developers all trying to "make it big" with their bespoke
| framework. 99% of these go no where, but even that 1% that gain
| some traction just add to the constant churn of `inventing
| "revolutionary new ways" of doing the exact same thing.`
| torstenvl wrote:
| That's an interesting and valuable perspective. I'm definitely
| one of the people who keep reinventing things that have already
| been done before, even though I'm not very good. But since I
| don't use programming to put food on the table, maybe that's
| okay - it's more of a hobby/educational endeavor than anything
| important.
|
| All the same, maybe if I spent less time writing, e.g., yet
| another dictionary/map, I could actually make something
| worthwhile.
| Simon_O_Rourke wrote:
| That's a great perspective, but are those peeps writing the
| unused frameworks just wasting their time to solve a question
| nobody has asked?
|
| Take the D language, it's basically a poor man's Java, with a
| shoddy garbage collector and aspirations at being C/C++... Is
| that the work of heroes or the misguided?
| strictfp wrote:
| Sorry, but D is a good idea and much closer to golang in my
| book, plus a lot earlier. They just didn't have the funding.
| johnny22 wrote:
| Can't it be both? or none of the above? I don't know anything
| about D specifically, but effort spent here is likely to be
| valuable elsewhere. Either because of techniques learned, or
| approaches validated.
|
| Even if D never catches on, folks will learn from what
| they've done. And the folks who did it, will likely be able
| to get jobs in the field. I doubt the effort is truly wasted.
| dexwiz wrote:
| Are they solving a question no one asked, or a question that
| already has an answer? If there is already a clear answer,
| then it's probably a waste of time. Your answer needs to be
| better, and that is rare. When your answer is better, then
| its a paradigm shift to some. To others the answer is no
| better, and then it's just the infinite reinvention.
|
| It's even rarer to answer a question that no one has yet
| asked. Then you are a revolutionary.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| Will random tech people with blogs ever going to stop submitting
| clickbait-titled blog posts?
|
| The actual subject of the rant:
|
| > Why in the world has this idiotic trend of abstracting
| everything away by layers upon layers of complexity gained such a
| strong foothold in the industry?
| bdavis__ wrote:
| up next, chapter 2, about the docker infrastructure.
| gaze wrote:
| The piece is kinda whiney and comes off like "get off my lawn!"
| and doesn't really add much beyond the myriad of other
| complaints. Thing is that I don't really think that many people
| love developing this way, it's just that nobody will pay anyone
| to shovel our way out from under this mess of technical debt. GUI
| development on windows is a schizophrenic mess and then you want
| to be cross platform? The only options are Qt, Wx, and
| Electron... or imgui... or lispworks CAPI or something. Electron
| has permissive licensing and you can hire JS devs and most
| importantly you can externalize a fair bit of the debt onto the
| end user as power and compute resource consumption.
|
| It's just like everything else in today's economy -- incredibly
| short sighted and whatever you make will either evaporate or be
| someone else's problem in short order. But, that's how you behave
| in such an environment! You'd get fired for writing a cross
| platform toolkit if the the expectations are set through the
| current climate of shipping shit apps quickly. Apps that function
| just well enough to retain a subscription or shovel ads or mine
| data or upsell or whatever.
|
| You'd have to change the entire reason why people are paid to
| write software to fix this. People aren't "stupid," they're on
| average lowish skill (JS bootcamp to first hire...) and behaving
| rationally under the incentives.
| danesparza wrote:
| You have a misspelling in your second sentence.
|
| You also seemed to be focused on only web development. I would
| argue that "IT people" are not limited to web development -- and
| that you're overlooking the entire maker movement (including
| Raspberry Pi's and Arduinos), the breathtaking development going
| on with self-driving cars, and the development still taking place
| with AI.
|
| But as always -- follow the money. Old school engineering shops
| got their money from the military (the internet is thanks to
| DARPA, after all). Web 1.0 got it's money from selling physical
| goods. Web 2.0 got it's money from venture capital and digital
| goods. What are we selling now?
| jcoletti wrote:
| "They constantly crash..."
|
| Putting aside the downsides and reasons not to use Electron, this
| statement is just false. They are not "constantly crashing." I
| currently use at least Figma, Insomnia, Slack, Spotify, and VS
| Code and these apps rarely crash, if ever.
| Trasmatta wrote:
| The memory arguments are valid, but I don't think I've ever
| once had an Electron application crash on me. Contrasted with
| older native applications that would crash on a weekly basis.
| wccrawford wrote:
| It's possible that they crash constantly on that person's
| computer, especially if they have a bad power supply or other
| hardware. The problem might just be their own.
