[HN Gopher] Is the madness ever going to end? ___________________________________________________________________ Is the madness ever going to end? Author : zaik Score : 73 points Date : 2022-01-11 21:15 UTC (1 hours ago) (HTM) web link (unixsheikh.com) (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. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-01-11 23:00 UTC)