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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

#271

Post by OJFord »

negamax wrote: post #193
TacticalCoder wrote: post #153

> 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. Don't forget Confluence and JIRA and all Atlassian products. Minecraft too. I facepalm when people say Java this and that

You can absolutely tell Jira is written in Java and not in a good way. I guessed the first time I went through one of the '...' > 'Move'/'Clone'/'Convert to subtask' flows.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#272

Post by cbm-vic-20 »

cies wrote: post #235
winrid wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like if Java had immutability by default it would be such a better language to work with. It is so hard to determine what actually gets modified where in a large Java codebase.

Too bad immutability breaks the quite-ubiquitous-in-JVM-land Bean spec (and I wonder what one was smoking before drawing that spec). I think having proper sum-types with pattern matching would have also made it a much better language.

It was designed when UML and tools like Rational Rose was being pushed hard by the big consulting firms on their clients as the One True Way to build Serious Business Software. JavaBeans was designed as a way to have a conventional interface that allows code components to be snapped into GUI applications. But someone thought it would be a great idea to use it everywhere else, too.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#273

Post by lbriner »

revelio wrote: post #115
asdfman123 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s so weird, I used to be much more of STEM triumphalist, the kind of person who used to think the past was evil and the future can’t come fast enough. I wouldn’t consider myself conservative by any means but increasingly in 30s I’m beginning to think everyone needs to stop messing with stuff and accept imperfection.

That's the usual path of becoming conservative as you grow up. Or phrased another way, becoming normal. The training process humans go through leads to a lot of weird biases, just like how RLHF contributes to models getting bad ideas as well as good. For example, you spend years in school being instructed as efficiently as possible in the one right way to do things that was already discovered. You are only rarely or…

Not sure why you are downvoted, this is one of the best comments I've read in a long time. How idealism turns into realism and the sweet spot is probably somewhere in the middle.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#274

Post by throwaway019254 »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #153

> 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.

And using AWS that has most services written in Java.

Java improved a lot in the last few years and it’s not going anywhere.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#275

Post by generic92034 »

WA wrote: post #258
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…

Why though? Does it really matter if something outlives you by 200 years? 500? On a not-that-long timeline like 10,000 years, nothing lasts. The "cathedral-like" timeline is completely arbitrary I think. Imho, there’s freedom in accepting that nothing I produce will last a long time.

That is when you are shooting a car into space. ;)

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#276

Post by davedx »

josephg wrote: post #222
TacticalCoder wrote: post #153

> 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…

Bingo!

I’ll never forget working for a tiny startup under an ex Google CTO in 2013 who wrote plain Java code and chose simple libraries. Saying it was a breath of fresh air is an understatement.

Code is culture and culture is code.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#277

Post by jen20 »

ilyt wrote: post #216
TacticalCoder wrote: post #153

> 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. The IDE that's written in Java most likely shares nothing with Java ecosystem parts they "hate" (I'm guessing all of the EJB, applets an general 90's Java enterprise stuff). Only irony here is you thinking it is. The 90's Java was a thing to hate. Running fat complex app server…

I assure you code as XML has not disappeared from enterprise Java.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#278

Post by jen20 »

negamax wrote: post #255
animuchan wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, Jira is indeed very hatable before knowing its implementation details. I don't know if it's a strong argument for Java however, saying that god-awful software written in it is universally despised, but for reasons other than the language choice.

Saying that a software is god awful when it's commercially successful is not a good argument. Certainly tons of people and orgs out there are deriving value out of it. I still have to see anything that comes closer to Confluence for arranging organisational knowledge

How would you explain SharePoint if this followed?

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#279

Post by Nanana909 »

lopis wrote: post #211
TacticalCoder wrote: post #153

> 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…

> 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. I share this sentiment. All my adult life I've been in contact with the "tech-anxious" kind of dev that needs to be up-to-date with all the new frameworks all the time. While I've entertained sev…

IMO an argument against this is that the benefit though is not in the new tech itself, but different design paradigms it exposes you to and thought patterns you learn.

Even if Rust were to die off tomorrow I’d be happy I invested my time in getting familiar with it as I’ve learned quite a bit about memory management and ways to reason about it.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#280

Post by za3faran »

winrid wrote: post #230
josephg wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I feel like if Java had immutability by default it would be such a better language to work with. It is so hard to determine what actually gets modified where in a large Java codebase.

Java's records are immutable.
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