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My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

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Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#141

Post by revelio »

kragen wrote: post #53

a thing most of these have in common is that they're proprietary, so the users are dependent on the companies that own them for enhancements, bug fixes, and ports to new platforms. this is a recipe for wasting your time visual basic, asp, coldfusion, foxpro, activex, flash, and silverlight, windows ce, asp.net, webforms? proprietary, proprietary, proprietary, proprietary, proprietary, proprietary, proprietary, and pr…

Not very convincing. The world is full of abandoned open source projects and companies that maintain proprietary platforms near indefinitely. Angular 1 is dead, Python 2 is dead, Perl is dead, GTK 1-3 are dead, old KDE is dead, X11 is dying, but you can still buy supported versions of Delphi, COBOL and even VB6 is still somewhat maintained by MS [1]. ActiveX was killed by browsers (open source), the underlying proprietary APIs are very much not dead.

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/visualst...

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#143

Post by mickeyp »

revelio wrote: post #129
bboygravity wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what blows my mind about web stuff. You needed to completely change framework and even languages 3 times in not even 30 years?! Just to keep things maintainable? I don't feel that it's the same for other area's of programming: desktop apps, embedded stuff. Maybe I'm wrong...

Sure it is. Win16 -> Win32 (only partly backwards compatible) -> .NET WinForms -> WPF -> WinUI 2 -> WinUI 3 (with of course Java and Electron being in the mix too) ... or ... Motif -> GTK 1 -> 2 -> 3 -> 4 (all backwards incompatible) ... or ... macOS Classic -> Carbon -> Cocoa/ObjC -> Cocoa/Swift The browser is actually one of the more stable environments out there with a lot of the churn being on the server side and…

A Delphi app written in Delphi 4 in the mid/late 90s would still run just fine on the latest version of Windows today. Win32 works just fine even today.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#144

Post by revelio »

chasil wrote: post #9

Brian Kenighan wistfully removed the lex/yacc parser in the OneTrueAwk many years ago, and replaced it with a custom parser (I believe for performance reasons). The OneTrueAwk remains the standard awk in BSD, renewed, but not replaced. I don't think it's going anywhere. The POSIX standards, flawed as they may be, have incredible staying power. These standards run our phones and embedded, supercomputers, current Apple…

It can be argued the other way round. POSIX is tech debt and exists in modern machines so widely mostly because there happen to be free implementations of it. My experience from interviewing has been that a remarkably large number of developers actually never interact with POSIX directly these days: they never work with files and never open a socket or fork process trees. They certainly never use UNIX-adjacent stuff like X. Instead they interact with APIs layered on top like NodeJS, Java, C#, Android, Swift, HTML. None of which bears much resemblance to POSIX. Like, if you read about how to work with the network in iOS or Android you won't be directed to POSIX APIs.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#145

Post by hereonout2 »

nolroz wrote: post #65
MartinMcGirk wrote: post #18

I feel like this is heavily connected with the idea of legacy. I grew up in Scotland, and lots of the buildings, culture, etc, have been around for hundreds of years. It would be nice to feel like something I was building would last as long and outlive me. It doesn’t though. Sometimes I think that this is just the nature of software development. Most of the stuff I build is built to solve an immediate business proble…

When I was young I spent a year framing houses. I reflect a lot on how much longer those have lasted then so much of what I built software wise along the way.

Very true, I'd expect a house to outlast almost all of our software. There's really not much permanence in this industry.

I've built IKEA bookcases that have outlasted most of the stuff I have written.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#146

Post by revelio »

mickeyp wrote: post #143
revelio wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure it is. Win16 -> Win32 (only partly backwards compatible) -> .NET WinForms -> WPF -> WinUI 2 -> WinUI 3 (with of course Java and Electron being in the mix too) ... or ... Motif -> GTK 1 -> 2 -> 3 -> 4 (all backwards incompatible) ... or ... macOS Classic -> Carbon -> Cocoa/ObjC -> Cocoa/Swift The browser is actually one of the more stable environments out there with a lot of the churn being on the server side and…

A Delphi app written in Delphi 4 in the mid/late 90s would still run just fine on the latest version of Windows today. Win32 works just fine even today.

I used to love Delphi but I'd expect most people still consider code written in it to be tech debt. How many new projects are being started in it today?

Sadly Delphi became debt at the same time Win32 did. Win32 "works" in the modern era only as long as you restrict yourself to opening a blank window and putting a D3D surface in it. Very few apps use it beyond the absolutely minimum level required anymore, because it's just a giant pile of horrendous tech debt. It's so tech debty that Microsoft have tried numerous times to kill it completely; their failure to pay off their debts doesn't make it non-debt however. How many new apps are using comctl32 widgets and WinINet these days? They all ignore it as much as possible and rely heavily on fat wrappers or shipping reimplementations for the rest. I mean that was like 50% of the value of Delphi as a product - it wrapped Win32 in an API layer that made it actually digestable.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#147

Post by VaxWithSex »

Faint wrote: post #117
edejong wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you know what happened to SOAP? It was smothered by its own success. The allure of interoperability and extensibility attracted everyone and their cat to the party. With so many stakeholders involved, it became a classic case of "too much design by committee." It's like trying to paint a masterpiece by having a thousand artists contribute strokes—chaos ensues. And let's not forget the influx of junior developers…

It ended up being so complex, that none of the implementations were up to spec, and hardly any 2 implementations talked to each other out of the box. i.e. the exact opposite it was meant to do.

can confirm

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#148

Post by throwaway2037 »

jcpst wrote: post #70
MartinMcGirk wrote: post #18

I feel like this is heavily connected with the idea of legacy. I grew up in Scotland, and lots of the buildings, culture, etc, have been around for hundreds of years. It would be nice to feel like something I was building would last as long and outlive me. It doesn’t though. Sometimes I think that this is just the nature of software development. Most of the stuff I build is built to solve an immediate business proble…

Sqlite intends to keep their cathedral intact until 2050. https://sqlite.org/lts.html

I never saw this page before. Brilliant! Like catnip for nerds.

    Disaster planning → Every byte of source-code history for SQLite is cryptographically protected and is automatically replicated to multiple geographically separated servers, in datacenters owned by different companies. Thousands of additional clones exist on private servers around the world. The primary developers of SQLite live in different regions of the world. SQLite can survive a continental catastrophe.
SQLite can survive a continental catastrophe!!!

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#149

Post by Smaug123 »

chaostheory wrote: post #74

Apparently, we’re making either Tibetan mandala art or Theseus’s Ship

Insert Pirates of the Caribbean meme. "This is without doubt the worst ship that's ever floated." "But it does float." There's no inherent shame in Ship-of-Theseusing something to accommodate changing requirements! Complete rewrites are hard and take forever!

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#150

Post by pharmakom »

peterfirefly wrote: post #109
chrisco255 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's comforting to think that 2000 years from now, all that may remain of the early web and modern culture is the Space Jam website. Maybe Space Jam the movie will be looked at as our Gilgamesh or Iliad.

And the Galaxy Quest site -- will people in the future know it is a parody? http://www.questarian.com/

yes, because an LLM just trained on this conversation.

gazelle battery chair figment

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