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Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)

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Re: Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)

#41

12 years ago, even without AWS, you could get a Linode, host an app on its naked IP, and not made to feel too much like you weren't "serious" about hosting your app. These days you almost always need to know a fair bit of Docker and Docker Compose, a lot of people want to Kubernetes, ELBs got replaced by ALBs + NLBs which you gotta manage in VPCs which you gotta manage through Security Groups and your traffic gets ro…

[deleted]

Re: Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)

#42
post #9

> think of how many Americans buy giant cars who don't need giant cars. I hesitate to comment since I’m nitpicking a parenthetical, but this weird little bit of classism totally broke my immersion in an article I was otherwise really enjoying. Middle class people overwhelmingly can’t afford housing, but let’s shame them for trying to find at least one kind of affordable luxury in life? We’re the industry making giant…

The big car owner has ab unquestionable license to bully others, got it.

Re: Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)

#44
post #33
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a freshman CS student in 2010-2011 and we learned multi-threaded programming in our first year.

Sure but you would have learned it in 1995 too.

From my freshman years around 2005, I vaguely remember that multi-thread GUI apps were:

- a way to avoid blocking the UI,

- tool to gain some perf. on new fancy multi-core processors,

- making the code much harder to read and debug, which often makes them a victim in a cost-benefit analysis.

Re: Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)

#45

12 years ago, even without AWS, you could get a Linode, host an app on its naked IP, and not made to feel too much like you weren't "serious" about hosting your app. These days you almost always need to know a fair bit of Docker and Docker Compose, a lot of people want to Kubernetes, ELBs got replaced by ALBs + NLBs which you gotta manage in VPCs which you gotta manage through Security Groups and your traffic gets ro…

But you literally don't have to do any such thing though. A simple make file and maybe a load balancer can easily let you launch large web applications used by millions of users. I do not understand where people are getting stuck here that they need all of this complexity. How many users do these apps have?

Way less than people think they’re going to.

When I started my current job, the project was veering into microservices hell by a team that did not understand how to build a web application. A rough back of envelope calculation of potential customer base and what the product was aimed at (B2B in renewables) told me that even with world domination, the backend of the application would at most have 50k active users ever. So we didn’t really need 30 different microservices all which could scale independently, maybe just 2 or 3 larger services.

Re: Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)

#46

12 years ago, even without AWS, you could get a Linode, host an app on its naked IP, and not made to feel too much like you weren't "serious" about hosting your app. These days you almost always need to know a fair bit of Docker and Docker Compose, a lot of people want to Kubernetes, ELBs got replaced by ALBs + NLBs which you gotta manage in VPCs which you gotta manage through Security Groups and your traffic gets ro…

But you literally don't have to do any such thing though. A simple make file and maybe a load balancer can easily let you launch large web applications used by millions of users. I do not understand where people are getting stuck here that they need all of this complexity. How many users do these apps have?

> How many users do these apps have?

There aren't that many projects that have "millions" of users.

Re: Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)

#47

12 years ago, even without AWS, you could get a Linode, host an app on its naked IP, and not made to feel too much like you weren't "serious" about hosting your app. These days you almost always need to know a fair bit of Docker and Docker Compose, a lot of people want to Kubernetes, ELBs got replaced by ALBs + NLBs which you gotta manage in VPCs which you gotta manage through Security Groups and your traffic gets ro…

But you literally don't have to do any such thing though. A simple make file and maybe a load balancer can easily let you launch large web applications used by millions of users. I do not understand where people are getting stuck here that they need all of this complexity. How many users do these apps have?

Startup mentality - you preparing to serve 100M users even if you have 1.5 right now and it will be rare luck to have even 1M because if you will not hit high numbers it doomed: high investment will not bring equally high returns and everything will be scrapped.

Re: Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)

#48

12 years ago, even without AWS, you could get a Linode, host an app on its naked IP, and not made to feel too much like you weren't "serious" about hosting your app. These days you almost always need to know a fair bit of Docker and Docker Compose, a lot of people want to Kubernetes, ELBs got replaced by ALBs + NLBs which you gotta manage in VPCs which you gotta manage through Security Groups and your traffic gets ro…

>We do have a choice though.

I took the choice: to run from the web with my hair on fire, screaming.

Towards embedded, where none of this matters, and where the crux of the whole thing is really, really important: its the atoms, then the electrons...

We don't need the web if the user holds our interface in their hands. Surprisingly enough, the web holds an iron grip on that face/phone interface, but .. one easy solution to all the cruft, is simply return to the roots.

Yes, this requires hardware production capabilities. Its not for everyone, then.

But I tell you, 40 years into this industry, it was so refreshing to abandon all of the fancy front-end stuff and just get straight down to the embedded realm. Nothing nicer than having the machine - and the user - all to oneself.

Of course, this edge case gets discussed further in the article, but that is just one of a few things this old-timer could say about what went wrong with programming culture... (*cough* *cough*..should never have removed the compiler..*cough* *cough*.. this opened the door for all the weirdos to take over what should've stayed in the OS .. *cough*)

Re: Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)

#49
post #30

> The story that solidified is: Use Boring Technology. Use [...] Ruby [...] > I think this narrative, while conventional, is bollocks. [...] Ruby's weird semantics are credited for how one person as able to use it to make a world-changing framework; to call Ruby a "boring" choice now is a testament to how successful the right weird tech can be! Sorry, but this whole section is bollocks. I've never heard anyone call R…

Its not entirely bollocks, you may have just missed the point: technology is cyclical, according to its application. Once, Ruby on Rails was the badass, non-boring way to write apps, now - because it was once so badass - it is 'boring' in the sense that anyone can do it, and you don't really have to think about much - its quite possible to operate on cruise control, and is thus 'boring' from the coding cowboy/techno-aristocrat sense of things.

>Basically no-one seems to use Ruby for new Serious™ Programming™ Projects™ anymore.

Yes, and in so witnessing this, you are demonstrating how non-bollocks the original bollocks was and now is. Such is the cyclical nature of things in our highly stratified industry .. its one layer of bollocks on top of a shit cake, after another ..

Re: Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)

#50
post #24

"12 years ago everyone was wondering how we'd program on multicore CPUs" is either laughable or enlightening to read as an OS developer.

I was a freshman CS student in 2010-2011 and we learned multi-threaded programming in our first year.

Threads are but one way to handle the concurrency/parallelism problem on a given set of processors, old or new.

So what are some other ways of handling multi-core code that you were taught?

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