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Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You

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Re: Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You

#361

Post by MisterPea »

_dps wrote: post #359
overgard wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably less to do with backwards compat then how it was handled. The first few versions of python 3 didn't really provide any compelling benefit, (indeed things like performance were worse, not better), and most people didn't _care_ about the cruft it removed. The "print" statement being a great example. Was it kind of weird? Sure. Did that weirdness have any consequences at all? Not really. Was it worth it to forc…

Agree with everything you said here, but let me riff on this > The "print" statement being a great example. Was it kind of weird? Sure. I am reminded of the Emerson quip "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds". The Py2 print statement is special/weird because it is a very important and special behavior, especially for newcomers. It's not randomly special, it's special because it models something that…

> It's not randomly special, it's special because it models something that deserves special treatment.

Can you expand on this, why is this more humane? And why should print be a special function?

Re: Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You

#362

Post by _dps »

MisterPea wrote: post #361
_dps wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree with everything you said here, but let me riff on this > The "print" statement being a great example. Was it kind of weird? Sure. I am reminded of the Emerson quip "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds". The Py2 print statement is special/weird because it is a very important and special behavior, especially for newcomers. It's not randomly special, it's special because it models something that…

> It's not randomly special, it's special because it models something that deserves special treatment. Can you expand on this, why is this more humane? And why should print be a special function?

Two simple reasons. First, "hello world" requires less explanation

  print "hello world"
  vs
  print ("hello world")
Second, printing a line to stdout is an extremely common and special activity (especially during debugging). There is almost no programmer-defined function you could write that has a function as fundamental as that of "print".

Larry Wall of Perl thought about these things in terms of Huffman Coding, i.e. the most common thing you might want to write should have the syntax elide any easily understood context.

In the case of "print", we know we're not talking about any random function here: it's the function for getting output to the terminal, one of the most fundamental operations in all of programming. So I think it's totally fine for it to have a special representation in the language.

Re: Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You

#363

Post by davidzweig »

lowiqengineer wrote: post #340
scarface74 wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I specifically said that I was not shaming $150k. You graduated from college and are now making more than most developers in the US and you work at a big tech company. You have the opportunity to leverage that and either get promoted from within or change jobs. Are you really struggling making $150K straight out of college? You graduated from a state school (as did I) you probably don’t have that much debt. For conte…

>You have the opportunity to leverage that and either get promoted from within or change jobs. I think the real problem is I'm not capable of doing so, at least according to the fair labor market. > Are you really struggling making $150K straight out of college? You graduated from a state school (as did I) you probably don’t have that much debt. I don't have any debt, I just have a really pathetic savings rate and a…

I spend a lot of time in the Ukraine and talk with people. A friend of mine earns $140/mo ($1680/yr) as a skilled machinist. He has probably as much accumulated skill as me and sweats at his work. I sit around and type out some JS and drink coffee, and make an order of magnitude more money than him. I drove a $500 car (on vegetable oil - cheaper). Live in one bedroom appartment with a Hungarian family. Outside the window are people shooting themselves up. I worked for a couple of years out of a McDonalds with earplugs so the music didn't distract me. I maintain a complex software stack that services nearly a million users with a software they love. I don't want to be doing anything else.

I don't like the IQ/talent fetish that seems to pervade Anglophone culture. Some people have a stronger natural predisposition to sit and stare at a screen and figure out puzzles, and that happens to be sought after on the labor market. Doesn't mean others have less inherent value as human beings.

Would be nice to have a small appartment one day. I just try to offer some perspective.

Re: Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You

#364

Post by userbinator »

jimmaswell wrote: post #60
userbinator wrote: post #27

It's odd to see an article emphasising backwards compatibility, but not a single mention of Microsoft (I even ctrl+F'd the page source to check!) They've regressed a bit in the recent years but I'd still consider MS the gold standard for back-compat. I have Win32 binaries I last modified over 15 years ago, small (or perhaps tiny - size measured in KBs) utilities that I use daily. They worked perfectly on Win95, and s…

The absolute worst in my small experience with it is anything touching the node ecosystem. Try to follow any guide or use any library not updated in the last week and there will be breaking API changes and deprecation warnings everywhere.

Anything Node, JS, or web-development related seems to churn much more than everything else.

Re: Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You

#365

Post by perl4ever »

dragonwriter wrote: post #302
perl4ever wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this rent seeking and not just profit seeking? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

Profit-seeking with market power is rent-seeking.

