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Ask HN: What are the “lost arts” of our field?

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Re: Ask HN: What are the “lost arts” of our field?

#11

Post by tacostakohashi »

To paraphrase your own complaint - one "lost art" is self-contained software, that can be shipped on a CD, including release notes and documentation that form part of the software/release itself, and can be used on a standalone computer with no internet access, or occasional internet access.

Lots of software these days is written with the naive assumption of continuous, unlimited bandwidth / zero-latency internet connectivity, and falls apart whenever that assumption turns out to be incorrect.

Re: Ask HN: What are the “lost arts” of our field?

#12

Post by rthomas6 »

As an outsider to web dev, I think there's a lot of wheel reinventing going on in web technologies over the past 10 years or so, and we still haven't fully caught up to where we were.

XMPP was a federated instant messenger protocol that worked extremely well and was widely used. It generally worked better than Element/Matrix or MS Teams in my experience. It was used by over 10 million people by 2003.

Adobe Flash. It had a lot of security and usability issues, but HTML5 has still not caught up to it. Any bright 15 year old could spend a day and make their own game.

Makefiles. People hate on them, but if you get around their weird syntax and other eccentricities, it's hard to find a better build system. They've been around since the 70s, and I have not seen another build system achieve feature parity.

Re: Ask HN: What are the “lost arts” of our field?

#13

Post by cpach »

blitz_skull wrote: post #8
cpach wrote: post #4

Writing good Mac applications is a quite rare skill these days. Not extinct – but the share of devs that can do it is probably quite small.

Got any good examples of outstanding mac apps? I think I'd throw "Things 3" into that bucket for sure.

Acorn is one of my favorites.

Re: Ask HN: What are the “lost arts” of our field?

#14

Post by cpach »

RicoElectrico wrote: post #9

User research, UI design. Windows 95 was a big leap in that regard, at least in the PC space [1] Nowadays it's "move fast & break things", following the fashion, and asshole design ("dark patterns"). [1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/238386.238611

Jakob Nielsen 4-ever <3

Re: Ask HN: What are the “lost arts” of our field?

#15

Post by the_only_law »

tacostakohashi wrote: post #11

To paraphrase your own complaint - one "lost art" is self-contained software, that can be shipped on a CD, including release notes and documentation that form part of the software/release itself, and can be used on a standalone computer with no internet access, or occasional internet access. Lots of software these days is written with the naive assumption of continuous, unlimited bandwidth / zero-latency internet con…

> Lots of software these days is written with the naive assumption of continuous, unlimited bandwidth / zero-latency internet connectivity, and falls apart whenever that assumption turns out to be incorrect.

I’ve been stuck tethering to my phone for connection for a couple weeks with… volatile mobile networks, and what kills me is when the UI in some application stops responding when connection is bad. “Yeah here’s an intrusive popup, sorry you can’t close it because you don’t have a fast enough internet connection”

Re: Ask HN: What are the “lost arts” of our field?

#16

Post by dekhn »

xp84 wrote: post #6
mattbgates wrote: post #3

Back in my day... probably not technically a lost art, but an interesting lesson in math. I remember I was in computer science class. I was 17 years old. And the teacher taught us how to read binary and how to calculate it. He said binary was math which is a universal language that even aliens could understand and would allow us to communicate though we'd still run into the struggle of converting that binary to actua…

Tangentially related: storing a bitmask in your database (as a single 32-bit value) to track many flags, and using bitwise math to manipulate/interpret it. Much more space efficient than what everyone would do now (a bunch of tinyints, enums, or booleans) but obviously you’d be rightly fired out of a cannon now for introducing something so difficult to grasp for young devs, just to save “cheap” memory and storage.

I have a few simple bit questions in my coding interviews and most programmers simply don't know how to set a bit in a byte (or word), rotate bits in a byte (or word), or what endian is.

Re: Ask HN: What are the “lost arts” of our field?

#17

Post by yen223 »

cpach wrote: post #4

Writing good Mac applications is a quite rare skill these days. Not extinct – but the share of devs that can do it is probably quite small.

Docs, tutorials, and other educational resources for learning how to write native macOS applications is pretty limited. I can understand why a lot of devs choose to go for Electron instead.

Re: Ask HN: What are the “lost arts” of our field?

#18

Post by frfl »

rthomas6 wrote: post #12

As an outsider to web dev, I think there's a lot of wheel reinventing going on in web technologies over the past 10 years or so, and we still haven't fully caught up to where we were. XMPP was a federated instant messenger protocol that worked extremely well and was widely used. It generally worked better than Element/Matrix or MS Teams in my experience. It was used by over 10 million people by 2003. Adobe Flash. It…

> It generally worked better than [...] MS Teams in my experience

That's a very very very low bar to cross.

Re: Ask HN: What are the “lost arts” of our field?

#20

Post by mikewarot »

We used to have tools that could be used to build a CRUD application from scratch in a few hours (minutes for a trivial one). Delphi and Visual Basic 6 were widely used by domain experts to hammer out a workable tool.

Then Microsoft got obsessed with .NET because they thought everyone was going to bail on the X86, and used it as an excuse to kill off VB6. The shift to "professional" programming tools really just added a ton of boilerplate.

Since then, we've been forced to send UI though a soda straw to a random web browser, and make it all work.

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