11–20 of 221 posts
In The Churn this week, a colleague wanted to improve a query for a widget on a dashboard. The query was perfectly fine but now I’m stuck getting the wrong results debugging everything I can find.
Like all industries we can't just stay still. Curiosity and creativity are important. The "olives" are a fruit of some sort of older technology that has matured. Maybe this technology was the "shiny new some some time back then" Some people try to fix the the shortcommings from yesterday's technology with their own ideas and view of things and nobody can prevents this. This is just basic, human creativity at work. Ma…
You don't see in other disciplines such as physics or chemistry where people spend years learning about existing research before actually starting to contribute.
With programming the barrier to starting to write code is much lower than to actually learning the background research. People don't bother looking at what's been done already, and just start "inventing" things.
More often than not this result in half baked ideas because the authors of projects don't really think about the full scope of the problem. Then once the project starts hitting limits in practice, people start kludging things on top of it, and eventually it becomes unwieldy to use. Then somebody comes by and does the same thing simplistically again, and the cycle repeats. Nothing new is learned in this process, and you get churn for the sake of churn.
Just this morning I've spent an hour trying to get a well-known Http library to work in my project, cos the developers keep completely refactoring all the classes and methods. Stop it!!
Is it possible to do modern mobile dev without churn (coming from a situation where my clients often go months without requesting features)?
"Great nutritious technologies to use: Make, Emacs, Lisp, CLI"
"Bad unwholesome technologies to use: JavaScript, Ruby, IDEs, Graphical User Interfaces"
I personally hate Make, it's burned me too many times. Now I use CMake, and I haven't been burned in years.
And is it candy or an olive that I like VSCode and not Emacs (not that I've ever tried Emacs, I just don't feel like investing in that ecosystem)?
I agree the front end web framework churn is out of control; hopefully it will stabilize over time. But come on, don't just rip on random scripting languages that have been around for 25 years
The first thing that came to mind when I read the opening paragraphs regarding churn is developing mobile applications. I find myself losing a day or two just to get my apps to compile if I ever go a month or two without spending any time on them. It's brutal how quickly things can break and dependencies need to be updated. Is it possible to do modern mobile dev without churn (coming from a situation where my clients…
- Reduce the use of dependencies to the minimum (I'm bad at this) - set version compatibility in my Cartfile / Podfile - when new breaking versions of Swift came out, suggest to my client a 2 / 3 mission solely focused on upgrading their app and it's dependencies (otherwise it will probably make their next last minute super-urgent-right-now feature needlessly long and complex to develop)
But I'd also willingly take any advice on this
Edit: also, semi-solved this for my JS work using automated dependency update services, like dependabot, coupled with unit / integration tests, but still haven't found a similar service for Swift
Like all industries we can't just stay still. Curiosity and creativity are important. The "olives" are a fruit of some sort of older technology that has matured. Maybe this technology was the "shiny new some some time back then" Some people try to fix the the shortcommings from yesterday's technology with their own ideas and view of things and nobody can prevents this. This is just basic, human creativity at work. Ma…
The reality is that there is very little actual innovation happening in programming. Most of the ideas in use today have been discovered decades ago. The big reason for churn is that people don't bother learning about what's been done before, and keep reinventing the wheel. You don't see in other disciplines such as physics or chemistry where people spend years learning about existing research before actually startin…
But on the other side of the coin, do you really want to be locked into a decades-old solution to a "solved problem" forever? Or are there still improvements that can be made to reduce friction and human error?
"Machine/human readable data exchange format? Yeah, that's a solved problem - we use XML for that. What's that? You want to reinvent the wheel? JavaScript Object Notation, are you insane? Didn't you bother seeing which exchange formats are already out there? XML can already do everything JSON can do and more! Plus, JavaScript is the exact opposite of what we value here, get that crap out of my face; like I said, XML is the one true solution to data exchange and forever will be."