Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Web Development: A Crazy World

rubiken.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 206 posts

Re: Web Development: A Crazy World

#151

Post by tubbo »

eranation wrote: post #39
rpeden wrote: post #30

I've found that a large subset of programmers share the same trait as a large subset of photographers: they become so obsessed with tools that they lose sight of the fact that the end product is what matters at the end of the day. For example: there are many people who spend thousands on cameras and gear, and still take terrible photos. There are many developers who spend a lot of time keeping up with what they think…

Author of the original rant here, funny it became viral and translated to Chinese (and back to English) :) The rant was made as a comment here: http://www.zemanta.com/blog/i-bet-you-over-engineered-your-s... Picked up by a Tilo Mitra: http://tilomitra.com/the-crazy-world-of-code/ And as discussed here in HN before: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4226990 The point of it was actually: it's impossible to always kee…

My advice to you is to pick the technology that's right for the job. If you don't know it, learn it. Otherwise, don't learn it. For example, if I never make an app in my LIFE that has to do with data processing, why in the world would I want to learn Clojure? What use will it have to me? There are lots of things you can do with any language you described, but I think you'll know a good fit when you see it.

It took me about an hour of writing Ruby for the first time to know that this is the language I would prefer writing all of my web applications (client and server side) in.

Re: Web Development: A Crazy World

#152

Post by sbilstein »

barredo wrote: post #45
rpeden wrote: post #30

I've found that a large subset of programmers share the same trait as a large subset of photographers: they become so obsessed with tools that they lose sight of the fact that the end product is what matters at the end of the day. For example: there are many people who spend thousands on cameras and gear, and still take terrible photos. There are many developers who spend a lot of time keeping up with what they think…

"Let's argue about whether Haskell or Clojure is better while somebody else ships products using PHP and duct tape." @agentdero https://twitter.com/agentdero/status/174965036928868352

If one bothers to learn about tools and why they are useful, they can think a little bit deeper and understand why some intellectual argument do result in software that ships. We write Scala at my company because we've found that with the right developers who seek to understand type systems and fp we can ship fast as fuck. I'm dozens of times faster working in Scala than I ever would be in php. We want to beat the average, not be the average.

http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

Re: Web Development: A Crazy World

#153

Post by sbilstein »

papsosouid wrote: post #145
barredo wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Let's argue about whether Haskell or Clojure is better while somebody else ships products using PHP and duct tape." @agentdero https://twitter.com/agentdero/status/174965036928868352

I really dislike the anti-intellectualism in fallacious quips like that. People discussing haskell and clojure are not magically prevented from writing code as a result of their intellectual curiosity and desire to explore better tools and methods. The implication that people who are smart and use quality tools never accomplish anything or do any work is quite insidious, as newcomers start taking pride in ignorance b…

agreed. Just because someone can use a pocket knife and some twine to lash together a chair in 20 minutes doesn't mean someone is going to buy that chair.

Craftsmen care about their tools, and great craftsmen ship. Shitty ones can ship too, but it won't be good.

Re: Web Development: A Crazy World

#154

Post by lifeisstillgood »

31reasons wrote: post #120
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am amazed a rant can go English -> Mandarin -> English via half the world's tech forums, and still be recognised by its original author. But what really blows my socks off is how a tech forum in Beijing follows rants from Slovenian blog to a Californian forum and back again. And it actually matters to the Chinese because they liked it as much as we did. Welcome to the new global culture, sharing the same memepool.

This is scary, we are loosing diversity at an incredible rate.

Some forms of diversity we want to lose - the current Syrian culture stands as a good example, China's own culture of terrible human rights abuses is another. On a more usual definition of culture diversity of attitude towards race or sexuality covers diverse opinions such as the KKK and that guy who protests at gay funerals.

Not all diversity is positive - and given that the norms on the forums this passed through are themselves widely different is a indication of how culture will disconnect slightly from geography.

A genepool is strong if it has variety and if it can spread the beneficial genes widely. This can be dichotomous, but trust me 4chan proves generating a wide variety of memes quickly is something we can do.

