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Is the madness ever going to end?

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Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#531

Post by matheusmoreira »

rdiddly wrote: post #221
root_axis wrote: post #23

The author is fighting a strawman. Rather than engage with the specific problems these solutions were built to solve they dismissively regard them as just flavor of the week trends purely for the sake of chasing newness. This is true of the entire post, but I'll tackle just one since it's emblematic of my issues with all the rest: The argument for Electron and React Native isn't "it's modern", it's "it's much cheaper…

I think that's what's offensive to the purist engineer mind. These aren't engineering decisions, they're business decisions (or maybe the closest thing you could call them would be "financial engineering" decisions). The best thing, by pure engineering criteria, is not what gets built. The best thing for the business is what gets built. In that context it's a complaint as old as the hills. ...and not specific to comp…

> And then the mayor of the town shows up out of the blue and says no, this direction is going to have a longer wait, I'm going to delay people intentionally, so that when they're stuck in traffic, sitting there, they'll have more of a chance to see signs/placards of, and contemplate patronizing, nearby businesses, whose owners are my political backers.

You gotta be kidding me! Not only are we subjected to this constant visual pollution in the form of advertising but these politicians deliberately make traffic less efficient in order to force us to "contemplate" this garbage?

That's extremely offensive and not just in the purist engineer sense. The audacity of these people to think they can literally hold you down and force their little commercial interests into you.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#532

Post by gitgud »

rdiddly wrote: post #221
root_axis wrote: post #23

The author is fighting a strawman. Rather than engage with the specific problems these solutions were built to solve they dismissively regard them as just flavor of the week trends purely for the sake of chasing newness. This is true of the entire post, but I'll tackle just one since it's emblematic of my issues with all the rest: The argument for Electron and React Native isn't "it's modern", it's "it's much cheaper…

I think that's what's offensive to the purist engineer mind. These aren't engineering decisions, they're business decisions (or maybe the closest thing you could call them would be "financial engineering" decisions). The best thing, by pure engineering criteria, is not what gets built. The best thing for the business is what gets built. In that context it's a complaint as old as the hills. ...and not specific to comp…

> "The best thing, by pure engineering criteria, is not what gets built."

How do you define the "best thing, by pure engineering criteria"?

The least memory/CPU? Or the smallest download size?

These are somewhat irrelevant vanity metrics in most cases... they're especially vain, if optimising them loses you potential clients and makes the project a failure...

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#533

Post by scotty79 »

goodpoint wrote: post #526
scotty79 wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Invest into your own super wonderful alternative and they'll crumble at mere sight of your engineering superiority. Or not.

Missing the point a bit? The author is in no way complaining about the lack of choice in web frameworks and similarly hyped up stuff. He is complaining about unnecessary churn and unnecessary software and you obviously don't reduce it by writing even more stuff.

You can reduce abundance of software by writing more software.

Nothing kills software as effectively as creating alternative software that works way better.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#534

Post by danaris »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #521
Ultimatt wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feels like everyone is very disinterested in the cost to the user with most "modern ways" of doing things. Many webpages use far too much resource to just communicate text. Web adverts are especially awful for this. I could browse the web with dialup and a machine a thousandth as powerful as my phone. So as a consumer why do I need to "upgrade" what was the added value above Google scale is delivering computationally…

We see the same in other areas. Desktop OS's are not appreciably faster now than they were 30 years ago, despite exponential rises in memory, storage and processor capacity. Better looking, yes, but not faster. Games have maintained roughly the same performance for 20 years. However, the number of polygons has risen exponentially. There's a minimum acceptable performance for most systems. If you exceed that, no-one c…

> the average web browser and connection is fast enough to serve Wordpress content in an acceptable time for the user

...That's because (unless something has changed in Wordpress relatively recently) what the browser receives is, in fact, "flat HTML".

