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Advice to my younger self: become allergic to the churn

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Re: Advice to my younger self: become allergic to the churn

#101

Post by rxhernandez »

tenaciousDaniel wrote: post #95
tomgp wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a similar set of experiences but have a feeling that it's at least partly down to the sheer number of people writing Javascript and the very public nature of much of that code that so much of it is a mess. I don't think there's anything inherent in JS that make is produce messy code other than the fact that it's easy for amateurs to get results (thanks to the fact it runs in a browser and there's lots of easil…

I'm a JS dev and I love it, but JavaScript is to programming languages what the electric guitar is to musical instruments. It's the thing that attracts a lot of new beginners who may or may not be interested in the more serious theory that makes programming what it is.

Have you worked in other languages for substantial amounts of time?

Re: Advice to my younger self: become allergic to the churn

#102

Post by MiroF »

tomgp wrote: post #86
rxhernandez wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean I haven't been a professional for multiple decades but I've written professionally in a very wide range of fields in C, Matlab, Java, Python, Verilog, Assembly, Fortran, and Javascript, and, there is no language that I've seen that has more hair pulling, braindead I just learned to program yesterday type programming nearly as much as I've seen in Javascript. (I've worked intimately with decades old scientific…

I have a similar set of experiences but have a feeling that it's at least partly down to the sheer number of people writing Javascript and the very public nature of much of that code that so much of it is a mess. I don't think there's anything inherent in JS that make is produce messy code other than the fact that it's easy for amateurs to get results (thanks to the fact it runs in a browser and there's lots of easil…

what killed Javascript for me (and I think many others) is that there is no idiomatic way of writing Javascript. There is no "javascript"-y way of doing things (unless you count callback hell).

I'm not saying that a language should only offer one approach to a problem, but there should be general guardrails and guidelines. A shared vocabulary. None of that exists in modern JS

Re: Advice to my younger self: become allergic to the churn

#103

Post by MiroF »

kabdib wrote: post #75
Crinus wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may hate Make and it is certainly far from ideal (tab-based syntax was a mistake) but the thing is, Make has very simple rules that haven't changed for decades and Makefiles generally keep working (and when they break it isn't the fault of Make itself but of something else that isn't as stable/backwards compatible as Make).

Common make fail #1 The project you landed on has been using some souped-up supermake with a ton of features (which were used with wild abandon) and some subtly different semantics for (say) macro expansion and variable assignment (and these are really difficult to determine the dependency scope of). The build system has grown to a recursively gnarly Turing-complete mess. So when you go to update the tooling, you fin…

> multi-million-line makefiles

Is this a copypasta?

Re: Advice to my younger self: become allergic to the churn

#104

Post by collyw »

Ididntdothis wrote: post #25
yogthos wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I totally agree. But how do you balance this with the need for looking good on the job market? If you want to stay employable you are almost forced to participate in this craziness.

Sadly I agree as well. Instead of mastering the tools we have we need to make half arsed versions of everything because we don't have a mastery of this years trend.

Re: Advice to my younger self: become allergic to the churn

#105

Post by cutler »

yogthos wrote: post #55
Ididntdothis wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally agree. But how do you balance this with the need for looking good on the job market? If you want to stay employable you are almost forced to participate in this craziness.

I've been working with Clojure for the past decade, and haven't had to deal with any of the craziness. The job market is smaller, but so is the pool of developers. Companies tend to be more flexible because of that and are often open to remote work. I'd much rather work in a sane niche market than deal with the mainstream churn.

Isn't it fair to say, though, that you're not the average Clojure dev? I mean you have a book and a web framework to your name so that puts you way ahead of the pack. As an average Clojure dev I've found it very difficult to find work.

