Boring Technology Checklist • Hacker News Board

Re: Boring Technology Checklist

#41

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jan 31, 2022, 5:05 PM UTC

lacker wrote: post #35

TacticalCoder wrote: post #8

Weirdly enough I do believe Clojure ticks the boxes from that checklist. It's familiar in that it both "supports popular language runtimes" (runs on top of the JVM or transpiles to JavaScript) and it's a Lisp dialect (or close enough) and Lisps have been around since a very long time. It's incredibly stable: so stable some libraries commonly used haven't been updated in years . There's also very little code churn ins…

I like Clojure, but it's really the exact opposite of the sort of "boring technology" that this post advocates. If MongoDB costs you 2 innovation tokens, Clojure costs at least 2, perhaps all 3. The cost of innovation is not so much in the core of Clojure itself, but that once your company gets larger, you will want to integrate with more and more things that have not put effort into Clojure compatibility, just becau…

[deleted]

Re: Boring Technology Checklist

#42

Post by deltarholamda » Mon, Jan 31, 2022, 5:05 PM UTC

Steltek wrote: post #17

This article would be enhanced with concrete examples. The "Boring Technology" argument is hard to attack because it's an opinion, an ideal. It's a good ideal, mind you, but it has the problem of being different for each person, even if they're all on the same team looking at the same use case. Another good extension to the topic would also be defining when Boring Technology becomes Ancient Technology. You need to hi…

I think the flexibility of the ideal is part of what makes it so attractive. "Boring" may mean some pretty cutting-edge technology because your team is so thoroughly steeped in it that they know it back to front.

For me, "boring" means avoiding things like Kubernetes because it's an ecosystem with which I am woefully unfamiliar and I can more or less achieve with other (possibly less efficient) means.

Ted Dziuba made a point a while back that the three tools for systems engineering are money, time, and code, and they should be used in that order. It's a sort of shorthand for "boring" to just buy a bigger server, or spend the time to leverage existing and know Unix tools, and then if all that fails, use some gimcrack new tech to solve your problems.

(Though, I'd say that the biggest impediment to leveraging "boring" technologies is correctly determining what your problem is. Sometimes we focus on the wrong metrics, or the right metrics at the wrong time, and that skews our decision making.)

Re: Boring Technology Checklist

#43

Post by bsza » Mon, Jan 31, 2022, 5:07 PM UTC

radiator wrote: post #21

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about hiring though? If you have a vacancy for a Clojure developer, how many applicants could you expect? When it comes to programming languages, I'd stick to the top 10 languages if your company isn't hip enough to attract a certain kind of developer on its own.

It almost sounds like you don't believe that developers can learn new languages.

If it’s a language I’m not familiar with, I won’t consider applying, so that’s where the story ends in my case. I could be an outlier though…?

Re: Boring Technology Checklist

#44

Post by miiiiiike » Mon, Jan 31, 2022, 5:07 PM UTC

lmeyerov wrote: post #7

Missing two of the biggest: - hireability: large community of developers to hire from today + years from now - low risk of abandonment: long history of development, stable funding, and ideally many users+contributors from diff orgs using in commercial contexts Not easy for startups and new frameworks to achieve 'boring' status!

This is where Angular dies. Great framework. There's almost no amount of money that you can pay someone to learn Angular in 2022.

Re: Boring Technology Checklist

#45

Post by gregors » Mon, Jan 31, 2022, 5:08 PM UTC

darksaints wrote: post #27

TacticalCoder wrote: post #8

Weirdly enough I do believe Clojure ticks the boxes from that checklist. It's familiar in that it both "supports popular language runtimes" (runs on top of the JVM or transpiles to JavaScript) and it's a Lisp dialect (or close enough) and Lisps have been around since a very long time. It's incredibly stable: so stable some libraries commonly used haven't been updated in years . There's also very little code churn ins…

I'd agree that clojure fits the boring tag, and that's a good thing. Unfortunately it's also dying. While many old libraries and tools are stable and functional, nothing new is really being created with it. The same couldn't be said for boring technologies like Java or Python.

