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Thank You, Guido

blog.dropbox.com

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Re: Thank You, Guido

#151

Post by crtlaltdel »

Alupis wrote: post #132
jrs95 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The downside is that also means a lot of the core APIs are a huge pain in the ass to work with, especially relative to something like Python, and the “solution” to this problem ends up being something like Spring which has to use so much reflection and metaprogramming to accomplish what it does that it also relies heavily on exceptions for control flow. So without even getting into the other issues, debugging becomes…

If you're using something like Spring or Spring-Boot (highly recommended!!!) - you rarely, if ever, are going to be debugging Spring's code... any issues are going to be in your code. With Spring-Boot you can even start treating Spring and friends like a "Black Box", and stop caring about how it does what it does.

personally i loath blackbox systems, regardless of how well the docs are written. i want to know how it does things...even if only to satisfy my curiosity.

Re: Thank You, Guido

#152

Post by pvg »

not2b wrote: post #16

Did you notice this: "He has already put into motion the conversion of the Dropbox server code from Python 2 to Python 3." Even the company that hired Guido is still heavily dependent on Python 2, and it doesn't surprise me at all; my own employer still has a lot of it in internal tools.

What is 'even' about this, given that Dropbox was founded well before the first version of Python 3 was released? Feels like less of a 'did you notice' and more of a 'let's have an interminable python2 v python3 thread no matter the topic at hand'.

Re: Thank You, Guido

#153

Post by zerkten »

blauditore wrote: post #129
MisterBastahrd wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One day tech historians are gonna look back at this era and shake their heads at all the time, energy, and talent being wasted by people just trying to keep up with tech trends for the sheer purpose of remaining employable.

I don't think it's that bad. I've never heard of someone who got fired because they didn't know the latest JS framework. Also, new tech trends are not just hot air, there's also a lot of innovation happening. You just have to see through the hype and wait until the dust settles.

There is also the situation that someone gets hired for their tech skills, but the thing that keeps them in a job is their ability to pick up the domain. The tech choices are often point in time decisions which are irrelevant to any outcome. The domain knowledge builds is worth more than any framework knowledge.

If you are successfully (i.e. the business or product keeps being developed) you still need to be aware of the internal weaknesses of your original choices and the external opportunities of updating to something more modern. The challenge is in managing the transition which is a skill in itself.

Re: Thank You, Guido

#154

Post by lordgrenville »

raister wrote: post #68
w-m wrote: post #38

There's a whole generation of programming language creators born in the early to mid 1950s. In no particular order: Guido van Rossum (Python), Bjarne Stroustrup (C++), James Gosling (Java), Rob Pike (Go), Larry Wall (Perl), Walter Bright (D). Makes me wonder what kind of secret club they have going on.. Enjoy the retirement, Guido!

I can only dream of a panel or a TED talk with those computing sages! (I guess they are all alive right)

This is pretty close! (Guido van Rossum, James Gosling, Larry Wall and Anders Hejlsberg) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csL8DLXGNlU

Re: Thank You, Guido

#155

Post by matwood »

jrs95 wrote: post #117
alanfranz wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly: the Java environment is exceedingly good at that. Backwards incompatible changes are truly minimal, and only those that are strictly necessary are added. And since Java 8 the language is pretty nice and offers good functional idioms. Of course, major versions of libraries still change. But there's no match with the JS approach.

The downside is that also means a lot of the core APIs are a huge pain in the ass to work with, especially relative to something like Python, and the “solution” to this problem ends up being something like Spring which has to use so much reflection and metaprogramming to accomplish what it does that it also relies heavily on exceptions for control flow. So without even getting into the other issues, debugging becomes…

Java 8+ is so easy to work with I think it bores a lot of people so they go looking for something more. Spring boot + jooq is easy to work with and breaking changes are slow.

I'm also coming around on Go. The simplicity was a turn off at first, but now that I've used it to implement a graphql server I like the simplicity. I don't want to have to be a programming language researcher to quickly get work done. IMO Go delivers in that mission.

Re: Thank You, Guido

#156

Post by wutbrodo »

skellera wrote: post #45
notkaiho wrote: post #2

"“When asked, I would give people my opinion that maintainable code is more important than clever code,” he said. “If I encountered clever code that was particularly cryptic, and I had to do some maintenance on it, I would probably rewrite it. So I led by example, and also by talking to other people.”" This is very sage advice.

You’d think it would be common sense when writing something that other people will read. We don’t see people writing books in acronyms or omitting words. How come so many people try to use code to show how smart they are?

Honestly, if you're smart, it's just really fun to make things dense and logically concise. Think of it like a minor form of code golf.

