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We have used too many levels of abstractions

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Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#351

Post by MyFirstSass »

klysm wrote: post #275
MyFirstSass wrote: post #236

As a 15+ years webdev my recent projects in the front-end are almost pure "vanilla JS" (Just JS) + Html, and CSS with only Petite Vue / Alpine on top. I find the modern Vue, React etc. stacks absolutely insufferably complex and prone to breaking in 1000 places each time you upgrade some package, or change som random thing in the already stupidly complex "Tooling/Build" chains people are setting up by default. And it'…

Although I agree that many sites could get away without the bloat of client side JavaScript frameworks, sometimes the complexity is truly justified and it enables you to deliver a better product. Complex dashboards with data intensive interactions and explorations are so much easier with React or something similar

I do agree that advanced dashboards may still require some dependencies like texteditors, routing etc and i would have agreed in say Vue 2. Vue 3 is too complex just as React in my opinion.

For example if you just create a naming scheme or prefix vars in a scope i don't get why datasharing in an app between stuff right next to each other have become so cumbersome these days. You have to import and export absolutely everything in some microservice-like declarative way that is overkill in 99% of cases with code that looks way too complex and disallows binding unless you create complex subscription patterns.

Just let me emit, just let me share through the Window object between teams, everyone will save years of reading manuals and reinvent absolutely everything. If you name your data properly it will make sense. Especially when proxy's and listeners are now available in JS as it is.

Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#352

Post by konschubert »

onetimeuse92304 wrote: post #12

I think there is one interesting angle to this problem. I am someone who grew up with the technology, as the levels of abstractions were being added. I am now benefiting from all those accumulated decades of knowledge. As the IT / development world was changing, I had enormous privilege and comfort to learn the things at the pace they were happening. Being able to assimilate changes over long decades. Be a witness to…

Which is fine, it's specialisation.

Of course, it's bad if the western world fully outsources certain components of the stack.

But not everybody needs to understand the full stack. Maybe you don't know how the silicon crystals are made and that is okay.

Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#353

Post by raddan »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #322
mathgeek wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was at Fog Creek, we still had that as an interview question (with googling allowed). It was a good judge of how most folks approached something they used but didn’t necessarily understand. If the applicant already knew how to do it, that was a different signal as well.

Think ChatGPT would be allowed nowadays? It’d be my source for something so esoteric. I haven’t bothered to learn mail protocols because any message you send will be marked as spam unless it’s from a major provider.

> any message you send will be marked as spam

This is not true. I run a mail server for myself and some friends. It started as an old desktop running under the desk at a university, transitioned to the back corner of a server room when I was working as a network engineer, and now it runs on a Raspberry Pi in a closet of my house. I had to pay extra to get a static IP at home, but everything has been off the shelf and DIY. My current Raspberry Pi has been running for nearly ten years, with only one interruption (the SD card failed). The idea that you can’t run your own mail server is a myth, and I think more people should do it. It is not hard, and you will learn a ton.

(I used to run mail for a large corporation, so yeah, I know a lot. But I learned how to do it by running a mail server out of my dorm room.)

Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#354

Post by mardifoufs »

demondemidi wrote: post #228

Old man yelling at cloud vibes. Yes some people are experts and some are just adequate. Nothing new here. Not everyone can be a messiah like the author, who spends half of this short essay telling us how great he is. This article has almost nothing to do with abstraction. The author loses interest in his own thesis after the first two paragraphs.

Yeah I was at least expecting some concrete example or something specific... but nothing. I don't even mind "old man yells at cloud" articles if they show an example or provide actual substance since you at least come out of it learning something... but in this case the entire article just sounds like a bad HN comment.

Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#355

Post by sgarland »

steveBK123 wrote: post #312
Viliam1234 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We don’t need our software developers to know how our Cloud Networking and Virtual Networking works, we don’t need them to spin up resources and make various internal DNS and Firewall rules, we simply need them to focus on what they’re good at and then hand off the container to the operations department where people actually specialise in that knowledge. I am afraid that many businesses prefer the vision where the…

Agree that devs not needing to know this is how things should be, and that CTO/tech management however is not acting this way. It is basically idiotic to me, as a highly paid senior application dev.. that they basically want me to spend any cycles on stuff that would ordinarily be done by someone making 1/5th my TC. If I can do it more than 5x as fast/efficiently, sure, but I don't. IaC is something I worry about at…

> stuff that would ordinarily be done by someone making 1/5th my TC

Did you mean for this to be condescending towards ops? Because that’s how it sounds.

Ops is not easy, at all. Even if you’re doing zero IaC, I defy the average dev to try to provision a Linux box from scratch and install, configure, tune, and maintain the stack you need to run your code. Throw IaC atop that, and now you need to understand declarative programming and OOP concepts to be able to do it efficiently. Then, there’s K8s…

Not to mention the architecture side of things. Devs love to grab whatever shiny thing they saw on a Medium blog, even when it’s a poor fit to their problem (or their problem is unoptimized code). You probably do not need a columnar DB, you just need to normalize your tables and learn relational algebra.

Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#357

Post by nonrandomstring »

onetimeuse92304 wrote: post #12

I think there is one interesting angle to this problem. I am someone who grew up with the technology, as the levels of abstractions were being added. I am now benefiting from all those accumulated decades of knowledge. As the IT / development world was changing, I had enormous privilege and comfort to learn the things at the pace they were happening. Being able to assimilate changes over long decades. Be a witness to…

> We, people who really understand the technology that the world runs on, are a slowly dying breed. We are still here as tech leads, managers, directors, business owners. But there will be a point in time when we will go on retirement and there will be only precious few people who had perseverance to really understand all those things by diving into obscure, historical manuals

Some people like to say this is a perennial problem that every generation bemoans. I get why that might seem intuitive, and for the longest time I've hoped they're right and I'm merely getting old.

Sadly they are wrong. Long term historical patterns of empire collapse follow this over-reach and under-education cycle that leads to a catastrophic rebuild capability gap that is triggered at some point.

Thomas Thwaite's "The toaster project" [0] is a wonderful commentary on this. I cited it in a talk I did about education in world that will no longer pay for teaching kids how to use chips and breadboards in skinflint universities that prefer to teach them Microsoft Excel or use some crappy simulators of everything [1].

When it comes to cybersecurity we can only obtain defence in depth if we have knowledge in depth, and there are ever fewer of us around who understand how computers actually work. It's more than a little unnerving to meet CISOs and folks with high-flying titles who have no idea why using a phone app to control a Fortune 500 company infra might not be a good idea.

[0] http://www.thetoasterproject.org/

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxoSskalOrM

Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#358

Post by phkahler »

mikewarot wrote: post #342

I think there needs to be a clearly defined difference here between professionals and experts. You can be a professional in the field, but until you understand all the layers of abstraction, you aren't an expert. You can't diagnose those deep problems and fix them. Professionals are paid to work in an area, and are thought to know enough not to be horribly dangerous. Experts, on the other hand, are supposed to unders…

>> You can be a professional in the field, but until you understand all the layers of abstraction, you aren't an expert.

Let's not inflate titles here. I've noticed what the author is writing about and will offer another example. Remember when the bad-guy hackers used to make hacking tools and exploits available for free? Before that was big business? Then a bunch of kids would leverage their hard work to cause trouble. Do you recall what those guys were called? Script kiddies. A lot of so-called professionals these day are little more than script kiddies. That's not to say they aren't effective or useful (the old hackers caused plenty of trouble) but they really don't know the internals of the tools they use. They can keep things going until something weird happens.

I'm not sure what I think of this state of affairs. Not everyone can go deep, but I do feel the bar has been lowered too far in many cases. It's like millions of small components... NPM: because nobody can be bothered to figure out some problem and write 50 lines of code themself.

Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#359

Post by sgarland »

Viliam1234 wrote: post #202
devjab wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re managers and tech leads then why aren’t you making sure the people you’re supposed to lead obtain the understanding? We work with both high and low level tools where I work, and in my experience there isn’t necessarily a lack of understanding among younger developers. The CS courses still teach you a lot of the basics, and to actually use what you call “hype” tools efficiently you typically need a rather go…

> We don’t need our software developers to know how our Cloud Networking and Virtual Networking works, we don’t need them to spin up resources and make various internal DNS and Firewall rules, we simply need them to focus on what they’re good at and then hand off the container to the operations department where people actually specialise in that knowledge. I am afraid that many businesses prefer the vision where the…

Agreed. DevOps was a mistake, Full Stack was a mistake. Go back to teams of specialists. Ops doesn’t necessarily need to gate deployments - CD is a good thing when properly done - but believing that the latest AWS offering means your dev team can handle everything from the database to frontend is a fallacy.

Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#360

Post by convolvatron »

lolinder wrote: post #315
onetimeuse92304 wrote: post #12

I think there is one interesting angle to this problem. I am someone who grew up with the technology, as the levels of abstractions were being added. I am now benefiting from all those accumulated decades of knowledge. As the IT / development world was changing, I had enormous privilege and comfort to learn the things at the pace they were happening. Being able to assimilate changes over long decades. Be a witness to…

An important thing to remember is that not only did you get to watch the layers be added, you also have decades of experience . In today's field, where we double in number every N years, that's enough time to accumulate enough knowledge to feel like a demigod—to have more than 20 years of experience is extremely rare in the industry right now. That won't always be the case: eventually we'll stop growing exponentially…

its more than just time. the sad part about this evoluation is that younger people are enculturated to believe that the foundations that they are standing on represent some sort of inviolate physics and not just some technical decision someone made 20 years ago.

i think whats required to move forward isn't just some dusty studying of these physics, but a reawakening to an understanding that these are just systems with tradeoffs, and we can choose to make other systems just as easily.

thats the only way the sandpile collapses and we get .. for example .. secure operating systems and network protocols. or systems that were designed to exploit the massive amount of concurrency available in modern machines.

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