When in doubt, make it stout out of stuff you know about.
Choose Boring Technology (2015)
151–160 of 297 posts
Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a different question. Why do you want to SEO an application? I understand you want to SEO your landing page or blog but SPA should be dynamic content which you don't even want to be crawled by google.
Yes you're right, my question wasn't for apps, but as a response to using react as a universal web frontend tech.
> a universal web frontend tech
There... that's the problem.
Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whether you end up with a hellish dependency tree is more up to the developer than the language. I’d say the only reason this is more common in node projects than it is in other languages is because dependency management in other languages is more tedious, so the barrier for introducing new dependencies is higher. All of my node projects have had rather tidy dependency trees. It’s also been quite easy for me to use p…
Trust me, its the lack of standard library. Python and Java are both "batteries included" . You can write apps decently with just 5-10 dependencies if you want. Every JS app I've worked on has like 10-20X the dependencies of projects written in languages with a good standard lib
> Trust me, its the lack of standard library.
It's almost certainly not, as R has plenty of batteries, and young nitwits in the Hadleyverse are writing preposterous node-like dependency graphs. It's fashion, and it should be curb-stomped.
Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)
#154I still think that "boring" is a wrong word. Choose the technology you know in and out, and are immediately productive with. Choose the technology which is sure to be around in 5-7 years, preferably 10-15. Choose the technology for which you are comfortable hiring the next 15 engineers. This does not mean that you need to choose something unpleasant, unergonomic, or ancient. Neither does it mean that you need to choo…
Choose PHP.
PHP silently transforming all string keys of a map to integers when they are all integer strings ("123", "456" etc.) is exactly one of the reasons I'll never choose a language that pulls the rug from below my feet and replaces it with parquet.
Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah. Java is pretty boring but I wouldn’t recommend for the majority of cases.
Why not? Java is used to great success in the software industry. It's a good language and platform, fads to the contrary notwithstanding.
When you are actually coding Java -- yes. But as a sibling commenter pointed out, there's a lot of "XML as code" in the Java world. That's really hard to work with.
Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)
#156As relevant as ever. It's fascinating how big web stacks are these days, even for small-to-medium sites: various combinations of at least one styling language (SASS/LESS/CSS), frontend framework (Angular/React), frontend language (JavaScript/TypeScript/Node.js), backend framework (Django/Express/Spring/Rails) backend language (Python/Ruby/PHP/Perl/Java), and message bus (ZeroMQ/Redis/RabbitMQ). That's just the fronte…
The young people in my company made sure our webpage is a react app. I gave in because they are having fun and it looks good, but it could have been done in static html (maybe using a generator) way more easily. It hurts me everytime I‘m thinking about it.
Ask them how they’ve addressed SEO. I doubt there’s a good answer. In my experience you’re better off just using Wordpress for a marketing website. It already does the vast majority of what a marketing website needs. Now, a rich web portal/SaaS product is a different story. Choosing the right tool for the job only comes with experience.
Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
There should also be an explicit call out to both tooling and community. Even if a programming language ticks all the other boxes, Without a sizable and stable community to constantly push tooling languages will fade, not necessarily die. In my past job I was ColdFusion programmer for 15 years. ColdFusion ticks all the other boxes. * Created in 1995 and is a very mature platform * Easy to learn and productive * I was…
I currently see it happening with Ruby. I used it as a scripting language for DevOps tooling, CLIs, and for small web apps, but without rails. What I see is Go pushing it out from the DevOps space and Python is more popular as a general-purpose language. Tools that were written in Ruby(eg.: Puppet) are outdated and new tools are written in Go. I still think Ruby is a superior language compared to Python, but because…
This is avoidable by continuing to use Ruby. Just continue to use it and contribute to the community, it's that easy. Ruby still has big businesses using it - Github, Airbnb, Shopify. There is no reason to believe it'll go the way of cold fusion. The language ecosystem is much different than 20 years ago. There are so many languages all thriving. Even Perl is relatively healthy and is a fine choice for doing many things in the software space.
Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)
#158I still think that "boring" is a wrong word. Choose the technology you know in and out, and are immediately productive with. Choose the technology which is sure to be around in 5-7 years, preferably 10-15. Choose the technology for which you are comfortable hiring the next 15 engineers. This does not mean that you need to choose something unpleasant, unergonomic, or ancient. Neither does it mean that you need to choo…
> YouTube was (and still largely is) written in Python, way before it was cool and well-known
That's a good point. I wonder how many successful apps used tech that only appeared boring after the fact. Rails is a fairly boring stack today but back when GitHub started, it probably wasn't.
Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
The young people in my company made sure our webpage is a react app. I gave in because they are having fun and it looks good, but it could have been done in static html (maybe using a generator) way more easily. It hurts me everytime I‘m thinking about it.
You could suggest them to use React/NextJS, but publish a static export (yarn export) which is the buildtime compiled HTML+CSS+JS from react, but without needing anything else. Works well for static pages, this is what I did so II could use next/react and deploy to a boring LAMP server we have for our landing pages.
Don’t do this. I’ve just been through the process. Trust me. For a marketing website just use Wordpress and save your time for something more valuable.
Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)
#160I think the problem is that not all programmers are motivated by successfully building things. Lots of us are motivated by learning things, and some are motivated by investigating and solving problems when things don't go the way they supposed to. If you pick a 'boring' technology, you have less of those two things, and you are stuck with boring process of developing one feature after the other with boring technology…
I believe you are correct, at least judging by myself and several others I've talked with. We are creators and get bored of our creations pretty quickly. In that regard we aren't unlike painters or even book writers; something sparkles our interest, we work on it for a while but then we get tired of it and really want to do something else.
That can easily be seen as unprofessional from the outside and I'd agree you shouldn't conduct yourself like that when there are money involved but that also leaves something to be said about the productivity of the tools we work with.