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Ask HN: What's your unpopular tech, programming opinion

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Re: Ask HN: What's your unpopular tech, programming opinion

#51

Post by thiht »

zozbot234 wrote: post #49
kens wrote: post #7

My unpopular opinion is that computing is stuck in a local maximum based on technology from the 1970s. In particular, typing into an 80x25 terminal window with unformatted fixed-width characters should be obsolete; we don't need compatibility with punch cards any more. There was a thread a week ago about displaying graphs in your terminal using ASCII graphics. This shouldn't be necessary! Also, code shouldn't be a se…

80 character lines are a near-optimum for readability. And command line interfaces are convenient to use via keyboard over remote, possibly high-latency connections, where a more direct interaction becomes clunky. It's also easy to extend: you don't have to change anything in the UX, just add a new command. Moreover a CLI allows for the expression of complex behaviors that are all but impossible to render in a "user-…

> 80 character lines are a near-optimum for readability.

Counterpoint: 80 chars is too short for writability. You need to make arbitrary splits and refactors all the time and it ends up hurting readability.

120 is a better sweet spot to strive for in my opinion.

Re: Ask HN: What's your unpopular tech, programming opinion

#52

Post by moomoo11 »

kbrannigan wrote: post #11
moomoo11 wrote: post #5

less "people engineering" and more "technical engineering"

What do you mean by people engineering?

People trying to add tons of process and “standards” that involve more promotion driven development and playing politics than.. providing value to customers.

Like no offense to other engineers but if people who call themselves engineers can’t understand new systems within a week of joining a team they should probably find other work.

I’ve worked on dozens of teams and projects and with the exception of a few where everyone was S tier (the best team experience let’s be real) the rest were mediocre people who somehow were able to spend more time coming up awful implementations (that waste everyone’s time) to get a promotion rather than actually doing their job. Over time nobody maintains these things or people naturally stop using these approaches because they suck, and the problem starts again because some new joker joins and shoots their shot.

It’s hard to describe unless you’ve been on the receiving end of it, but it’s pretty common at larger companies.

Re: Ask HN: What's your unpopular tech, programming opinion

#53

Post by zoomzoom »

Cloud IDEs are the future. Nobody will run code on their laptop/workstations in 10 years in a professional context.

There's no difference to a business between first-gen infra as code (terraform/cloudformation) and second-gen (CDK/pulumi/etc ...). They both should be replaced by a developer platform that runs in your own cloud

The best tool to build on is something that combines the two with one simple config, like what we're building at withcoherence.com!

Re: Ask HN: What's your unpopular tech, programming opinion

#54

Post by swlkr »

kens wrote: post #7

My unpopular opinion is that computing is stuck in a local maximum based on technology from the 1970s. In particular, typing into an 80x25 terminal window with unformatted fixed-width characters should be obsolete; we don't need compatibility with punch cards any more. There was a thread a week ago about displaying graphs in your terminal using ASCII graphics. This shouldn't be necessary! Also, code shouldn't be a se…

There have been incremental improvements lately that might lead to code in a db instead of flat files at some point in the near future:

- rise of autoformatters

- language servers decoupling editing from editors

- all in one build tools (cargo, go)

This might be case of happens slowly then all at once.

It's not an insane jump from LSPs to new editor UIs and since the code is formatted on save, people care less about the minutiae of 80 char lines.

Re: Ask HN: What's your unpopular tech, programming opinion

#55

Post by kbrannigan »

kaveh808 wrote: post #34

We hit a local maximum in language design with Common Lisp in the 80's. I mean putting in the hard work to make a language be as powerful as you can imagine. Today the market moves too fast, priorities have changed, and there seems to less of a willingness to "do the right thing".

>> Priorities have changed

My assumption is that, nobody knew there would be that much cash involved in this industry.

It's about making the most money the fastest way possible.

Re: Ask HN: What's your unpopular tech, programming opinion

#56

Post by kbrannigan »

tkiolp4 wrote: post #44

Software design is subjective. After years of professional work, I cannot stand anymore getting entangled in architecture/design discussions. Any competent software engineer (most of us are) can come with a reasonable working solution to common problems 99% tech companies face. So, it doesn’t matter if you use Date or DateTime, REST or gRPC, Postgres or MySQL, Go or Rust… In a commercial context, good software is sof…

My assumption is that people need to pad their resume with the trendy stuff. The tech that will ensure future employability.

Can't risk working with old-timey tech. Gotta keep up with the fashion and the trends, because the industry encourages RDD

Resume Driven Development

Re: Ask HN: What's your unpopular tech, programming opinion

#57

Post by ac2u »

kbrannigan wrote: post #12
ac2u wrote: post #3

While it's valid to say that for most software jobs you won't be having to write tree search algorithms 10 times a day, you'll still need to use the intuition and body of knowledge that solving such problems requires more often than you think, even if it doesn't present itself as a whiteboard trivia problem.

I think it's a gate keeping strategy. Make the bar so high that only a few can get in. They might filter out some exceptional candidate and let in some regurgitator. But I agree of you can grasp those fundamental concepts you're a great programmer. Some of these concept became clearer, years after college

>I think it's a gate keeping strategy.

I agree, but I think the widely accepted thought of "it's gatekeeping and shouldn't be interview-whiteboard trivia for most roles" sometimes gets extended to an attitude of "you'll never need this stuff"

>They might filter out some exceptional candidate and let in some regurgitator.

hah, we think alike, had the same scenario when I detailed this answer:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17059852

Re: Ask HN: What's your unpopular tech, programming opinion

#58

Post by kaveh808 »

kbrannigan wrote: post #55
kaveh808 wrote: post #34

We hit a local maximum in language design with Common Lisp in the 80's. I mean putting in the hard work to make a language be as powerful as you can imagine. Today the market moves too fast, priorities have changed, and there seems to less of a willingness to "do the right thing".

>> Priorities have changed My assumption is that, nobody knew there would be that much cash involved in this industry. It's about making the most money the fastest way possible.

Compare the 10-year effort for the ANSI standardization of Common Lisp with the two-week, ill-considered marketing-directed creation of JavaScript, now one of the world's most popular languages, and the resultant decades of technical debt.

Re: Ask HN: What's your unpopular tech, programming opinion

#59

Post by dinofp »

I'm a professional Haskell programmer and have been writing in the language for almost 20 years. It's amazing and I love it.

Nix is the single worst thing that's happened to Haskell development tooling. The last 9 months at my current job have been Nix misery non-stop.

Nix in general is hot garbage.

Re: Ask HN: What's your unpopular tech, programming opinion

#60

Post by tome »

dinofp wrote: post #59

I'm a professional Haskell programmer and have been writing in the language for almost 20 years. It's amazing and I love it. Nix is the single worst thing that's happened to Haskell development tooling. The last 9 months at my current job have been Nix misery non-stop. Nix in general is hot garbage.

I'd agree. Nix feels to me like the Lisp of build systems. Something that's going to be extremely influential but ultimately too flawed for me to want to use in practice. I'm still waiting for the Haskell of build systems.
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