Ask HN: What are the “lost arts” of our field? • Hacker News Board

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

#21

Post by amerkhalid » Tue, Aug 15, 2023, 7:52 PM UTC

mikewarot wrote: post #20

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 adde…

Microsoft Access was great for this. You could built a quick app in couple of hours and deploy in local network with a shared database.

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

#22

Post by gradschool » Wed, Aug 16, 2023, 6:47 PM UTC

Well-known game developer Jonathan Blow has a lot to say about software and technology more generally being in decline due to skills being lost when older generations retire [1]. In my own experience, writing code with pointers in it used to be a skill expected of entry level programmers, and getting the hang of it was something of a rite of passage. Around the time Java started being used as a teaching language, it became best practice to rely on the language's standard libraries instead of rolling one's own linked list or whatever, and I instructed university students accordingly. As things have developed, the design effort put into Rust seems to imply that pointers are now regarded as a grand challenge problem. These days I don't tie my own neck ties any more but wear the clip-on kind because the knots have been developed and tested by experts.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW-SOdj4Kkk

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

#23

Post by warrenm » Wed, Aug 16, 2023, 7:40 PM UTC

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.

Bit masks are cool

They are also very fragile

Far better to have some maintainable and extendable (what happens when you exceed 32 binary flags?) than being overly clever for the sake of saving a couple bytes of storage

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

#24

Post by xp84 » Fri, Aug 18, 2023, 1:56 PM UTC

warrenm wrote: post #23

xp84 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Bit masks are cool They are also very fragile Far better to have some maintainable and extendable (what happens when you exceed 32 binary flags?) than being overly clever for the sake of saving a couple bytes of storage

No dispute there, it would be silly now, I just think it was kind of cool how programmers used to understand how binary worked, and appreciate that it was worth it at one point to use 1 actual bit to store a true/false value.