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Ask HN: Were we more productive 10, 15, or 20 years ago?

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Re: Ask HN: Were we more productive 10, 15, or 20 years ago?

#91

Post by usaphp »

bsenftner wrote: post #53

I started professionally developing in '82. I'm 52 now. A major part of being an engineer is filtering out the noise generated by the marketing arms of our industry. As tech development grew, the number of available tools and platforms exploded, with an exponential growth in the marketing noise generated by all these tools trying succeed. Since web development "matured", the number of disposable tools and the hype ma…

the website which you list to be ceo of is having some certificate issues: www.3D-Avatar-Store.com

Re: Ask HN: Were we more productive 10, 15, or 20 years ago?

#92

Post by gaius »

shortoncash wrote: post #18

No. Git is better, GitHub is better, most package managers for finding things are better, stack overflow is better, help forums are better, tools are often free, cloud access and compute power is better, instructional videos on youtube are better, online classes are better. I don't want to go back to 10 years ago and definitely not 20 years ago. I have never been more productive than now.

No. You can spend 10x as long downloading random libraries and utilities looking for the perfect one than it would take to just write the function you need, and then you haul in a massive stack of dependencies that makes your project fragile and your build times long. I see projects now with literally hundreds of external dependencies. And if one of them breaks or suffers a security compromise you are toast. Say no to PyPI, NPM, Github and all the rest.

Re: Ask HN: Were we more productive 10, 15, or 20 years ago?

#93

Post by johnx123-up »

shortoncash wrote: post #18

No. Git is better, GitHub is better, most package managers for finding things are better, stack overflow is better, help forums are better, tools are often free, cloud access and compute power is better, instructional videos on youtube are better, online classes are better. I don't want to go back to 10 years ago and definitely not 20 years ago. I have never been more productive than now.

Anyone feels Usenet is better than stack overflow?

Re: Ask HN: Were we more productive 10, 15, or 20 years ago?

#94

Post by bitexploder »

falcolas wrote: post #54
bitexploder wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was part of Slack's reason for choosing PHP for their backend. Use a fancy language like Java or Node if you want to do "modern" development. PHP is for getting shit done. https://slack.engineering/taking-php-seriously-cf7a60065329?...

If you want to stop my productivity cold, use PHP. If you want me to just "get shit done", give me Python. Does this, by itself, make Python superior to PHP? No. It's what I'm used to using. IOW, they are mistaking familiarity with tooling with the superiority of tooling.

Heh. Maybe I was just memeing a bit myself. I pretty much only use Python and Flask/Pyramid/Django for building web apps these days and can't imagine using anything else honestly.

Not your post, but I saw someone else calling the blog post out as silly. I used to write a lot of PHP for customers when I freelanced, and I use Python a lot now. PHP is very productive for many of the reasons stated and when you are doing very CRUDy apps PHP frameworks seem quite legit now at doing things like MVC.

Re: Ask HN: Were we more productive 10, 15, or 20 years ago?

#95

Post by bitexploder »

gkya wrote: post #46
bitexploder wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was part of Slack's reason for choosing PHP for their backend. Use a fancy language like Java or Node if you want to do "modern" development. PHP is for getting shit done. https://slack.engineering/taking-php-seriously-cf7a60065329?...

That's a silly blogpost, to be honest. Any language provides what he descirbes under "State" if you run a script through some sort of CGI interface (I'm not very well informed on all the variations like FastCGI or httpd mod_ stuff), which is roughly what PHP is doing too. Many languages (among which PHP too) have some web frameworks written in them which do complicate the applications, but for good: it's easier to wr…

I think it is just the immediate mode, do a thing in a familiar environment and start making a web app. No dealing with tooling. No `pip install flask`. Nothing. Just write PHP and you have a web app. I was probably memeing a bit much there, but I think there were several solid points in the article. I would not reduce PHP to "run a script through some sort of CGI interface". I don't use PHP any more. Only Python so I pretty much agree on using a nice framework/library, but I still see this kind of casual dismissal of PHP. I think it has progressed enough to not be a toy language. It is no worse than JavaScript in terms of idiosyncrasies. It (PHP) has plenty of decent features these days and runs fast thanks to things like HHVM.