My first CL at my first job out of college was writing a state machine at Google. I remember collapsing it into this dense, elegant representation by hinging on a couple of bits of state. It took me an extra half day, but I was really proud of the end result, and I remember being mildly put off by the request that I unroll it and make it explicit. Upon thinking about it for a bit, I decided it was entirely reasonable, and after a few more years at Google, I transformed into the kind of engineer insisting that every bit of code prioritize readability over everything else, in the absence of constraints like performance. Across the tech orgs and teams that I've run since, this has paid huge dividends. I'm writing a lot of tensorflow and C++ at a very fast-moving company working on a complex problem, and I don't know how anyone on my team would be productive at all without strictly prioritizing readability.

Being good at coding and having good engineering habits aren't the same skill, and the latter is about discipline and patience (and occasionally thinking like a dumber person), which are inherently less fun than unfettered technical challenges.

Re: Thank You, Guido

#157

Post by acdha »

michaelcampbell wrote: post #76
iandanforth wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll also add "silly." A not-too-serious attitude from day one helps protect a community (IMO). When your language is named after a surrealist comedy troupe it kinda takes the wind out of the sails of moral outrage. Whimsy is surprisingly powerful.

Which is odd to me; I resisted using python much because of the rabid culture around it, and I tried, several times. They didn't get the nickname "pythonistas" for nothing, nor in jest. It is much, much better of late (I was thrust into a role a year ago where I am doing 95% of my coding in python now). I'm not sure what's changed; I had assumed it was the "core" culturalists were diluted by the influx of ML people,…

That might have been an artifact of small sample sizes: I couldn’t think of any time in the last couple decades where I would have used “rabid” to describe Python culture as a whole.

Re: Thank You, Guido

#158

Post by Rychard »

blauditore wrote: post #129
MisterBastahrd wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One day tech historians are gonna look back at this era and shake their heads at all the time, energy, and talent being wasted by people just trying to keep up with tech trends for the sheer purpose of remaining employable.

I don't think it's that bad. I've never heard of someone who got fired because they didn't know the latest JS framework. Also, new tech trends are not just hot air, there's also a lot of innovation happening. You just have to see through the hype and wait until the dust settles.

> I've never heard of someone who got fired because they didn't know the latest JS framework.

Sure, but I've worked with a number of individuals who have either resigned (on their own), or have been let go, solely because they had no desire or interest in keeping up with their craft.

I think that's effectively the same thing, though.

Ultimately, the notion of not wanting to stay abreast of the current industry trends is neither something I can relate to, nor is it something I see as being compatible with one's employability.

Re: Thank You, Guido

#159

Post by kbenson »

ceronman wrote: post #145
3pt14159 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm starting to long for a stack that doesn't constantly change. Just set the features and that's it. Security updates only after that. It feels like a constant grind keeping up with everything. Containers, clouds, programming languages, operating systems, frontend frameworks, transfer protocols, it seems like it takes so much effort to just build something and keep it going. That Python 2 is still around doesn't rea…

Use C. Standardized since the 80s, it has had only minor, backwards compatible revisions in 99 and 11. According to the TIOBE index, it's the second most popular language in the world. It works on almost any platform imaginable and it has decades of tooling available for it. Of course it doesn't have any of the good new things developed recently, but if it's stability what you look for, then I don't see a better opti…

Or Perl. Perl takes backwards compatibility very seriously. There was a lot of gnashing of teeth a while back on whether to make newer versions actually change the default behavior finally to some new features could be opt-out instead of opt-in. An by new features, I mean stuff like "use strict", which has been best practice for a couple decades now, but the change would cause problems for existing scripts that didn't turn that feature on.

The rule has generally been that you can take a 20 year old Perl script and it will still just run. This has its own complications though, as it makes it harder to advance the language, and then people feel it's being left behind (the Perl 6 stuff came after that feeling developed).

It's a longstanding problem in language design and communities, stability vs advancement.

Re: Thank You, Guido

#160

Post by petre »

evmar wrote: post #83
3pt14159 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm starting to long for a stack that doesn't constantly change. Just set the features and that's it. Security updates only after that. It feels like a constant grind keeping up with everything. Containers, clouds, programming languages, operating systems, frontend frameworks, transfer protocols, it seems like it takes so much effort to just build something and keep it going. That Python 2 is still around doesn't rea…

Go has a compatibility promise from 2012 that they've upheld for now seven years. They are still discussing whether to change something in Go 2. https://golang.org/doc/go1compat

They probably do not want to end up with a Perl 6 situation. I meant Raku, the language formally known as Perl 6.
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