| Damogran6 wrote:
| Thank you for articulating this better than I could have. We had
| HTTPD...Then Apache2, then nginx...and a guy here is messing with
| GPU visualization and introduced me to caddy...which is better,
| for reasons. And just today I saw gunicorn (which I thought was
| gun-i-corn for a moment) and I see it's been around for YEARS.
|
| And I feel old. It used to be you secured a system when you knew
| every single thing that was running on it. Those days are long
| looooong gone.
|
| And today, I had to go find Visual Studio 2019 because hashcat
| needs CUDA needs VS19 and Microsoft REALLY wants you to use VS22,
| but CUDA doesn't support it.
|
| And so it goes.
| LeicaLatte wrote:
| Not with that font.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| > In the past IT people, whether we're talking about programmers
| or something else, where very clever people. People with a high
| level of intelligence that took serious pride in doing things in
| a meaningful and pragmatic way.
|
| Uh, no, IT people were idiots decades ago too. I was one of those
| idiots. I've watched myself become less of an idiot, over a very
| long period of time, because I can see my old self in other
| people today. But even that is a fallacy - I'm not actually less
| of an idiot, I just see my old idiocy and assume because I've
| seen it that I'm smarter now.
|
| I find the "impostor syndrome" meme pretty funny. Tech people
| seem to get impostor syndrome when their egos develop a crack and
| they see their own lack of understanding, and worry somebody else
| will see it too. But then a tech person with a stronger ego
| convinces them that it's all fine, because actually we're all
| either idiots or geniuses and nobody can tell the difference.
|
| The tech industry is basically at the same level of advancement
| as people who built small buildings in the medieval period. Large
| enough that you need an experienced craftsman to put it together,
| but small enough that they're not using geometry or doing the
| math necessary to safely build large structures. The idiocy will
| continue until society forces this industry to be a real
| regulated engineering discipline.
| timmy2ply wrote:
| I'll offer a counter, perhaps, unpopular opinion. I too, have
| found myself at times mentally fighting against what appears to
| be a tidal wave of modern software techniques. But I don't do
| that anymore, these days I try to embrace them using an
| ecological perspective. They won't all be great ideas, some will
| prevail while others fail, some will even survive well while at
| the same time layering complexity and loss of performance on the
| industry. However, I now see them all as being necessary
| experiments to further the technological advancements of the
| industry. Even if they are bug ridden, security nightmares, they
| all work to provide selective pressure and refinement by the
| industry in the aggregate. Upon close inspection, it looks like a
| mess, but if you back out and see it akin to our own bio-
| diversity and natural selection processes, you may begin to
| appreciate the wide variety of techniques and talents we have to
| choose from and that over time we should expect a refinement of
| our abilities.
| arilotter wrote:
| > The entry barrier to programming needs to [be] high!
|
| I strongly disagree with this sentiment. I think the author's
| view that frameworks like Electron offer "no value over a native
| desktop application what so ever - well, perhaps with the only
| exception that now a 2 year old baby can make something shiny
| that you can click on with your mouse." is missing the point that
| a "2-year-old baby" making something shiny you can click on is an
| amazing feat, and an example of the power of the democratization
| of computing technology.
|
| I do agree that tech stacks are increasingly obtuse, and not
| something any one person can carry in their head. I do agree that
| this is problematic. However, I really believe that the more
| individuals get access to a technology and have their barriers to
| using it removed, the better odds we have of letting someone with
| great ideas execute those ideas.
| modzu wrote:
| "where very clever people"
| Koshkin wrote:
| > _and while we 're add it_
|
| I hole-hardedly agree, but allow me to play doubles advocate here
| for a moment. For all intensive purposes I think you are wrong.
| In an age where false morals are a diamond dozen, true virtues
| are a blessing in the skies...
| emaginniss wrote:
| This comment was _chief 's kiss_. Bone apple tea!
| etaioinshrdlu wrote:
| I thought this was going to be about blockchain, or something
| else hypey like the Metaverse.
|
| Instead, it complains about stuff like Electron.
|
| I think the author is wrong that the technologies he complains
| about are all that bad.
|
| Also, there was no world in which a traditional Unix system was a
| good experience for a regular person, and it's never going to
| happen.
| lvs wrote:
| ITT: lots of people who have promoted one trivial web technology
| or another who feel personally attacked by the post.
| lezojeda wrote:
| The one who feels personally attacked is the article's writer
| IMO. From this article and others from his website you can see
| he clearly has a problem with new developers, especially those
| from JavaScript. A lot of resentment can be read between lines.
