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Choose Boring Technology (2015)

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Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#211

Post by drwiggly »

leonardteo wrote: post #184

Getting vulnerable here for a sec and hoping that others can add their thoughts. I struggle with this. As a small-ish, bootstrapped business, the issue I commonly run into is developer retention. If we stand our ground and choose boring technology because we have limited innovation tokens and can't afford to waste them, there's the flight risk of those devs who really want to work with those new technologies. And thi…

Ask them live support your app, esp code they didn't write. Or some kind of dev log from the ops people hunting down their bugs. Tricky fun frameworks then become a pita.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#212

Post by wpietri »

matwood wrote: post #188
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…

> 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. TBH, this is exactly what the Java world is like. There are not many surprises in Java land. The language isn't getting fantasy land changes on a daily basis. There are libraries that haven't been updated in years because there hasn't been a need to update them - the…

Java the language is decently boring, (although I appreciate how Kotlin has tried to advance while staying pretty boring). But not Java the ecosystem. When I returned to using Spring a couple years back, I thought, "Well, it was rough then, but I'm sure they've worked out a lot of the kinks." Nope. It had become more complicated and less reliable. I know a lot of Java-land stuff seems fine to people who live in enterprise-land, where people have a very high pain tolerance and no particular urgency around getting things done. But for me that's not the right kind of boring.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#213

Post by markus_zhang »

I actually get why engineers, especially young ones prefer new techs sometimes.

Think it this way. You join a company and get two choices. One is to use a reliable albeit old system, read tons of legacy code and figure out how to do things other guys' way. The other is to build new things from ground up when you have a much bigger feeling of ownership, but risk breaking things up.

Which one do you choose? Note that you are a junior engineer, not a lead, not an architect.

Somewhat this is more like a class struggle instead of choosing the right tech.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#214

Post by pjmlp »

kitd wrote: post #76
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…

> 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.

Zope fits that role, not Django.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#215

Post by wpietri »

the_af wrote: post #175
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…

> 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.

Wonder no more! Two years ago I did a 9-month contract in Java. I have used Java for consulting gigs going back to 2000. I honestly expected it to be a pleasure to work with this most recent time in hopes that things were usefully boring. That was not my experience.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#216

Post by ProZsolt »

derrekl wrote: post #157
ProZsolt wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thi…

I came out a little bit negative in the end, but as I said I don't think it's going away.

All these companies you listed using it with Rails and that part of the ecosystem is alive and well, but I'm not interested in it.

A few years ago Ruby ruled the DevOps/Cloud space(which I working in), a lot of tools was written in it, but with the dawn of containerization, its former glory starting to fade. Docker, k8s, or even the new GitHub CLI is written in Go. While I am happy to write Ruby code, I can't expect the same from my colleagues.

While professionally I don't think I will continue to use it much longer, I still planning to keep up with it. Before the lockdown, I started teaching Ruby at a local meetup group, and I can't wait for Ruby 3.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#217

Post by jatone »

TomMarius wrote: post #82
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.

TypeScript is in the top spot for the last 3 years at least.

mainly because typescript at least makes a bunch of warts of dealing with large frontend javascript systems bearable.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#219

Post by djmips »

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…

But boring brings the views. Single word. Concise. Controversial.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#220

Post by djmips »

markus_zhang wrote: post #213

I actually get why engineers, especially young ones prefer new techs sometimes. Think it this way. You join a company and get two choices. One is to use a reliable albeit old system, read tons of legacy code and figure out how to do things other guys' way. The other is to build new things from ground up when you have a much bigger feeling of ownership, but risk breaking things up. Which one do you choose? Note that y…

Every boring tech was once new and exciting at one time. Without someone taking a risk everything would be boring.
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