I’d never heard of mobbing. That’s an awesome idea.
Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering
11–20 of 400 posts
Re: Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering
#12>The open source maintainer problem isn’t going to get much better in the near future. >People are gonna keep blaming “Capitalism” for this. Capitalism is great, there really is no need to defend it at every opportunity, especially if no one is attacking it.
great is a relative term. It's much better than feudalism, and certainly better than the most prominent socialisms that've been tried (USSR, China etc). However, it does not align incentives towards the things we think are "good", like maintaining open source software, securing software, etc - so it certainly isn't ideal.
Re: Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering
#13No. 13 is gold: > We’re never going to get the broader SE culture to care about things like performance, compatibility, accessibility, security, or privacy, at least not without legal regulations that are enforced. And regulations are written in blood, so we’ll only get enforced legal regulations after a lack of accessibility kills people. Sorry, can't help but blame capitalism for saying "fuck performance, compatibi…
Software is not charity. I will not work hard to deliver all those things out of the goodness of my heart. The ROI on those things isn’t great.
If it’s easy to do I’ll do it, but none of those are trivial things.
Re: Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering
#14No. 13 is gold: > We’re never going to get the broader SE culture to care about things like performance, compatibility, accessibility, security, or privacy, at least not without legal regulations that are enforced. And regulations are written in blood, so we’ll only get enforced legal regulations after a lack of accessibility kills people. Sorry, can't help but blame capitalism for saying "fuck performance, compatibi…
It's not capitalism, but the bad apples exploiting it.
The exploitation is a feature of capitalism, not a bug.
Re: Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering
#15No. 13 is gold: > We’re never going to get the broader SE culture to care about things like performance, compatibility, accessibility, security, or privacy, at least not without legal regulations that are enforced. And regulations are written in blood, so we’ll only get enforced legal regulations after a lack of accessibility kills people. Sorry, can't help but blame capitalism for saying "fuck performance, compatibi…
It's not capitalism, but the bad apples exploiting it.
I'd like to see examples of well known good apples outside of OSS that care about performance, compatibility, accessibility, security, and privacy.
Re: Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering
#16There’s no rigorous academic evidence for this, but a lot of companies have been backporting typescript/mypy/sorbet onto existing dynamic codebases and the case studies have been overwhelmingly positive. Not to be a buzzkill, but migration reports from any tech A to tech B are always overwhelmingly positive when the industry has a newlywed period with tech B. Save for a clear, undeniable failure the stakeholders will…
Number one, static type checking is hardly a "new tech" for which the industry is in a "newlywed period". If anything, it is the middle-aged wife that the industry's crawling back to, as the passion fades from its dynamic mistress dalliance.
Secondly, the obvious counterexample here is MongoDB. Way too hyped-up during its honeymoon, and then almost immediately crapped on by the entire industry (to the point where we've PROBABLY gone too far and are unfair now). When hype waves don't work out, this industry is pretty quick about discarding them.
Re: Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering
#17No. 13 is gold: > We’re never going to get the broader SE culture to care about things like performance, compatibility, accessibility, security, or privacy, at least not without legal regulations that are enforced. And regulations are written in blood, so we’ll only get enforced legal regulations after a lack of accessibility kills people. Sorry, can't help but blame capitalism for saying "fuck performance, compatibi…
It's not capitalism, but the bad apples exploiting it.
Capitalism is a handful of people who own the means of production and the rest of us trying to get by. The bad apples exploiting it are the people who own the means of production, and saying they're the bad part of capitalism might as well be saying "capitalism is only bad because of what makes capitalism what it is".
Re: Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering
#18#10 also applies to religion.
Re: Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering
#19> 10. TDD/FP/Agile zealots are probably zealots because adopting TDD/FP/Agile/Whatever made them better programmers than they were before.
Being a Zealot also stunts your growth beyond the level that zealotry got you to in the first place.
Re: Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering
#20There’s no rigorous academic evidence for this, but a lot of companies have been backporting typescript/mypy/sorbet onto existing dynamic codebases and the case studies have been overwhelmingly positive. Not to be a buzzkill, but migration reports from any tech A to tech B are always overwhelmingly positive when the industry has a newlywed period with tech B. Save for a clear, undeniable failure the stakeholders will…
For Typescript, I think it's safe to say the honeymoon period is over. It's been >9 years, or more than 3 internet generations.
For at least this one case, many people (including myself) believe it's a success. Whether the tooling for Sorbet or mypy ever reaches that point, there are compelling reasons to believe in the success of the model.