Re: Web Development: A Crazy World

#155

Post by jmilkbal »

aditya wrote: post #143
api wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The absolute worst is SOA (the "enterprisey" buzzword for lots of small services) architectures in which every service is written in a different language ! "Oh, our payment processor is in Node, but our site's in Ruby. Our file caching layer is in Python with bits of C for high performance and our crypto stuff is in C++ with Boost and libcryptopp but it talks to a Java app that uses Cassandra..." (Runs outside, sets…

What's wrong with that if every service is using the right tool for the job and provides a sane API? Maybe maintenance?

In the 1970s, the US DoD had what one could parallel to SOA. They had hundreds of languages; they'd start a new project and with it came a new programming language, stack and toolset. They created the High Order Language Working Group which worked on a document of requirements for one language to rule them all, the Steelman. A competition was had to which 4 colorful languages were entered. The winner, Green, became Ada which coincidentally has just wrapped it it's latest language revision process at ISO. Much of the Steelman focused on maintenance, reliability, readability and other traits that make for good software that will last. It is a good thing take that step back and make sure we are programming up to her level.

Re: Web Development: A Crazy World

#156

Post by yxhuvud »

api wrote: post #138
eranation wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author of the original rant here, funny it became viral and translated to Chinese (and back to English) :) The rant was made as a comment here: http://www.zemanta.com/blog/i-bet-you-over-engineered-your-s... Picked up by a Tilo Mitra: http://tilomitra.com/the-crazy-world-of-code/ And as discussed here in HN before: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4226990 The point of it was actually: it's impossible to always kee…

The absolute worst is SOA (the "enterprisey" buzzword for lots of small services) architectures in which every service is written in a different language ! "Oh, our payment processor is in Node, but our site's in Ruby. Our file caching layer is in Python with bits of C for high performance and our crypto stuff is in C++ with Boost and libcryptopp but it talks to a Java app that uses Cassandra..." (Runs outside, sets…

I'd take that situation any day over a monolithic monstrosity written in only Java. Small losely coupled services that do one thing is the only way to build a large system if you want to keep your sanity.

Re: Web Development: A Crazy World

#158

Post by bjourne »

nlh wrote: post #93
sramsay wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Does Backbone help you solve your problems?" This really bears repeating over and over again, and I think it's a corollary of "start by writing the dumbest thing that can possibly work." If you start with dumb, simple things, the problems become more obvious. Dumb simple things tend to shake out the parts that are tedious to build, or non-conformant, or confusing to read, or hard to maintain. It may be that Backbone…

I agree 1000% - very good point. The best tools (for you) are the ones that solve the problems that bug you the most and feel the most "right". It's a personal thing. For example: In my case, I used to write a lot of plain HTML. I found it got annoying to type brackets and keep track of all the closing tags. So I tried ZenCoding, and it helped, but only on creation, not on editing. I finally settled on haml, because…

Haml is soo 2012. :) Try Jade (http://jade-lang.com/), it has a much cleaner syntax and integrated markdown support. You can even use it as a preprocessor for other templating languages.

Re: Web Development: A Crazy World

#159

Post by kyllo »

FilterJoe wrote: post #106
metaphorm wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Django is pretty mainstream. Its not as popular as Rails but its hardly a maverick. I think the reason why Python never went all in on a single web framework is just because the Python community itself is much larger and more diverse than the Ruby community. Consequently there were alot more opinions and alot more people willing to develop those opinions into separate projects. Maybe you're right that there are advan…

With Django in specific you can swap out a component. For example, if (like many people) you don't like the HTML template syntax, just swap it out for Jinja2 or Mako. In Django it is also usually easy to customize something minor by use of overrides (OOP).

This is also true of Rails. That's what the Gemfile is--a list of optional packages that you can swap out. (Almost) all of your configuration happens in that one file where you tell Rails what packages (gems) you want to use with your application.

Re: Web Development: A Crazy World

#160

Post by brehaut »

api wrote: post #136
rpeden wrote: post #30

I've found that a large subset of programmers share the same trait as a large subset of photographers: they become so obsessed with tools that they lose sight of the fact that the end product is what matters at the end of the day. For example: there are many people who spend thousands on cameras and gear, and still take terrible photos. There are many developers who spend a lot of time keeping up with what they think…

Absolutely. A truly cool app written in VB.NET is more interesting than FizzBuzz in Haskell.

Depends on the audience, and the implementation of fizzbuzz.

This haskell fizzbuzz is great: http://dave.fayr.am/posts/2012-10-4-finding-fizzbuzz.html

Post reply on HN