Being acquired by a bank isn't exactly a bad thing for the language from a longevity perspective.

https://www.cognitect.com/blog/2020/07/23/Cognitect-Joins-Nu...

Re: Boring Technology Checklist

#46

Post by friedman23 » Mon, Jan 31, 2022, 5:08 PM UTC

A lot of this boring technology talk just seems like an excuse not to learn something new.

"X works fine why are we using Y?" "See Y doesn't cover every X use case perfectly, we should have stuck with X!"

The arguments are predictable at this point. We'd still be using Jquery for developing frontends if this mindset was pervasive.

Re: Boring Technology Checklist

#47

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jan 31, 2022, 5:12 PM UTC

lacker wrote: post #35

TacticalCoder wrote: post #8

Weirdly enough I do believe Clojure ticks the boxes from that checklist. It's familiar in that it both "supports popular language runtimes" (runs on top of the JVM or transpiles to JavaScript) and it's a Lisp dialect (or close enough) and Lisps have been around since a very long time. It's incredibly stable: so stable some libraries commonly used haven't been updated in years . There's also very little code churn ins…

I like Clojure, but it's really the exact opposite of the sort of "boring technology" that this post advocates. If MongoDB costs you 2 innovation tokens, Clojure costs at least 2, perhaps all 3. The cost of innovation is not so much in the core of Clojure itself, but that once your company gets larger, you will want to integrate with more and more things that have not put effort into Clojure compatibility, just becau…

[deleted]

Re: Boring Technology Checklist

#48

Post by mixmastamyk » Mon, Jan 31, 2022, 5:12 PM UTC

ape4 wrote: post #29

I hate to say it, but in many ways Windows checks many boxes - its backwards compatible for decades. Programs from 30 years ago still work fine.

The core is fine, it’s being at the whim of MS’s hostile marketing and sales departments that are decidedly not boring.

Re: Boring Technology Checklist

#49

Post by gregors » Mon, Jan 31, 2022, 5:13 PM UTC

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #10

TacticalCoder wrote: post #8

Weirdly enough I do believe Clojure ticks the boxes from that checklist. It's familiar in that it both "supports popular language runtimes" (runs on top of the JVM or transpiles to JavaScript) and it's a Lisp dialect (or close enough) and Lisps have been around since a very long time. It's incredibly stable: so stable some libraries commonly used haven't been updated in years . There's also very little code churn ins…

How about hiring though? If you have a vacancy for a Clojure developer, how many applicants could you expect? When it comes to programming languages, I'd stick to the top 10 languages if your company isn't hip enough to attract a certain kind of developer on its own.

From what I heard, Nubank hired a good deal of Elixir developers when they aqui-hired Plataformatec. I suspect having functional programming experience matters more than having concrete Clojure knowledge. It definitely didn't seem to be a problem in this case anyway.

https://medium.com/building-nubank/tech-perspectives-behind-...

Re: Boring Technology Checklist

#50

Post by Scarbutt » Mon, Jan 31, 2022, 5:13 PM UTC

lacker wrote: post #35

TacticalCoder wrote: post #8

Weirdly enough I do believe Clojure ticks the boxes from that checklist. It's familiar in that it both "supports popular language runtimes" (runs on top of the JVM or transpiles to JavaScript) and it's a Lisp dialect (or close enough) and Lisps have been around since a very long time. It's incredibly stable: so stable some libraries commonly used haven't been updated in years . There's also very little code churn ins…

I like Clojure, but it's really the exact opposite of the sort of "boring technology" that this post advocates. If MongoDB costs you 2 innovation tokens, Clojure costs at least 2, perhaps all 3. The cost of innovation is not so much in the core of Clojure itself, but that once your company gets larger, you will want to integrate with more and more things that have not put effort into Clojure compatibility, just becau…

you will want to integrate with more and more things that have not put effort into Clojure compatibility

The answer to that is to just use java interop.