Re: Advice to my younger self: become allergic to the churn

#106

Post by ourlordcaffeine »

rxhernandez wrote: post #63
umvi wrote: post #17

The piece reads like a Unix pastor's pulpit preaching "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…

I mean I haven't been a professional for multiple decades but I've written professionally in a very wide range of fields in C, Matlab, Java, Python, Verilog, Assembly, Fortran, and Javascript, and, there is no language that I've seen that has more hair pulling, braindead I just learned to program yesterday type programming nearly as much as I've seen in Javascript. (I've worked intimately with decades old scientific…

For me, R probably has a worse rate of churn than javascript in the case of breaking changes. Javascript is full of hyped frameworks, but R is the only language I've used where a minor update to a package caused an entire project to break (because the package author had changed its api)

Re: Advice to my younger self: become allergic to the churn

#107

Post by FigBug »

hrktb wrote: post #36

> The Churn is spending a week just to get a project you wrote a year ago to even run. How much effort would it be worth avoiding to spend a week every year ? Sure the weeks can add up, but so does the time spent on low level abstraction, and refusing to adopt better tools when the whole environment in changing around (e.g. there is no mention of native mobile environments. Would it be churn use to Swift instead of n…

I find Swift very bad for churn. Swift has had 5 versions in 5 years, with breaking api changes each time.

Every answer on Stackoverflow about Swift has several answers, one for each api version. Any time you grab some Swift code from the web or an older project, it's not going to work.

Avoiding the churn isn't an option since new Xcode versions drop support for old Swift versions. And only the two latest Xcodes will run on latest macOS. They even drop the support for the conversion tools. So if I go back to an old Swift project now, it won't compile in my Xcode, nor will my Xcode help convert the code to modern. My only option is to run an order version of Xcode in a VM to convert the code.

If I'm writing a library I want other people to use or share between projects, I'll still do it in Objective-C. Apps I do in Swift but I find it annoying.

I still have 15 year old non-ARC Objective C libraries. Why spend the time updating them when the are debugged and work fine?

Every time I have to do a Swift version update I introduce bugs.

Re: Advice to my younger self: become allergic to the churn

#108

Post by test6554 »

IggleSniggle wrote: post #96
rxhernandez wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean I haven't been a professional for multiple decades but I've written professionally in a very wide range of fields in C, Matlab, Java, Python, Verilog, Assembly, Fortran, and Javascript, and, there is no language that I've seen that has more hair pulling, braindead I just learned to program yesterday type programming nearly as much as I've seen in Javascript. (I've worked intimately with decades old scientific…

It's all about who is writing it and why they are writing it, not the language. Well ok JavaScript has some legacy warts, but ECMAScript 2019 enables a variety of very well written code in a variety of styles, and TypeScript is icing. As for me, I've only recently entered the JavaScript game, but the php I've seen has been much, much worse. I find the quality of JavaScript I typically encounter is on-par with typical…

Seconded on php. I have used php, I can use php, I just choose not to any more if I can help it.

Re: Advice to my younger self: become allergic to the churn

#109

Post by mighty_bander »

umvi wrote: post #17

The piece reads like a Unix pastor's pulpit preaching "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…

Having started with the MS stack way back in the old days of their Hegemony, I always felt like make was doing something that I shouldn't have to think about.

I'm curious about VSCode - why that, and not Visual Studio or another full-featured IDE? I've gone from IDE to vim and back, and I have to admit with great sadness that the various little gimmicks an IDE provides (without hand-configuring the damn thing!) make it worth it, particularly since they all allow for vim keybindings to one degree or another.

Re: Advice to my younger self: become allergic to the churn

#110

Post by tenaciousDaniel »

rxhernandez wrote: post #101
tenaciousDaniel wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a JS dev and I love it, but JavaScript is to programming languages what the electric guitar is to musical instruments. It's the thing that attracts a lot of new beginners who may or may not be interested in the more serious theory that makes programming what it is.

Have you worked in other languages for substantial amounts of time?

I did Objective C for about 1-2 years, and a bit of java over the years. But no, not really.
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