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

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

#211

Post by regularfry » Fri, Aug 09, 2019, 8:42 AM UTC

cryptozeus wrote: post #39

“Examples: Clojure, Common Lisp, HTML, Make Counter-examples: JavaScript, Ruby, React-Preact-Vue-Angular-“ OP does not give any reason as to why these are churn and why stop them ? This makes no sense...basically to op’s point we should just never adopt new technology because it’s just a new shiny thing. This makes no sense at all.

Clojure is a really interesting example because it's newer than things in the "churn" list. It's an existence proof that "newness" and "churniness" don't go hand in hand. What causes "churn" isn't the tech, it's how the ecosystem around it works.

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

#212

Post by krageon » Fri, Aug 09, 2019, 8:47 AM 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.

> You can do work that helps the greater good of humanity

There are many groups that say they do this work, but very few that actually do. Then you have to move yourself internally until you are actually doing work that is the greater good.

What is the greater good to begin with? The flexibility of human understanding and the breadth of types of companies with "good intentions" available means that the search for such a mythical group is something that can take a lifetime and still not yield any fruit.

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

#213

Post by _carl_jung » Fri, Aug 09, 2019, 8:50 AM UTC

shurcooL wrote: post #208

_carl_jung wrote: post #4

Relevant (arguably overblown) talk by Jonathan Blow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW-SOdj4Kkk

Thank you for sharing, I really enjoyed this talk. I somehow missed it when it happened.

No problem, I loved it too.

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

#214

Post by Xelbair » Fri, Aug 09, 2019, 9:38 AM UTC

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…

>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.

Good languages kinda enforce some kind of basic rules, and prevent developers form making silly mistakes - because we all do them all the time. Those languages usually trade off the performance for safety though.

We should pick the safest language, that prevents errors and mistakes as long as we stay within allowed performance bounds.

JavaScript can be performant, but most of the times it isn't and it isn't safe at all. At least we have typed variants of JavaScript.

JavaScript by design was meant to fail gracefully - in the background - so the site works fine. Sadly nowadays sites are so JavaScript heavy that it isn't helping at all.

I generally prefer statically typed languages just because there is less ambiguity and function definition can help you greatly - you know what you put it, and what it returns.

With dynamic typed languages unless documentation is pristine(and in JavaScript ecosystem it is pretty varied from package to package) you are out of luck unless you look at the implementation.

bash and devOps code has their own special place in hell. bash has only one advantage - it works on any linux distro out of the box, and that's it. It is unreadable untyped mess.

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

#215

Post by pepper_sauce » Fri, Aug 09, 2019, 11:13 AM UTC

DannPuglo wrote: post #170

Watching people fight Javascript never gets old. Keep yelling at those clouds, fogies.

What properties do you think make modern JavaScript a good language, rather than a (now, finally) barely passable language being actively ruined by its own ecosystem?

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

#216

Post by nesadi » Fri, Aug 09, 2019, 11:33 AM UTC

bro25 wrote: post #193

mighty_bander wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's such a shame! JS could be a concise little language with a lot of power (in terms of being able to ignore types until they matter), but instead you end up transpiling unusable garbage with 10MB string manipulation libraries that release breaking changes as patch versions. Python is what JS is supposed to be, although I do feel like Bart Simpson in front of the blackboard every time I write `lambda x:`.

Being a small language would be irrelevant to JS. The web could benefit from a sound type system built into browsers (aka typescript in the strict mode), but it's not like anybody complains about python lacking the type system, right? What web really needs is a way to write highly modular apps and let the browser download only relevant modules, with caching, prefetching and so on. None of the attempts have worked so…

> anybody complains about python lacking the type system.

Well, Python does have strong typing. It's just dynamic, not static, and I've seen enough criticism about it to say that it isn't as unimportant as you make it out to be. JavaScript gets a lot of criticism for having dynamic and weak typing. And I think both forms of criticism are valid, though not everybody agrees, which is fine too.

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

#217

Post by nesadi » Fri, Aug 09, 2019, 11:39 AM UTC

deng wrote: post #168

kabdib wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The multi-million line makefile is real. I wish it hadn't been. That was a terrible time. I guess my point is that make doesn't scale, and unavoidably gets messy over time as each project solves the same problems over and over in different, buggy ways. make solves problems you get early in a project ("let's get this handful of files automatically built") and doesn't even try to address issues of modern software devel…

> The multi-million line makefile is real Of course you quickly get to million-line Makefiles in bigger projects. In C++, if you depend on stuff like Boost, a single file can easily depend on thousands of header files, and every single one must be tracked by Make. But of course, nobody in his right mind would write these dependencies by hand. At my dayjob, the core Makefile is 700 lines. These 700 lines do cross-comp…

Do you know any resources on how to use Make in a sensible/sane way?

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

#218

Post by mbrodersen » Fri, Aug 09, 2019, 12:16 PM UTC

You are the problem. Not the tools.

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

#219

Post by namelosw » Fri, Aug 09, 2019, 1:26 PM UTC

> Examples: Clojure, Common Lisp, HTML, Make

> Examples: UNIX, LISP, The Web, Emacs, TeX

1. Or just computer science.

2. Churn is not a problem. If you keep accepting the churn, you will learn them faster and faster, until you scan the doc and know most of the things, if it is churn. If it is not, it's something new (eg: Coq), then you have the ability to identify 'new but not churn', instead of just learning 'old and not churn' from a half-century ago (eg: Lisp).

3. Among the churns, there would be 'meta churn' like Haskell, Lisp, Erlang, and Rust. There are countless languages stealing Monad from Haskell, and Kubernetes patterns are very similar to Erlang OTP patterns.

4. Editors and IDEs are really irrelevant, I used Emacs a lot, I'm very fluent with Vi, but for some languages, I prefer Intellij and VSCode. Just use tools you feel productive.

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

#220

Post by filoleg » Fri, Aug 09, 2019, 5:59 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?

Yep. Python for many years, Java+TurboPascal+C# for a couple of years, C+Matlab for a bit under a year, and a few other ones that I wouldn't list simply due to how little work I've done in those.

TypeScript and Python (with typehints) are the current favorites. Golang seems to be getting up there for me too, but I don't have enough experience with it to actually be able to say that.