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The cloudy layers of modern-day programming

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Re: The cloudy layers of modern-day programming

#81

Post by dinosaurdynasty »

tester756 wrote: post #78
dinosaurdynasty wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Capability trap. Not everyone is capable of effectively working 2 jobs at once, and generally speaking no matter how big that $big_salary is you aren't going to have more money or time. Also there are lots of way for a company to say they are doing interesting/meaningful things or whatever and effectively not be. And no matter how great the work you may be doing, you don't want to be doing it if it doesn't pay enough…

So the only way is to complain whole life?

Most of the time life is "choose the least shitty option" and not "choose the best option".

That's just the world we live in.

Re: The cloudy layers of modern-day programming

#82

Post by agumonkey »

waynesonfire wrote: post #73
agumonkey wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to admit that having it giving short summaries of framework docs and models felt like drugs in my veins.

what were some prompts you asked?

- how to filter tabs in a firefox extension (turns out some APIs are only accessible in background scripts). the fun part is that it gave me an obsolete use case, so I told him "it's wrong, firefox uses promises now", so he fixed itself and used the new api.

- someone about django custom inlines, the answer was mild but it integrated various aspects of the framework in a short answer which helped a lot (django is particularly horrendous, i cant suffer its strange style, so that played too)

Re: The cloudy layers of modern-day programming

#83

Post by aliqot »

Dave_Rosenthal wrote: post #45

Like many other commenters (of a certain age?), I too have this unsatisfied feeling about a particular kind of modern software development. The kind where you never really dig down and design anything, you just plumb a bunch of stuff together with best practices you find on stack overflow. Many commenters are attributing this problem to the modern high-level tools we now have access to. But I don't think this is the…

Challenge yourself to use stdlib only for a while, or the future.

It sounds unrealistic and I'm going to get flamed, but hear me out. It works. Most of my development these days is in reasonably complete languages like go, rust, zig, and various scripting languages, so your mileage may vary if you're writing in something like rune, hare or carbon that is still taking shape.

If you think I'm crazy but have a lingering skepticism, challenge yourself to spend one day, one week, or one month using the stdlib only. If that is unrealistic in your setting a compromise could be to only use libraries that were created by yourself. You wont come out of it as an enlightened samurai monk with a celebrity HN presence, but you will gain an immense sense of scrutiny that didn't exist before as you take a look at the libraries you want to use after that.

For those who think this is just 100% bull, consider how we survived before google, youtube, and stackexchange existed.

Re: The cloudy layers of modern-day programming

#84

Post by hsn915 »

Dave_Rosenthal wrote: post #45

Like many other commenters (of a certain age?), I too have this unsatisfied feeling about a particular kind of modern software development. The kind where you never really dig down and design anything, you just plumb a bunch of stuff together with best practices you find on stack overflow. Many commenters are attributing this problem to the modern high-level tools we now have access to. But I don't think this is the…

A side effect of this is that almost all job position advertisement are disgusting to look at. They are all about this kind of mindless glue code programming, but wrapped in marketing speak to make it look like "you get to use awesome bleeding edge latest technologies" when in reality it is "you have to figure out how to configure 10 different things to work together to sort of kind of produce the intended behavior".

In the last 3 years I think I never saw even once a job description on any popular job board where they advertise that you will do some actually interesting programming. The only ones I've seen have been on Twitter but from companies doing things in areas I have no experience in (e.g. game engine programming).

Re: The cloudy layers of modern-day programming

#85

Post by cgh »

Dave_Rosenthal wrote: post #45

Like many other commenters (of a certain age?), I too have this unsatisfied feeling about a particular kind of modern software development. The kind where you never really dig down and design anything, you just plumb a bunch of stuff together with best practices you find on stack overflow. Many commenters are attributing this problem to the modern high-level tools we now have access to. But I don't think this is the…

Or, just don't work in webapps. Get into embedded programming. Or join a games studio.

I have a friend who is writing code to run on a sort of exoskeleton meant to benefit disabled people and help them walk. He has never in his life "deployed to the cloud" and wouldn't have the foggiest idea of how to do it.

