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NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract

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Re: NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract

#271

Post by CydeWeys »

rnprince wrote: post #240
specialist wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently took a job. Great team, great company, interesting problem, relevant work. Everything's nodejs, but I didn't worry. How bad could it be? While the prize for Worst Tech Used in a Professional Setting might go to InterSystems Caché ® (syntax errors will bork your entire runtime, with no undo). And it's all downhill from there. Nodejs (javascript + libuv, aka control flow obfuscation framework) is a strong co…

After working with MUMPS for some time, getting to use Node.js has been a religious experience for me. I feel as if an incredible weight has been lifted off my shoulders.

I know the feeling. Four years ago I got done working on some truly terrible tech stacks and got to use NodeJS for the first time and it felt like a huge weight had been lifted off my shoulders too. Then I left that company and I'm doing Java now, and I realized that leaving NodeJS behind has also lifted a huge weight off my shoulders, but of a different kind.

Re: NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract

#272

Post by [deleted] »

StevePerkins wrote: post #265
criddell wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think applets gave Java a terrible black eye as a client-side because of how insecure Java in the browser turned out to be. The market confusion I would blame on Netscape for choosing "Javascript" as the name for their scripting language.

Applets have nothing to do with Java desktop app development, and I don't think anyone has confused the relationship between Java and JavaScript in over a decade. I don't believe you really have anything to contribute to this thread, and are just bouncing from one tangential reference to the next to feel insightful.

[deleted]

Re: NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract

#273

Post by criddell »

StevePerkins wrote: post #265
criddell wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think applets gave Java a terrible black eye as a client-side because of how insecure Java in the browser turned out to be. The market confusion I would blame on Netscape for choosing "Javascript" as the name for their scripting language.

Applets have nothing to do with Java desktop app development, and I don't think anyone has confused the relationship between Java and JavaScript in over a decade. I don't believe you really have anything to contribute to this thread, and are just bouncing from one tangential reference to the next to feel insightful.

First, I'm sorry if I've offended you in some way. Your original answer to my comment was a very good one.

I have to respectfully disagree that nobody confuses Java and Javascript these days. There's an active thread on Quora about this very topic.

Re: NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract

#274

Post by thesz »

brianleb wrote: post #245
bostand wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I beg to differ. Have your ever tried to maintain a large js project? It gets harder the bigger the codebase gets.

Is there an alternate universe where this is not true? Where things get simpler while they get more complex?

Erlang, for one example.

Read about AXD 301 development.

Re: NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract

#275

Post by hluska »

user5994461 wrote: post #217
hluska wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about recruiting?

It's one of the most used and most known languages. There is no issue recruiting. Better yet, it's been widely used for a while, so there is no issue recruiting experienced developers.

I wasn't talking about Java in particular. Instead, I was focusing on this sentence:

In general, nobody cares what the tech stack powering a solution to a given problem is.

When I choose a tech stack, I'm always concerned about recruiting. Some stacks are easier/cheaper to recruit in than others.

Re: NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract

#276

Post by AlphaSite »

paulddraper wrote: post #210
winter_blue wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's outdated about Java/Swing? Java 8 is a fairly decent language, and Swing isn't bad. In fact the entire suite of JetBrains IDEs (WebStorm, PyCharm, IntelliJ, Android Studio, ReSharper, etc) have their UI implemented in Swing. I suppose they could have used Kotlin, Scala, Haskell, or some other more language with a more advanced type system. But it would have been truly horrible had they written their back-end i…

JetBrains uses Kotlin now. (And invented it.)

Kotlin is a language not a UI framework, and most of the code was still java last I checked.

Re: NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract

#277

Post by dzhiurgis »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #260
dzhiurgis wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dread whenever I need to open MS Word and choose G Suite anytime I need to write a longer document...

Because you are on Linux, or because you like your software laggy? ;).

Office suite takes a ridiculous time to load on OS X. Plus stuff like Word is painfully over bloated.

If you need to print something that looks reasonably nice - then maybe Word would make sense.

Thankfully we are sort of living in digital era where printing is synonym to bureaucracy.

Re: NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract

#278

Post by fapjacks »

gaius wrote: post #257
jhall1468 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always found it weird when people say stuff like this. Clearly your last team was bad, you even said the developers were less skilled, and time constraints were problems and yet you manage to blame tooling. There's absolutely great test and CI tooling for JavaScript. The fact that you and your team didn't spend enough time to develop an expertise with them isn't the languages fault.

Good engineers will naturally gravitate towards good tools. Therefore away from bad ones. Node.js is not a good tool. Therefore the quality of engineers using it will be poor and get worse over time. The same is true of MongoDB.

Good engineers will naturally gravitate towards good tools. Therefore away from bad ones. A hammer is not a good tool. Therefore the quality of engineers using it will be poor and get worse over time. The same is true of shovels.

Re: NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract

#280

Post by bhouston »

bane wrote: post #40

Conjecture? Palantir is known to be rabidly expensive. The available information on the internet and from people I know who've encountered the technology directly describe their "product" as a mix of a very outdated tech stack and expensive integration services with expensive on-site support [1] My guess is that the NYPD did an analysis of the life-cycle cost of the system over another contract period, and probably d…

According to linked in Palantir growth continues - they are not that big at only ~2K employees:

https://www.linkedin.com/company-beta/20708/

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