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

Choose Boring Technology

boringtechnology.club

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 356 posts

Re: Choose Boring Technology

#291

Post by yellowapple »

malvosenior wrote: post #78
nickjj wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's weird to see people comparing Go and Python in this thread as they solve entirely different problems and shouldn't be interchangeable, not due to developer preference but due to fundamental features of the language. Yes but when Go first came out, a lot of people jumped on the bandwagon and started proposing they would use Go for web applications too. There's definitely some overlap in building web services wi…

> Go and Python are also pretty related for command line apps too. You could totally use either one to build a CLI tool. Distribution of Go CLI apps is much easier as you don't need to have your end users install the 3rd party libraries themselves.

This is true for Python, too, albeit quite a bit harder due to the relative lack of first-party tooling for generating standalone executables.

Re: Choose Boring Technology

#292

Post by runarberg »

mcguire wrote: post #260
delusional wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it a bit silly to presuppose that what we have now is the best we are ever going to get. I mean, files were state of the art at one point, but i don't think anyone will suggest we go back to punchcards. "Boring Technology" is the wrong thing to aim for. Aim for simplicity.

Which JavaScript framework is the simple one?

VanillaJS!

But seriously while Svelte is the new kid on the block, they do claim to have minimal API design and no virtual DOM. So I guess the real answer is Svelte.

Re: Choose Boring Technology

#293

Post by yellowapple »

arethuza wrote: post #148
zzzcpan wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, not to work with a running system someone else operates, but to run it in production yourself.

Doesn't that rather depend on which SQL database you are using?

Indeed it does. There's a huge difference in ease of maintenance in production between (e.g.) PostgreSQL and MS SQL Server.

Re: Choose Boring Technology

#294

Post by ncmncm »

Whenever somebody brings up this "unknown unknowns" thing, I'm reminded again why we ended up in such a shitstorm in Iraq:

Rumsfeld listed three out of the four possible combinations of "known" and "unknown" that he had his minions thinking about for him.

But, evidently, neither he nor his minions thought of or spent any time on the fourth one: unknown knowns. Those are the ones you think you know, but you're wrong. And that's what knawed 5 trillion dollars out of our guts (and killed hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children) over the next N years since.

It is not a new observation. Usually Mark Twain gets credit for "It ain't what you don't know that gets you, it's what you think you know but ain't so."

Re: Choose Boring Technology

#295

Post by iLemming »

Bahamut wrote: post #162
lvh wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've ran multiple org that are largely or almost exclusively working in Clojure(Script) and trained over a dozen folks to be proficient Clojure programmers, and have not found that any of those to be a problem. For example: you mentioned debugging serious performance problems, but the JVM has some of the most advanced instrumentation on any platform. This is actually a point subtly made in the talk: your real product…

As a counterpoint, I have had a developer who had wrote production ClojureScript tell me it was the worst of all worlds - it doesn't abstract away issues of the DOM and yet you still have to debug what was happening in JS and translate it over to Clojure. Another thing I noticed is that most developers who had to touch Clojure in my org all pretty much didn't like it at all.

> I have had a developer who had wrote production ClojureScript tell me it was the worst of all worlds

You know how it sounds? It sounds like: "yeah I like rock music, but I think I don't like this Pink Floyd band. No, no. I never heard any of them on the radio, but Sarah once tried singing their song to me on the phone, and you know what? It was horrible. No I don't think I'm gonna ever listen to them. Not my style."

> Another thing I noticed is that most developers who had to touch Clojure in my org all pretty much didn't like it at all.

Most people who actually try Clojure do tend to like it. There are certain annoyances as a beginner you'd have to deal with (parentheses, startup time, error messages), but once you learn it a bit - they all become really insignificant. And what's there not to like? Clojure is extremely practical, has a nice core library, it is very predictable and stable. Yeah, it is not a silver bullet but it is for sure much better than Javascript and Java (and many other popular languages).