| afarrell wrote:
| > Programming is engineering
|
| Is it?
|
| Genuine question that I've been asking myself for the past
| several years: In what senses is software engineering actually an
| engineering discipline?
|
| If you make a project trade-off for the sake of code
| maintainability, is that based on empirically tested knowledge or
| following a design pattern guided by an artisan's intuition about
| how code will be interpreted?
| motohagiography wrote:
| When you solve a problem, you deprive someone of one they can
| manage / extract value from, and so they invent new ones to
| manage. Problem solvers aren't actually that clever, they're more
| like beasts of burnden or working donkeys (asses) who have become
| wise to how they are being managed, but this doesn't change the
| fact that they are still asses. Most frameworks are new ways to
| favourably manage solved problems, and pointing out this fact
| without understanding it's on purpose is what a smart ass would
| do. (I am very much a smart ass.)
|
| When it clicks that most people are miserable because it works
| for them and most problems are trivial but for it being someone's
| job to manage it and ensure it's never solved, you can probably
| find some peace.
| tlackemann wrote:
| This is why I get paid top dollar as a consultant ;) When a
| company's top engineers decide to rewrite their stack in
| JavaScript, I get to swoop in, take $10k and tell them their old
| PHP monolith was just fine.
|
| Long live idiots, for I'll always get paid
| tacostakohashi wrote:
| It's amazing how (much of) 'senior management' is actually just
| stopping / not letting people doing dumb things. Turns out it's
| pretty much a full-time job just stopping silly things and
| keeping entropy at bay.
| a_e_k wrote:
| s/senior management/parenting/
|
| It's striking just how much this post also describes how I
| feel as a parent sometimes.
| prions wrote:
| It will end when people like the author drop their victim
| mentality and start putting their own ideas into practice. It
| seems that this person is content with yelling on the sidelines
| about how good and efficient things used to be.
|
| Meanwhile, the shitty tech is winning. According to this author,
| bad code and bad tools and bad frameworks are reigning supreme
| over real engineering. Why?
|
| "The situation is really bad for the industry." Also, why?
|
| People with the mentality like the author don't actually want to
| build things. They just want to sit and complain. Their sense of
| righteousness and victim mentality gives them more pleasure and
| validation than actually engaging with the "modern" tech world.
|
| Some other articles by the same:
|
| - "Using a framework can make you stupid!"
|
| - "So-called modern web developers are the culprits"
|
| - "One sure way to determine if you are stupid"
|
| - "SQLite the only database you will ever need in most cases"
|
| - "No, your website is not a web app even if you call it so"
| mmmeff wrote:
| Dead on. Building efficient and elegant software is difficult.
| The author should actually give it a try some time.
| Damogran6 wrote:
| Alternately, it becomes impossible, by analysis paralysis, to
| decide what stack to learn and build from. Which one is safe?
| Which one is secure? Which one has legs?
|
| Which ones do you dedicate your precious time to as a direction
| to keep earning a paycheck?
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > bad code and bad tools and bad frameworks are reigning
| supreme over real engineering. Why?
|
| Why? The (ultimately unsuccessful) quest for the silver bullet.
| Nobody wants programming, they want programs - so anything that
| promises to deliver programs faster looks like a holy grail.
| Inevitably, though, the promise boils down to a pre-packaged
| implementation of an existing approach that does something
| relatively specific, with some options for customization. If
| you want to step outside that customization, you not only have
| the assumptions baked into the new "silver bullet", you also
| have to understand all the nuances of the layers upon layers of
| other approaches (and all of _their_ assumptions), to the point
| where it would be faster to just shed all the layers and do it
| yourself (but you can 't because noooo, you're a dinosaur, you
| don't understand anything, it's the future, it's the modern way
| of doing things).
| bsenftner wrote:
| I believe we, as an industry, are driving towards frameworks that
| can be operated with story-like analogies describing what needs
| to be done with no technology knowledge at all. The core computer
| scientists creating such a framework create it with entry level
| non-developers as the "end-users" in mind. Such a framework is
| the holy grail of software development because it will enable any
| Joe with any software idea to hire anyones to make "their dream".
| The "no code" movement is an early manifestation of this trend.
| BTW, the VFX world is ahead in this tread, creating production
| frameworks requiring no 3D graphics technical knowledge at all...
| windows2020 wrote:
| This works great in many scenarios. But when the time comes to
| complete a task that the lossy abstraction that is the
| framework doesn't facilitate, Joe hits a wall very fast. He
| then needs to either unravel the abstraction, find another one
| or say it can't be done.
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