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Thank You, Guido

blog.dropbox.com

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Re: Thank You, Guido

#161

Post by mcny »

nine_k wrote: post #131
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…

Either you have a stable platform, and it reflects the state of the art form the year of its inception, or you have a platform that keeps on improving, but this means you need to change your code along with it, to keep up with the improvements. You can't have it both ways, OTOH current JVM can still correctly run bytecode compiled by Java 1.0.1 (or maybe even earlier), so the backwards compatibility is indeed excelle…

I am not a go programmer but I would love to revisit this conversation but with golang twenty years from now. Please correct me if I am wrong but I believe golang is essentially complete, right? and golang programmers like golang?

Re: Thank You, Guido

#162

Post by chrisseaton »

lvh wrote: post #147
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.

I agreed until the disaster that was Jigsaw. Maybe Jigsaw didn't impact you particularly hard, but you can't argue the JVM has a policy of minimal backwards incompatible changes given that debacle.

I work on Java at a really deep level, and I haven't had to interact with Jigsaw at all. What is it breaking for you?

Re: Thank You, Guido

#163

Post by toast0 »

3pt14159 wrote: post #79
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.

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…

You want to find a stack that's small / concise / organized enough that you could support it if you needed to.

It's ideal if it has a stable community, but it should be a small group of core devs, so they don't have time to change things that aren't broken. It helps if the community has a culture of stability.

In my experience, FreeBSD and Erlang fit this bill. You may need to manage some small changes now and again when upgrading between releases, but generally the most apparent changes are things you were doing before work better. And you can run a fleet with rather divergent versions, as long as you're careful not to use new features (it helps to make sure your dev environment matches your most out of date hosts)

Re: Thank You, Guido

#164

Post by VectorLock »

novok wrote: post #111
VectorLock wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Python 2 had hit the perfect balance of "just enough but not too much" which I'm very deeply worried that Python 3 is going to deviate from.

Python 3 is barely different in my experience and it's been about 10 years at this point. I do enjoy some of the "new" features of python 3.

Some of the syntax changes are barely different (print statement a function instead of a keyword, good) but a lot of new things are added that I would consider to be syntactic sugar (walrus operator, for example) that threaten to detract from the two biggest things that drew me to Python: clean syntax and obvious understandability.

Re: Thank You, Guido

#165

Post by Alupis »

crtlaltdel wrote: post #151
Alupis wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not blackbox in that you can't look inside... it's blackbox in that you can choose to ignore it and be just fine.

Springboot takes an opinionated approach to a lot of things, but always lets you override it and do whatever you want wherever you want.

I suppose that's more of a greybox...

Re: Thank You, Guido

#166

Post by a-priori »

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…

To me, C is a tale of the perils of maintaining backwards compatibility: there are lots of parts of C, and particularly its standard library, that should never be used because there's no way to do so safely, but can never be removed and so inevitably new code will continue to be written that uses them.

Re: Thank You, Guido

#167

Post by didibus »

3pt14159 wrote: post #79
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.

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…

Clojure has had only a single backward breaking change since its creation in 2008, it took 10 full years before being introduced, and it was a pretty minor one at that.

Java and the JVM themselves value backward compatibility, and I'd say Clojure takes it a notch above that.

Re: Thank You, Guido

#168

Post by rurp »

Grue3 wrote: post #108
skellera wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

We don't use code to show how smart we are. We just assume that other developers are as smart as we are. >We don’t see people writing books in acronyms or omitting words. Math books written for mathematicians do this all the time.

I didn't take the comment to mean that other developers can't understand clever code, rather that writing overly clever code just isn't the best approach when a more plain solution will do. Writing code that takes another developer an hour to read through and understand wastes a lot of time compared to code that can be read and understood at a glance.

Re: Thank You, Guido

#169

Post by Rychard »

Grue3 wrote: post #108
skellera wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

We don't use code to show how smart we are. We just assume that other developers are as smart as we are. >We don’t see people writing books in acronyms or omitting words. Math books written for mathematicians do this all the time.

> We don't use code to show how smart we are. We just assume that other developers are as smart as we are.

I think it would be more accurate to say that we assume that other developers have the same amount of context about the problem as we do.

Going back and reading my own code from even a few months ago makes this very evident, as I frequently realize that I'd made various assumptions that required a much deeper level of understanding than I anticipated. The difficulty in providing a sufficient amount of context is readily apparent to me as I go back and fill in the gaps I unknowingly left.

Re: Thank You, Guido

#170

Post by anoncake »

Alupis wrote: post #126
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…

> I'm starting to long for a stack that doesn't constantly change Come on over to Javaland, it's nice, warm, and the sun is always shining! With the exception of the Java 8 -> Java 11 transition (skipping the non-LTS versions), things are pretty stable. You don't have to use any new-fangled features if you don't want... and your Java 3 code compiled nearly 20 years ago will still run just fine on modern JVM's.

> Come on over to Javaland, it's nice, warm, and the sun is always shining!

My oracle predicts much worse weather.

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