Re: Ask HN: Were we more productive 10, 15, or 20 years ago?

#96

Post by bsenftner »

usaphp wrote: post #91
bsenftner wrote: post #53

I started professionally developing in '82. I'm 52 now. A major part of being an engineer is filtering out the noise generated by the marketing arms of our industry. As tech development grew, the number of available tools and platforms exploded, with an exponential growth in the marketing noise generated by all these tools trying succeed. Since web development "matured", the number of disposable tools and the hype ma…

the website which you list to be ceo of is having some certificate issues: www.3D-Avatar-Store.com

The 3D Avatar Store closed 3 years ago. I still own the domain, but there is nothing at it, so the error you get is a default.

Re: Ask HN: Were we more productive 10, 15, or 20 years ago?

#97

Post by muzani »

bsenftner wrote: post #53

I started professionally developing in '82. I'm 52 now. A major part of being an engineer is filtering out the noise generated by the marketing arms of our industry. As tech development grew, the number of available tools and platforms exploded, with an exponential growth in the marketing noise generated by all these tools trying succeed. Since web development "matured", the number of disposable tools and the hype ma…

I've been developing Android apps for 6 years. The tools from now to back then have gotten better, namely Kotlin, which lets us write the same thing with 30% less lines of code and less cognitive load.

However, I see that the "minimum" work has greatly increased. What was once 1 file for a screen now becomes 4-5 files and a folder.

While we once had 30 lines and 5 minutes to parse a JSON file, we now use an external library, with about 30 minutes to create a POJO for it. The new methodologies make API changes more costly too.

The added complexity also multiplies the damage from bugs, rushed schedules, team members dropping out, cost of documentation, and so on.

Most of these new tools are only useful if you want to keep on adding more engineers and still have something for them all to do. But for the most part, I feel that they just regulate productivity - keep everyone at roughly the same productivity, even if it means crippling someone from being 10x more productive.

Re: Ask HN: Were we more productive 10, 15, or 20 years ago?

#98

Post by in9 »

gaius wrote: post #92
shortoncash wrote: post #18

No. Git is better, GitHub is better, most package managers for finding things are better, stack overflow is better, help forums are better, tools are often free, cloud access and compute power is better, instructional videos on youtube are better, online classes are better. I don't want to go back to 10 years ago and definitely not 20 years ago. I have never been more productive than now.

No. You can spend 10x as long downloading random libraries and utilities looking for the perfect one than it would take to just write the function you need, and then you haul in a massive stack of dependencies that makes your project fragile and your build times long. I see projects now with literally hundreds of external dependencies. And if one of them breaks or suffers a security compromise you are toast. Say no t…

HUuuum idk about security being a problem now a days. The community overlook in an opensource library vastly outweighs my capabilities of writing secure libraries.

Re: Ask HN: Were we more productive 10, 15, or 20 years ago?

#99

Post by AnimalMuppet »

conan_fr wrote: post #16

I think yes and we were more focused on the task to achieve but on the other hand, computers were dead slower than today's ones. I remember launching tasks for a whole night (for example generating a mandelbrot 720×348 MDA picture near 1984 on IBM PC) and checking the result the following day. Now we can code (IDE with watch mode) and see the result in realtime as we can see on Live Coding session video on YouTube.

Heh. I remember getting a 68000 to increment a (32-bit) zero until it was zero again. It took it 8 hours. Nowadays, it's a second (if the compiler doesn't optimize it out completely).

What's that? We're discussing productivity? Oh. Carry on...

Re: Ask HN: Were we more productive 10, 15, or 20 years ago?

#100

Post by gaius »

in9 wrote: post #98
gaius wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. You can spend 10x as long downloading random libraries and utilities looking for the perfect one than it would take to just write the function you need, and then you haul in a massive stack of dependencies that makes your project fragile and your build times long. I see projects now with literally hundreds of external dependencies. And if one of them breaks or suffers a security compromise you are toast. Say no t…

HUuuum idk about security being a problem now a days. The community overlook in an opensource library vastly outweighs my capabilities of writing secure libraries.

The community overlook in an opensource library

Haha really? https://mail.python.org/pipermail/security-announce/2017-Sep...

It’s the Wild West out there. And then there’s NPM...

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