221–230 of 585 posts
How did technical debt become so bloated and meaningless? Isn't it "remaining half baked/incorrect code, known edge cases, bad/slow implementations, or even bugs due to constraints imposed on the engineering team"? How is dead technologies are imposed constraints?
Author is not talking about technical debt but experience that is not directly applicable anymore.
> My entire career is now technical debt, or the code has been deprecated. My fellow dev often laugh when I tell them that instead of looking at all the long dead techs that are not useful to me anymore, my way to feel good is to look back at all the long dead techs that I didn't bother to learn . And, geez, is the graveyard huge. > Java Applets were also a big thing once upon a time. They were slow, and having the c…
Guilty as charged! I hate using Java because everything written in java seems to blend into the same indistinguishable swamp of classes with meaningless names, full of methods that constantly find new and interesting ways to obscure what your program is actually trying to do. Debugging very large Java codebases feels like living through Terry Gilliam's 1985 film Brazil.
I think the problem is cultural, not technological. It seems like there's a lot of people in the Java community who still think OO is a great idea. Who think Bob Martin's awful, muddled code examples in Clean Code are something to aspire towards. People who claim the path of enlightenment requires them to replace concrete classes with interfaces - even when those interfaces only have 1 implementation.
Anyone who writes class names like FactoryBuilderFactoryImpl and claims to walk in the light is at best a scoundrel, and at worst a follower of a religion so dark we don't name it in polite company.
This is what makes IntelliJ so impressive. It takes a master craftsman to forge something beautiful from such an unholy material. VS Code pulls off the same feat on top of election. In each case I can't tell whether to be horrified or impressed! Either way, I'm a huge fan.
"In the long run. we are all dead". But I find it hard not to look at software and think how ephemeral it all is. All those late nights and all that debugging and it has mostly disappeared without a trace within 10-20 years. And that is the stuff that even got used at all. :0(
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> let &mut writer = Writer ::writer::new(connection.clone()).clone(); // TODO ??? writer.write(data.clone()).unwrap(); It's not difficult to arrive at the caricature of baroque generic code if you combine lack of knowledge with miscommunication. The knowledgeable coworker should be aware that a writable object implements the Write trait, and know, or find out, the signature of the Write::write() method. Even fully ge…
Eh, zero on failure, I suppose. The real write(2) syscall returns -1 on failure, and a non-negative value is the number of bytes actually written. But the general point still stands.
I totally agree with you that folk writing code need to understand the semantics of what they're building on top of. Humans and now AI models have a great capacity for generating tons source code without understanding the semantics, though.
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Who are the people who belong to "I hate Java" and "I love Jira" sets? I'd love to see that Venn diagram.
Do people who loves JIRA exist for real?
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…
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Who are the people who belong to "I hate Java" and "I love Jira" sets? I'd love to see that Venn diagram.
People don't hate Jira because it's written in Java. They don't know or comprehend that something like Jira or Confluence or Minecraft can be written in Java.
Mind you, I've only ever used Jira when its been setup, poorly, to fit in to a badly designed "scrum" process. People say it can be usable if you turn most of its features off. But the same is true of "smart" appliances, and that doesn't make me want to buy any of them.
> My entire career is now technical debt, or the code has been deprecated. My fellow dev often laugh when I tell them that instead of looking at all the long dead techs that are not useful to me anymore, my way to feel good is to look back at all the long dead techs that I didn't bother to learn . And, geez, is the graveyard huge. > Java Applets were also a big thing once upon a time. They were slow, and having the c…
Sexy? nope. Hot new thing? neither. But the jobs are out there.
Similarly that mention of RoR being "in danger" seems incorrect. It's just that Rails is not the topmost big player in the market, and I don't think it ever was, even at its early peak. Sure it made rounds in the news and had a big impact but even back then it certainly wasn't The Tech That Everyone And Their Dog Uses.
That's fine. A tech doesn't need to be in the top 3 market leaders to be useful, successful, and lively.
> My entire career is now technical debt, or the code has been deprecated. My fellow dev often laugh when I tell them that instead of looking at all the long dead techs that are not useful to me anymore, my way to feel good is to look back at all the long dead techs that I didn't bother to learn . And, geez, is the graveyard huge. > Java Applets were also a big thing once upon a time. They were slow, and having the c…
> And most devs hating on Java are using an IDE written mainly in Java (all the JetBrains ones): the irony of that one gives me the giggles. Guilty as charged! I hate using Java because everything written in java seems to blend into the same indistinguishable swamp of classes with meaningless names, full of methods that constantly find new and interesting ways to obscure what your program is actually trying to do. De…