Advice to my younger self: become allergic to the churn • Hacker News Board

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

#131

Post by codingdave » Thu, Aug 08, 2019, 5:03 PM UTC

I'm not sure his list of technologies is accurate to the general coding population. Nor would anyone else's list be accurate. The more general idea is to learn the tech you use... learn it well and deep enough to avoid the kind of churn the article describes. If you can do that with modern tools, fine. If you can't and want to stick to older tools, that is also fine.

But draw your own line in the sand as to which tech you are going to use in your production systems, and move to new tech only when both your skills are sufficient, and there is a matching business need driving the change.

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

#132

Post by kd3 » Thu, Aug 08, 2019, 5:08 PM UTC

conception wrote: post #88

misterman0 wrote: post #76

>> The Churn is losing a day debugging because a transitive dependency changed a function signature. The Churn is spending a week just to get a project you wrote a year ago to even run. The Churn is rewriting your front-end because a shiny new thing came around. If you think the churn is that then you're lucky. To me, the churn is working for the man. Everything I ever do is for the man. If I could ever reach a point…

There are many many organizations and Institutes that aren't the man. You don't have to work for a soulless corporation. You can do work that helps the greater good of humanity.

The thing is, you always end up working for the man since they own part of your income.

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

#133

Post by kickopotomus » Thu, Aug 08, 2019, 5:09 PM UTC

nradov wrote: post #112

kkarakk wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your contrived example falls flat because JSON is flat out better for most use-cases and anyone having a discussion about it will probably fit into those use-cases. People don't discuss solutions in a vacuum. Ideally they'd think about what the potential fallbacks of using XML alternatives are before jumping into a new tech. Which they will, unless they're really really new

JSON is worse than XML if your use case requires namespaces.

Tangentially, this is one of the reasons that I am a fan of EDN[1] over JSON.

[1]: https://github.com/edn-format/edn

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

#134

Post by rhacker » Thu, Aug 08, 2019, 5:09 PM UTC

I'd have told my future self, moments after he said the word "churn" - wait wait wait, you're from the future and you have a time machine and you are giving me programming advice. You realize if you give me stock picks none of that will be relevant right?

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

#135

Post by User23 » Thu, Aug 08, 2019, 5:12 PM UTC

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…

> Seriously, I haven't seen any build tools in the past 30 years that have done a great job and that were a joy to use. CMake, Ant, Gradle, make-of-the-month-club, whizzy vendor-locked tools, bespoke in-house constructions, they have all been terrible. I see little hope, entropy has won this one.

Have a look at redo[1].

[1]https://redo.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

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

#136

Post by heavenlyblue » Thu, Aug 08, 2019, 5:13 PM UTC

vinceguidry wrote: post #123

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…

The only thing JavaScript was ever even barely good for was that which it was designed to do, be the programmable interface for a browser. Why anyone would want to do anything else with it simply boggles my mind. It's like if someone took the BASIC my calculator offered back in the day and turned it into a general purpose programming language.

But JavaScript's got asynchronous!

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

#137

Post by rxhernandez » Thu, Aug 08, 2019, 5:13 PM UTC

tenaciousDaniel wrote: post #110

rxhernandez wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Fair enough. Thank you for taking the time to a question that, in retrospect, sounds antagonistic (apologies for that).

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

#138

Post by regularfry » Thu, Aug 08, 2019, 5:16 PM UTC

cjfd wrote: post #51

vinceguidry wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rake, the Ruby version of Make, is rock-solid, dependable, and crazy-powerful. Don't want a Turing-complete language in your build automation? Don't use it, the rule syntax works just fine. But it's there if you want it, and oh god is it great.

There is something extremely weird about the idea of having a build system for a particular language. It is not uncommon for a project to have multiple languages and it is also possible that some of the source code in one language is generated by an executable in another language. Because of this and because of compatibility issues the correct number of build systems to exist is 1. If there is more than 1 in a single…

Rake isn't for Ruby any more than Make is for C. It comes from that ecosystem, but you can use it for anything. If you've got a system ruby installed, you've probably also got rake.

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

#139

Post by celim307 » Thu, Aug 08, 2019, 5:17 PM UTC

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 used kotlin, golang, and ruby for multiple. not a huge sample of languages but i still like es6 javascript the best

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

#140

Post by dnautics » Thu, Aug 08, 2019, 5:20 PM UTC

> These are the olives of technology. Olives aren’t candy, and tasting them the first time isn’t always pleasant, but soon you will develop a taste for them. They have been here since ancient times, and they will remain for centuries to come. They are good for you, solid, reliable, nutritious. Eat less candy and more olives.

For what it's worth, olives are basically inedible from the tree and require a considerable amount of processing before they are actually edible.