Re: Choose Boring Technology

#296

Post by iLemming »

Scarbutt wrote: post #230
Bahamut wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a counterpoint, I have had a developer who had wrote production ClojureScript tell me it was the worst of all worlds - it doesn't abstract away issues of the DOM and yet you still have to debug what was happening in JS and translate it over to Clojure. Another thing I noticed is that most developers who had to touch Clojure in my org all pretty much didn't like it at all.

Clojurescript on its own doesn't give you much for web programming and, not worth it over Javascript. It shines when combined with a react wrapper.

> not worth it over Javascript

It absolutely is. As someone who's dealt with JS/TS/Coffeescript and a bunch of other "scripts" that compile, transpile to Javascript for very long time, I can honestly say: Clojurescript today is the only truly production-ready viable alt-js PL.

and you don't have to use it with React. React with immutable data structures just makes sense. Once it stops making sense for any reasons, Clojurescript community will move on to using something else.

Re: Choose Boring Technology

#297

Post by draw_down »

mcguire wrote: post #260
delusional wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it a bit silly to presuppose that what we have now is the best we are ever going to get. I mean, files were state of the art at one point, but i don't think anyone will suggest we go back to punchcards. "Boring Technology" is the wrong thing to aim for. Aim for simplicity.

Which JavaScript framework is the simple one?

The one you like, of course! All the others are bloated and complex.

Re: Choose Boring Technology

#298

Post by mkr-hn »

>> "My friend Andrew wears the same brand of black shirt every day. He thinks that if he conserves the brainpower it would take to pick something to wear, he’ll bank it and be able to use it later for something else."

I do something similar, but in a way that keeps it interesting. I always pull a shirt off the right and move the hanger to the left for clean ones out of the dryer. Pants are the same. Stacked stuff always comes off the top. Clean ones go on the bottom.

I also went with Blogger in 2019 rather than fuss over blog engines. It's exportable, free, runs under your own domain, has few restrictions on front-end customization, and is unlikely to go out without warning. At worst, I defer thinking about it until later when I have a better sense of my needs.

Related to that, I started on a PHP-based static blog engine. I reasoned that PHP was made for smushing data and HTML together, so it was perfect!

https://github.com/CondensedBrain/blogengine

But I also saw a future where I had to maintain all the bits and pieces. I really just wanted a blog, not a blogging engine. I hadn't read Choose Boring Technology yet, but it affirms the thinking that led me to pick Blogger over a custom engine and other pre-made options.

Re: Choose Boring Technology

#299

Post by MattPalmer1086 »

Datenstrom wrote: post #134
oftenwrong wrote: post #58

Always glad to see this making the rounds, as it has been influential for me, especially the perspective of "Happiness comes from shipping stuff". I often think about this part, in particular: >Then we walked away. We didn’t do anything related to activity feeds for years after that. We barely even thought about it. >Then one day I said, “hey, I wonder how activity feeds is doing.” And I looked at it and was surprise…

Beautiful code denies its existence so perfectly you forget you wrote it.

That is a lovely way of putting it.

The unfortunate flip side is that everyone else forgets about it too, and one day there's no one left who understands it any more.

I came to the conclusion that software which just works invisibly can have a shorter useful life than software that demands some attention every now and again. So don't make your software invisible!

Re: Choose Boring Technology

#300

Post by sopooneo »

harimau777 wrote: post #207
gfodor wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely what you state here can be said of any advice given due to experience. As long as the natural inclinations of younger developers push up against said advice, it's completely sane to give it. Because without it, young developers will have an incomplete mental model, and will lack the intellectual tools to potentially make better choices early in their career. Also it seems to miss the point somewhat: choosing '…

The problem is actually finding jobs where the problem itself (rather than the tech stack) is compelling. Personally, I haven't seen much of that outside of academia or the elite of the elite Google X type roles.

I freelanced for a guy who ran a cabinet factory, helping him integrate his automated fabrication equipment with his customer ordering system. Dead boring old technology, but extremely interesting to me learning about wood-working and stuff.

I don't know if I have a point, but I bet if you're not picky about tech stack (at ALL), you can find some really cool work to do in non-tech industries.

Post reply on HN