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Choose Boring Technology (2015)

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Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#171

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

scottlocklin wrote: post #153
randombytes6869 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To be fair though, there isn't as much good introductory resources on base R, that aren't very discipline specific.

I do completely agree otherwise, but those people will learn through bitter, bitter experience that those dependencies will break over time and will see the light that is base R.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#172

Post by decompiled_dev »

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…

This reminded me of Paul Graham's Python Paradox:

http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html

Seems like Python is now in the camp of Java now given the current trends.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#173

Post by karatestomp »

hilbertseries wrote: post #14
Throwaway8588 wrote: post #9

Except the most employable technology keeps changing every few years. TypeScript and Go and Rust are the hot ones now and they were barely on the radar a year ago. Ofc I am inserting them into work projects as I need to learn them.

Rust may be “hot” but there are far more Java jobs than Rust jobs and I highly doubt that’s going to change anytime soon. And indeed Java developers have been highly employed for quite some time.

Yeah, every time I job hunt it’s 10x the enterprise Java opportunities (don’t really want those) versus Ruby, Go, and even native mobile. I don’t have .net in my work history but gather it’s similar for that. Between them they’re a huge percentage of all software dev jobs, writing boring bigco software for bad-for-FAANG-but-good-for-everywhere-else pay.

[edit] oh and the small/startup space is overwhelmingly Node + some front end framework + a bunch of cloud shit they probably don’t need and have mis-used and mis-configured. Take out Node, .net, and Java and hell, the next biggest segment I see is probably low-paid PHP (Wordpress mostly) work followed distantly by Ruby (mostly Rails, ugh), Python, and native mobile. Go, Rust, Haskell, Clojure, all that, rare as can be.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#174

Post by the_af »

pdimitar wrote: post #155
the_af wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I haven't dealt with "a lot of XML" in Java for ages. I've been using it in my day job for a decade, and about the only XML I touch is pom.xml (that's the build file for Maven). This is like complaining about stuff in Java 1.4 -- sure, but we haven't been using it for ages.

Please don't take it the wrong way, but the days of XML for everything are long gone, and for years in Java it's been XML for nothing as a counter reaction.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#175

Post by the_af »

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…

> For me, part of "boring" is being like a 2x4 or a claw hammer: simple, solid, reliable, well understood. A lot of the Java world is nothing like that.

Strong disagree. This is exactly what most of the Java world is like: well understood and reliable. I wonder if people who say things like you did actually use it for their day jobs, or rely on things people using other technologies claim in their blogs.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#176

Post by the_af »

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #163
wpietri wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 rai…

This is true about enterprisey patterns, which for some reason plague Java more than other languages. I think it's a flaw of the moment in time when Java became ubiquitous -- I mean, it still runs most software than many fashionable technologies these days, but it's not as dominant as it used to be -- rather than the language itself. Modern Java doesn't look like that, but indeed older software built with it did.

These are fashions in the software engineering world. Had Ruby dominated the development world at the time Java did, you would have seen the same enterprisey patterns.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#177

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

the_af wrote: post #176
mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 rai…

This is true about enterprisey patterns, which for some reason plague Java more than other languages. I think it's a flaw of the moment in time when Java became ubiquitous -- I mean, it still runs most software than many fashionable technologies these days, but it's not as dominant as it used to be -- rather than the language itself. Modern Java doesn't look like that, but indeed older software built with it did. The…

I think that’s largely true, but not completely. It just turns out that certain language features sincerely matter more for business software, such as rapidly mutating object & data models without needs to update them as a ripple effect through other designs in the system, and the ability to trade-off safety or correctness as resources just like memory or runtime complexity, which Java as a language is just not set up to do easily.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#178

Post by pdimitar »

the_af wrote: post #174
pdimitar wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I haven't dealt with "a lot of XML" in Java for ages. I've been using it in my day job for a decade, and about the only XML I touch is pom.xml (that's the build file for Maven). This is like complaining about stuff in Java 1.4 -- sure, but we haven't been using it for ages. Please don't take it the wrong way, but the days of XML for everything are long gone, and for years in Java it's been XML for nothing as a counte…

Your experience doesn't nullify mine, and vice versa. There's a huge pile of legacy Java applications out there still needing maintenance and occasional new features.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#179

Post by ghaff »

iso1210 wrote: post #162
TheDong wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Like a number of languages, PHP was around for quite a while before it really took off. PHP is probably most associated with "Web 2.0" as it became the model for web interactions in the mid-2000s.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#180

Post by xtracto »

wpietri wrote: post #142
ryanbrunner wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

React itself has been around for 7 years, but the ecosystem around React is still developing. There isn't a straightforward answer that's universally accepted and without warts in terms of how to do server communication, how to manage state, how to smoothly implement routing in a way that avoids most of the navigation hiccups that SPAs run into, how to manage CSS, etc. There's certainly answers which seem promising f…

This resonates for me. I'm mainly a back-end developer, but for a while I've been wanting to improve my front-end skills so I can do basic things myself. React has been the obvious choice for a while. But every time I say, "Ok, let's see what I need to learn to get started," which happens maybe once a year, I end up getting different answers. I would like React to get more boring. Because I'll never focus mainly on t…

I think SPA are overvalued. They are slow to load, clunky and the paradigm of loading "modules" is messy. I prefer web components and plain html /js .
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