Wordpress is written in PHP, and all the processing happens server-side.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#535

Post by gaze »

neilalexander wrote: post #439
gaze wrote: post #10

The piece is kinda whiney and comes off like "get off my lawn!" and doesn't really add much beyond the myriad of other complaints. Thing is that I don't really think that many people love developing this way, it's just that nobody will pay anyone to shovel our way out from under this mess of technical debt. GUI development on windows is a schizophrenic mess and then you want to be cross platform? The only options are…

> and most importantly you can externalize a fair bit of the debt onto the end user as power and compute resource consumption "The user will tolerate it being crap" is not an excellent mindset for us professionals to be striving for.

This isn’t what we strived for. It’s what we compromised upon

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#536

Post by dmd »

filmor wrote: post #438
int0x2e wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your quote is better, but for people that have a hard time with that analogy, I like using the example of building a 4-story concrete/brick building - anyone can make a building stand strong by filling it with concrete / bricks. It takes precise engineering to know how thin you can make the walls/supports to make that building worth building.

If you just mindlessly fill everything with bricks and concrete, you likely need to make the lower walls thicker than the upper ones to support the weight... The whole engineering process can be done without ever looking at the budget as long as the framework is given ("use these materials", "you have this much space").

And who came up with that framework?

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#537

Post by bsenftner »

windows2020 wrote: post #45
bsenftner wrote: post #19

I believe we, as an industry, are driving towards frameworks that can be operated with story-like analogies describing what needs to be done with no technology knowledge at all. The core computer scientists creating such a framework create it with entry level non-developers as the "end-users" in mind. Such a framework is the holy grail of software development because it will enable any Joe with any software idea to h…

This works great in many scenarios. But when the time comes to complete a task that the lossy abstraction that is the framework doesn't facilitate, Joe hits a wall very fast. He then needs to either unravel the abstraction, find another one or say it can't be done.

This is where the hold grail really pays off: those Any Joes that are deeply financially committed must hire real Computer Scientists to implement their non-standard needs. Of course, those real Computer Scientists work for the framework provider Corporation, and their expense is high enough that Any Joe is forced to give up equity for their non-standard feature. It is a operational maze designed to financially and mentally exhaust the new entrepreneur so they can be assumed and taken over by the status quo of existing deep pockets. Unless you've been asleep, this is exactly how SAP grew and continues to expand.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#538

Post by superkuh »

phailhaus wrote: post #252
superkuh wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel comfortable asserting you've never not used a complex web application, even for your personal non-commercial projects made for fun. The fact that his website (and other projects) is in HTML and doesn't need to be executed is a confirmation of the article ideas not some deficit. You can justify what you do with JS for money however you want but businesses do it that way because managers decided it's cheapest wa…

What is the purpose of his website? It is to serve static content. But obviously, his entire rant is against more complex, interactive, and stateful applications. It's strange to argue that because static sites exist, all sites should be static.

>his entire rant is against more complex, interactive, and stateful applications.

... where they aren't needed. Which is the vast majority of websites, even commercial ones. It's a rare website that actually is an application and not just a means to display text or images.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#539

Post by danesparza »

widg3t wrote: post #394
danesparza wrote: post #11

You have a misspelling in your second sentence. You also seemed to be focused on only web development. I would argue that "IT people" are not limited to web development -- and that you're overlooking the entire maker movement (including Raspberry Pi's and Arduinos), the breathtaking development going on with self-driving cars, and the development still taking place with AI. But as always -- follow the money. Old scho…

*its

:-) Thank you for reminding me to be less judgemental

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#540

Post by fleddr »

godDLL wrote: post #248
fleddr wrote: post #101

It's a good rant. Basically, our computing foundation is from the 70s and we keep stacking crap on top. Given hardware advancements, it's embarrassing how we're making the user experience worse, not better. What happened is speed. You need to ship fast or you're dead. The need for speed is not just because of commercial dynamics, also because of another major industry failure: programmer productivity did not scale up…

You should. Blog. I have a title for you, for your first piece: Robots trade, CEOs fidget, managers require, coders put shit out.

Sounds like I have my first follower :)
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