I think it's very destructive of meaningful discussion to redefine a term of jargon in order to exploit the stigma of the original definition while talking about something else.

Re: Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You

#366

Post by StopHammoTime »

larrymcp wrote: post #54
remus wrote: post #35

I'd be interested in some concrete examples of things GCP have depreciated. I'm an (admittedly fairly light) user of GCP and haven't come across any myself.

I saw that he mentioned a few of them in the article. He writes: I can tell you that virtually everything I’ve used, from networking (legacy to VPC) to storage (Cloud SQL v1 to v2) to Firebase (now Firestore with a totally different API) to App Engine (don’t even get me started) to Cloud Endpoints to... I dunno, _everything_, has forced me to rewrite it all after at most 2–3 years.

In relation to this, you then have AWS who basically support everything forever until their customers stop using it. They _still_ support people on EC2-Classic even though they would rather not. Every TAM I've come into contact with brags about how they won't deprecate until the customer deprecates.

There's a reason that people trust Amazon with their compute, and that's because in regards to their technology they're trustworthy.

Re: Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You

#367

Post by bradleyjg »

Traster wrote: post #102
mamurphy wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My armchair thought: what if the CEO said "wow, Yegge is right, we've gotten really off trail here. you need to show leadership in maintaining a 3+ year old system at Google for promotions?" Could that happen and would it work?

The promotion system isn't the issue, the promotion system was the issue 10 years ago. For the last 10 years Google has been hiring and promoting and keeping people who prioritize shiny new things more than maintaining old things. If you start rewarding maintaining old things you aren't going to suddenly get what you want, you're just going to lose a tonne of people because they don't want to do what you're telling t…

> For the last 10 years Google has been hiring and promoting and keeping people who prioritize shiny new things more than maintaining old things.

This is the same reason why it is near impossible to reform a police department. It would take firing everyone and starting over.

Re: Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You

#368

Post by bradleyjg »

skohan wrote: post #179
londons_explore wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but there might be other downsides... Suddenly every developer turns into 'maintenance man' just refactoring existing code to make it neater without adding much.

The solution to this is more qualitative performance evaluations. People are really good at gaming quantitative systems, so once it becomes a rule that more releases == more promotions, people will prioritize that over actual value creation. Same for if maintenance work becomes the metric. You need the people evaluating performance to really understand the work, and make informed, discretionary decisions about who to…

> You need the people evaluating performance to really understand the work, and make informed, discretionary decisions about who to promote to maximize real value creation.

I agree but for everyone working at / running a company without a money printing machine it is worth noting that this is really expensive. You need to take someone that’s a good engineer—-one with judgment and a modicum of people skills—-and give them mostly thankless, stressful work.

Re: Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You

#369

Post by MisterPea »

_dps wrote: post #362
MisterPea wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not randomly special, it's special because it models something that deserves special treatment. Can you expand on this, why is this more humane? And why should print be a special function?

Two simple reasons. First, "hello world" requires less explanation print "hello world" vs print ("hello world") Second, printing a line to stdout is an extremely common and special activity (especially during debugging). There is almost no programmer-defined function you could write that has a function as fundamental as that of "print". Larry Wall of Perl thought about these things in terms of Huffman Coding, i.e. th…

Interesting, thanks.

One nit I would call-out is that most people don't put a space between the print and the ("hello world"), so idiomatically when learning, print is 'just another function'. And since HelloWorld is usually the first thing people learn, I wouldn't want them to think print is different than any other function.

Also, the first line of The Zen of Python is "Beautiful is better than ugly", I can understand why consistency was a priority here.

We could get into a whole other discussion about whether or not a programming language should have and adhere to a "culture", but fundamentally I agree with the arguments against Python making this change. It's just not worth the effort, and like others have said, they might've lost of a lot of momentum to JS.

Re: Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You

#370

Post by non-entity »

mips_avatar wrote: post #230
mdrabla wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This hasn't been my experience, and I've worked there. There might've been a couple dicks like that but definitely not the norm

I don’t know about other locations, but in Seattle the googlers and SpaceX people walk around with a lot of swagger. And you don’t have to talk to them long until workplaces get brought up and a small jab at Amazon or Microsoft is made. Which idk maybe is fair if they used to work at Amazon/Microsoft. But still I wish we weren’t so intent on maintaining a hierarchy. Maybe we just all need to develop more of a life ou…

This sounds so tiring. I don't care who you work for, tell me what you're working on and I may be impressed.
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