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Choose Boring Technology

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Re: Choose Boring Technology

#141

Post by jcadam »

sydd wrote: post #84
lvh wrote: post #69

Author mentions Clojure a few times as an example of shiny-thing. Ironically, it's one of the few languages that I can reliably do in the browser, on the backend (on real servers or say, Lambdas), and build native binaries for -- which addresses the later "many tools" problem better than a "boring" programming language like Ruby. Unless you don't care about frontend code I guess :-) (Overall this talk is fine! I thin…

But: - good luck finding a Clojure programmer if your current one quits. - good luck finding answers for your exotic bug/performance issue etc. Code is a liability, it's much more than language/VM/compiler features

The supply of good Clojure developers far outstrips the demand. There are a large number of us who do Java at our day jobs, and hack Clojure on our hobby projects.

I can't imagine why anyone would have any difficulty finding and hiring good Clojure (or really, any functional programming language) programmers.

Re: Choose Boring Technology

#142

Post by fogetti »

> "You can’t do poetry if you’re worried about what you’re going to eat today"

Well let me just add this:

> "Shortly after his release from the prison at Meung-sur-Loire he was arrested, in 1462, for robbery and detained at the Châtelet in Paris. He was freed on November 7 but was in prison the following year for his part in a brawl in the rue de la Parcheminerie. This time he was condemned to be pendu et etranglé (“hanged and strangled”). While under the sentence of death he wrote his superb “Ballade des pendus,” or “L’Épitaphe Villon”, in which he imagines himself hanging on the scaffold, his body rotting, and he makes a plea to God against the “justice” of men." - I wouldn't call that the highest step on the pyramid

Re: Choose Boring Technology

#143

Post by codingdave »

crispyambulance wrote: post #37
dm3 wrote: post #3

Another case of someone discovering, after 10+ years in tech, that code is a liability and you're supposed to solve problems instead of chasing trends and padding the resume. Great that he's spreading the word!

Code is not "a liability". It is a tool that can be used masterfully or utterly abused. Every craftsman has to invest in their tools. And for someone to truly master their craft they must sometimes hone their tool skills speculatively, without short-term gain, and by sacrificing the time and attention used for other things, like actual projects. If everyone just obeyed their project manager and always focused 100% on…

> If you want to see what that's like look at enterprise applications.

If you think that is an argument against enterprise, you might want to take another look. I spent the early part of my career in enterprise, then moved to startups that serve government customers. Every app I have ever written is boring. I've been working on one boring app for most of the last 7 years. 7-figure ARR, and acquired, but boring.

Yet I consider my career, and those apps, to be great successes.

Re: Choose Boring Technology

#144

Post by hobs »

zzzcpan wrote: post #128
jerf wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally, "shiny-things" have some sort of appeal over the "boring" technology, or nobody would choose them at all. One of the places I'd say they are appropriate are in places where you have some problem where some "shiny-thing" stands head and shoulders above the "boring technology" in some particular and you can ram home those advantages well enough to overcome the other issues. For instance, if you've got a serv…

> I'm still recovering from some old "NoSQL" decisions made in a context where a relational database would have been more than adequate People jumped to NoSQL because of how awful a relational database actually is to operate. I guess it's easy to forget.

To operate? Do you mean for a developer to work with? Because most RDBMs systems I have worked with are much easier on the operator than most NoSQL systems for HA/DR.

Re: Choose Boring Technology

#145

Post by benbristow »

lvh wrote: post #77
macspoofing wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're talking about a tech stack, which is not the same as, for example, a modern web application. You can build a perfectly modern web app with 'old' Java/JEE stack, backed by an unsexy SQL-based database. You don't need Node.js with MongoDB. Techstacks very very very rarely enable new use-cases. They are the equivalent of fashion statements by young developers who haven't learned what it means to support software…

Do you similarly feel like frontend stacks have seen no meaningful innovation? I think your argument works fine-ish for backends but it's bananas to suggest that jQuery is the same thing as React or Svelte. I do security for a living and maybe 100% of all jQuery sites have XSS. If I find a React page I can just grep for dangerouslySetInnerHTML and I'm 80% of the way there. (I am exaggerating, but hopefully my point i…

The procedural nature of jQuery just makes for buggy as hell websites as well. Manual DOM updates etc. etc.

React being 'declarative' tends to end up with more stability in regards to UX (e.g. complex search forms). Makes the integration of third-party components smoother too.

Re: Choose Boring Technology

#146

Post by zzzcpan »

hobs wrote: post #144
zzzcpan wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm still recovering from some old "NoSQL" decisions made in a context where a relational database would have been more than adequate People jumped to NoSQL because of how awful a relational database actually is to operate. I guess it's easy to forget.

To operate? Do you mean for a developer to work with? Because most RDBMs systems I have worked with are much easier on the operator than most NoSQL systems for HA/DR.

No, not to work with a running system someone else operates, but to run it in production yourself.

Re: Choose Boring Technology

#147

Post by snaky »

neilwilson wrote: post #5

There's a longer term issue that appears to be missing here. At what point do you change? There must be a point otherwise we'd all be here writing COBOL/CICS with some whizzy Javascript interface library. Over time it becomes harder and harder and more and more expensive to maintain old technology. Because frankly maintaining old technology is pretty boring and career destroying so you need to be paid more and more t…

In 2016, Software AG announced that Adabas and Natural would be supported through the year 2050 and beyond. I'm not sure MongoDB will be there in 2050.

Re: Choose Boring Technology

#148

Post by arethuza »

zzzcpan wrote: post #146
hobs wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To operate? Do you mean for a developer to work with? Because most RDBMs systems I have worked with are much easier on the operator than most NoSQL systems for HA/DR.

No, not to work with a running system someone else operates, but to run it in production yourself.

Doesn't that rather depend on which SQL database you are using?

Re: Choose Boring Technology

#149

Post by schwurb »

enriquto wrote: post #22
amelius wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's even an expression for it: reinventing the wheel.

No, reinventing the wheel is alright; at best you may find a new and better kind of wheel, at worst you'll still learn something. This is forgetting that wheels can be round.

Our lifetime is finite. Given the choice, I'd rather invent the car than reinvent the wheel.

Re: Choose Boring Technology

#150

Post by kabes »

Somewhat playing devil's advocate, but if everyone joins that club, we keep the status quo and there's no more progress. If everyone joined this club in the 50's/60's we'd still be writing assembly. It's the guys pushing new shiny things that allows our domain to go forward, we just need to accept that 90% of the shiny new things eventually turn out to be crap. It's about the other 10%.
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