Re: The cloudy layers of modern-day programming

#86

Post by pclmulqdq »

aliqot wrote: post #83
Dave_Rosenthal wrote: post #45

Like many other commenters (of a certain age?), I too have this unsatisfied feeling about a particular kind of modern software development. The kind where you never really dig down and design anything, you just plumb a bunch of stuff together with best practices you find on stack overflow. Many commenters are attributing this problem to the modern high-level tools we now have access to. But I don't think this is the…

Challenge yourself to use stdlib only for a while, or the future. It sounds unrealistic and I'm going to get flamed, but hear me out. It works. Most of my development these days is in reasonably complete languages like go, rust, zig, and various scripting languages, so your mileage may vary if you're writing in something like rune, hare or carbon that is still taking shape. If you think I'm crazy but have a lingering…

I am thinking very hard about the CAP theorem right now while working on a billing system for a cloud API right now and it is an absolute joy. No, it won't deploy in version 1, 2, or 3, but it might in version 4, and if it does, it will be glorious.

You can find cool technical problems anywhere as long as you are willing to take the path less traveled.

Re: The cloudy layers of modern-day programming

#87

Post by kspacewalk2 »

aliqot wrote: post #83
Dave_Rosenthal wrote: post #45

Like many other commenters (of a certain age?), I too have this unsatisfied feeling about a particular kind of modern software development. The kind where you never really dig down and design anything, you just plumb a bunch of stuff together with best practices you find on stack overflow. Many commenters are attributing this problem to the modern high-level tools we now have access to. But I don't think this is the…

Challenge yourself to use stdlib only for a while, or the future. It sounds unrealistic and I'm going to get flamed, but hear me out. It works. Most of my development these days is in reasonably complete languages like go, rust, zig, and various scripting languages, so your mileage may vary if you're writing in something like rune, hare or carbon that is still taking shape. If you think I'm crazy but have a lingering…

I'm not gonna flame you, but I will note that, as someone who gets paid to use my judgement to decide on the optimal trade-off between quality, time spent on the project, and its future maintainability... I feel like all three will suffer quite a bit with this self imposed "handicap".

Re: The cloudy layers of modern-day programming

#88

Post by RobotToaster »

Dave_Rosenthal wrote: post #45

Like many other commenters (of a certain age?), I too have this unsatisfied feeling about a particular kind of modern software development. The kind where you never really dig down and design anything, you just plumb a bunch of stuff together with best practices you find on stack overflow. Many commenters are attributing this problem to the modern high-level tools we now have access to. But I don't think this is the…

>Heck, you could be working on a hardware circuit, but if the only thing you had to do was make sure the right wires, resistors, capacitors, etc. were in place between the chips you're still just doing plumbing work.

A lot of modern hardware design feels like that, take a microcontroller, some peripheral chips, connect them together, and copy the datasheets for whatever support passives they need.

Re: The cloudy layers of modern-day programming

#89

Post by veqq »

Dave_Rosenthal wrote: post #45

Like many other commenters (of a certain age?), I too have this unsatisfied feeling about a particular kind of modern software development. The kind where you never really dig down and design anything, you just plumb a bunch of stuff together with best practices you find on stack overflow. Many commenters are attributing this problem to the modern high-level tools we now have access to. But I don't think this is the…

Go is mostly devoid of this. The general approach is all stdlib and the idle extra dependency. Of course, a lot of fields are inaccessible.

Lisp can enable fantastic development speed allowing you to build your own primitives. Racket's ecosystem's all high quality too.

I believe Julia has a less buggy ecosystem allowing you to pipe together natively written ML things, as opposed to Python's dumpster fire ecosystem

Re: The cloudy layers of modern-day programming

#90

Post by Aeolun »

cgh wrote: post #85
Dave_Rosenthal wrote: post #45

Like many other commenters (of a certain age?), I too have this unsatisfied feeling about a particular kind of modern software development. The kind where you never really dig down and design anything, you just plumb a bunch of stuff together with best practices you find on stack overflow. Many commenters are attributing this problem to the modern high-level tools we now have access to. But I don't think this is the…

Or, just don't work in webapps. Get into embedded programming. Or join a games studio. I have a friend who is writing code to run on a sort of exoskeleton meant to benefit disabled people and help them walk. He has never in his life "deployed to the cloud" and wouldn't have the foggiest idea of how to do it.

It’s only a matter of time before someone realizes how helpful a GPS transmitter would be in an exoskeleton for disabled people.

Now you have a cloud component.

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