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Shipping Culture Is Hurting Us

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Re: Shipping Culture Is Hurting Us

#131

Post by dasil003 »

nekopa wrote: post #128
michalstanko wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flash always had its drawbacks, such as: 1. it was not a web standard, 2. it was not indexable by search bots + was not accessible, 3. needed a plug-in to run. Therefore, I don't think it was ever being seen as unseatable. It was actually quite hated in the community of web standards & accessibility-aware web developers very early on.

Don't get me wrong, I hated Flash as much as anyone else. And yes it required a plugin, but it was ubiquitous, and did run everywhere. Plus it allowed people to make rich games and apps. I even remember someone developed a DB connector that used Flash's protocols (it wasn't using Flash) to allow universal web based access to DBs (my google-fu is failing me, can't find the project now). So regarding your points: 1: Fl…

> Don't get me wrong, I hated Flash as much as anyone else. And yes it required a plugin, but it was ubiquitous, and did run everywhere.

Flash was more ubiquitous than other GUI toolkits, so I'd say it was as close to the dream as any proprietary platform developer ever achieved. However it never achieved anything approaching the web's current reach in sheer breadth of platforms.

Re: Shipping Culture Is Hurting Us

#133

Post by dustingetz »

Seth Godin wrote that 5 years ago, i think (hope) the economics are shifting, in the last 5 years a lot of the omgcats apps (market opportunities that can be captured with lousy software) have already been written, i think it may not be so easy for companies started today. However with the pace of innovation in the last 5 years (basically the coming of age of functional programming) it's a lot easier for a single person to write high quality software.

Anyway common wisdom is always going to lag behind today's actual best practices

Re: Shipping Culture Is Hurting Us

#134

Post by romaniv »

fijal wrote: post #67
didgeoridoo wrote: post #2

The author talks about languages and technologies (JS, Mongo), but he's really getting at something deeper. The real danger of the "ship it" culture is that things that can't be "shipped" right away — things that require solving really hard problems — tend to fall off our collective radar because there is just SO MUCH cool and (relatively) easy stuff to do right now. PG has a great term for this: "schlep blindness":…

The problem runs deeper than that even. Even if you like doing stuff that requires more effort, it's shockingly difficult to find places/people who want to invest/hire you to work on such technology. You have essentially a choice between academia (which is, well, sometimes very academic) and large corpos which have their own share of problems and not everyone fits.

And even in big corps, 95% of all IT is usually plumbing and hectically applying band-aids for past issues that should not have been there in the first place.

To me, the fact that IT is currently seen as rapidly progressing is laughable. It is rapidly changing, true, but for the most part we're solving old problems with new tools that work only marginally better than the old tools (because, like the article says, the underlying mentality is the same). Very often they change fast enough to keep everyone always "learning" at the expense of the users, so the marginal benefits are cancelled out.

(Seriously, I know people who made the same excuse for bad quality for the last decade. "Oh, I'm just learning [over-hyped tool]. Everyone makes mistakes at first." Learning tools is a fake kind of learning. Real advances happen when your conceptual basis is improved, so you get better at doing something with whatever tool. That's real learning. )

---

Also, sometimes we're using new tools that work significantly worse than some old tools.... because at some point conceptual development branched and "our" branch is at the same level of development as another branch was in, say, 60s or 70s. Sometimes I read about old tech and it just blows my mind. "What? They've been doing this three decades ago? How come this is marketed as awesome new thing right now?"

Re: Shipping Culture Is Hurting Us

#135

Post by [deleted] »

DiThi wrote: post #8

> Instead we get some bizarro-world where where the type of NaN (“Not a Number”) is number, where NaN !== NaN*, and a chart like this exists for something as simple as comparing two values. That's the definition of NaN in virtually any programming language with floating point numbers. And the comparison table makes sense with the rule "when types are incompatible, both are casted to strings". Just use === instead of…

[deleted]

Re: Shipping Culture Is Hurting Us

#136

Post by imjustsaying »

McUsr wrote: post #102
pavlov wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you name some of those Node.js apps that have been causing problems for you?

PopcornTime is performing badly on my machine, I actually have to shut down the browser to use it, I usally have 50+ tabs open in it, -that I use.

Last time I ran Popcorn time, it didn't run in the browser. Has that changed?

Re: Shipping Culture Is Hurting Us

#137

Post by CmonDev »

emodendroket wrote: post #129
CmonDev wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"don't break the web" I know it's not your fault but this statement doesn't make any sense. Web is made of hyper-linked content not jQuery animations and AJAX.

No one cares what the Web was originally intended to be, frankly.

Then why care about language designed for animating monkeys?

Re: Shipping Culture Is Hurting Us

#138

Post by romaniv »

saidajigumi wrote: post #24

This whole article makes me want to scream, if only because the author seems to have never heard of the concept of Path Dependence[1]. I could utter a similar rant, on how terrible it is that we're stuck with awful legacy dumb AC lightbulb sockets everywhere, and wouldn't it be nice if the entropy fairy just waved a magic wand and we all had 'net-connected DC smart sockets for our wonderful Future Bulbs. But that kin…

we don't have a magic wand and

Many of the problems he describes do not need a magic wand. In fact, many cases of horrible tech are were created by making an arbitrary choice between several possible options which contained far superior solutions. That's what why the situation is infuriating. Fixation on bad technology is often presented as equivalent to consumer-grade standards (wall plug, lightbulb socket) when it is absolutely, totally different in nature.

Re: Shipping Culture Is Hurting Us

#139

Post by romaniv »

saidajigumi wrote: post #24

This whole article makes me want to scream, if only because the author seems to have never heard of the concept of Path Dependence[1]. I could utter a similar rant, on how terrible it is that we're stuck with awful legacy dumb AC lightbulb sockets everywhere, and wouldn't it be nice if the entropy fairy just waved a magic wand and we all had 'net-connected DC smart sockets for our wonderful Future Bulbs. But that kin…

we don't have a magic wand and

Many of the problems he describes do not need a magic wand. In fact, many cases of horrible tech are were created by making an arbitrary choice between several possible options which contained far superior solutions. That's what why the situation is infuriating. Fixation on bad technology is often presented as equivalent to consumer-grade standards (wall plug, lightbulb socket) when it is absolutely, totally different in nature.

Re: Shipping Culture Is Hurting Us

#140

Post by rudyjahchan »

McUsr wrote: post #50

I haven't tried Mongo.db, but Node.js takes up a lot of resources in a browser, Node.js apps feels a bit like the widest book strategy in the bookstore, you have to shove other stuff out of your browser, in order to use stuff that uses Node.js, and I feel that as a rather arrogant approach to deliver software, especially, when the functionality of Node.js apps doesn't really dictate the necessity. AS for Javscript, t…

You should switch to io.js. It's more performant. :trollface:
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