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Choose Boring Technology (2015)

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Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#161

Post by cultofmetatron »

peferron wrote: post #80
gavinray wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know that necessarily correct. Previous startup I was at had a stack like this: - Frontend: Vue + Typescript - Android/iOS App: Vue (NativeScript/Capacitor) + Typescript - Backend: Node + Typescript - Database: Postgres - Deployment: Everything in Docker containers I know of a lot of places taking similar stances where the frontend and mobile apps are done in this way (IE React and React Native) and then you…

I just built a frontend and backend with TS following this same logic. I'm super happy with TS for the frontend, but I regret picking it for the backend and am considering rewriting the backend in Clojure while it's still early. My reasons are: - I don't need to share type definitions between the frontend and backend; the frontend can generate TS type defs using GraphQL introspection regardless of which language the…

take a look at elixir/phoenix if you're considering a rewrite. The Absinthe library is excellent and well documented. I'm using it for my startup and the app is speedy as hell on minimal hardware.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#162

Post by iso1210 »

TheDong wrote: post #91
kitd wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> YouTube was (and still largely is) written in Python, way before it was cool and well-known. I agree with you on just about everything, but python was well-known well before YT. Django was a staple of the early web.

The staples of the early web, in my mind, are html and perl CGI scripts. php might make the cut as early web, but web frameworks, like those in ruby and python, feel to me me much less like the early web, and much more like the web 2.0 days.

Matts Script Archive was mid 90s. Mod perl maybe just squeezes into 'early web', I think /. used it in the late 90s.

Perl wasn't the only CGI in the early days - a large internal web application I encountered as late as 2004 had it's CGIs written in C, running on IRIX

PHP is certainly the newcomer as far as I'm concerned

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#163

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

wpietri wrote: post #144
tarkin2 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. Java is pretty boring but I wouldn’t recommend for the majority of cases.

Java is boring in one sense, but it's the wrong kind of exciting in another. I've had to touch it a couple times in the last few years, and there's still a ton of "enterprise" nonsense in the space. Everything feels bloated, confused, unpolished. It's like I'm walking along, step on a trapdoor, and suddenly am sucked down into a tangle of stack traces, class loaders, annotations, and XML configs. For me, part of "bor…

Java also seems to bring with it a lot of cultural baggage for bloated design thinking, like needing overkill factory patterns, accessor patterns, and more.

If you start creating something called AbstractMonthlyBillingReportAggregatorFactory that inherits from AbstractBillingReportFactory that inherits from AbstractReportFactory all of which implement a Report interface, things have gone unsalvageably far off the rails to be useful any more.

It’s fair to say you could do this same thing in C++ or Python etc., and sometimes that does happen. But just anecdotally observing this in many companies, it happens _on purpose_ with Java all the time, but much less so in other ecosystems. In other systems it’s just much easier to get things done without resorting to tons of inheritance misdirection, and many great common libraries already solve problems in those ecosystems with minimal inheritance bloat, giving lots of easy to follow examples.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#164

Post by [deleted] »

wpietri wrote: post #144
tarkin2 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. Java is pretty boring but I wouldn’t recommend for the majority of cases.

Java is boring in one sense, but it's the wrong kind of exciting in another. I've had to touch it a couple times in the last few years, and there's still a ton of "enterprise" nonsense in the space. Everything feels bloated, confused, unpolished. It's like I'm walking along, step on a trapdoor, and suddenly am sucked down into a tangle of stack traces, class loaders, annotations, and XML configs. For me, part of "bor…

[deleted]

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#165

Post by systematical »

teambayleaf wrote: post #44
twblalock wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are more Java and C++ and Python jobs than Go or Rust or Typescript jobs, and I doubt that will change in 18 months. By the time new languages become the new industry standard, most developers will have had plenty of time to learn them. I've never heard of an industry change that happened so fast that it made the majority of working programmers obsolete in 18 months.

I think the lesson here is "don't be a commodity"? In this light, PHP coders are real commodities. They are paid lowly, treated as expendable, and get no respect by peers. I think they're going down the same path of "HTML experts" which were once lucrative business in early 1990s. Java/C++ programmers fare better because (I guess) there is some fundamental difficulty to be proficient at them. So, despite being old an…

PHP devs make good money, maybe not what their peers in "good" languages make, but a good Senior PHP dev is making six figures in most markets these days.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#166

Post by projektfu »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #110
kitd wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> YouTube was (and still largely is) written in Python, way before it was cool and well-known. I agree with you on just about everything, but python was well-known well before YT. Django was a staple of the early web.

It's funny to call Django the "early web" when it first came out in 2005. That is really not early at all. Especially when you consider Rails, etc. predates that. I was an early Python adopter (1995/1996) and could not for the life of me find anybody who would consider letting me use it in 'mainstream' commercial software projects. Then all the sudden about 10 years ago it exploded in popularity big time. But I'd mov…

I was using python with SCons back when it came out, sí around 2000. I was also surprised at the statement that python wasn’t well known, but I agree that the Java web scene was much more mature. It was, however, very focused on configuration. There was nothing like LAMP getting people up and running in under a minute.

ASP was also a favorite of the early web.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#167

Post by systematical »

The most recent MVP I created: CakePHP, MySQL, jQuery (UI/UX called for minimal dynamic UI IMO), and bootstrap. Very boring full-scale MVP released in under three weeks. I designed as client-server in case the need arises to go SPA with React down the line or go with a mobile app option, but I doubt the need.

Non-tech co-founder was worried from what he read on PHP etc.... Non-tech co-founder is not worried today.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#168

Post by [deleted] »

wpietri wrote: post #144
tarkin2 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. Java is pretty boring but I wouldn’t recommend for the majority of cases.

Java is boring in one sense, but it's the wrong kind of exciting in another. I've had to touch it a couple times in the last few years, and there's still a ton of "enterprise" nonsense in the space. Everything feels bloated, confused, unpolished. It's like I'm walking along, step on a trapdoor, and suddenly am sucked down into a tangle of stack traces, class loaders, annotations, and XML configs. For me, part of "bor…

[deleted]

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#169

Post by dmnd »

brabel wrote: post #75
dmnd wrote: post #34

I'm constantly invoking this principle, but I have a small tweak: combine it with the (now anachronistically named) Python Paradox to get "use a tool from your toolbox". Restricting the number of different technologies in your toolbox gets you most of the benefits described in TFA. But contrary to "boring", it's actually preferable for some of those tools to be bleeding edge. That way you also get to enjoy the benefi…

> you need to have good enough taste to pick new techs... So you see tech as you see fashion, i.e it requires good taste?! When you choose a new tech, perhaps you should consider what problems it solves and whether its costs are worthwhile for you, not whether its a hot new fashionable thing to "wear" in parties (conferences).

Tasteful ≠ trendy. By “good taste” I meant the ability to pick a technology you won’t regret later.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#170

Post by d0m »

nine_k wrote: post #62

I 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…

People use "boring" in opposition to "hyped" or "trendy", which like you said totally misses the point. I jumped on react right away when it came out, but not because of it being trendy, but because like you said I could be productive with it right way, I knew it'd be around for 5+ years and that I could hire engineers.
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