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Choose Boring Technology (2015)

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Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#291

Post by ncmncm »

It's funny that he mentions Rumsfeld, without mentioning Rumsfeld's very public glaring omission that was ultimately responsible for everything that went wrong in Iraq.

He cited "known knowns", "known unknowns", and "unknown unknowns", but completely missed the biggie, unknown knowns -- things you are convinced are true, but in fact are not.

"It ain't what you don't know that gets you. It's the things you think you know that just aren't so." (Often mis-attributed to Mark Twain, but Josh Billings is a better choice.)

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#292

Post by ByteJockey »

the_af wrote: post #247
ByteJockey wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You must judge Java by the developments of the last decade at the very least. Otherwise you're ignoring the practitioners. I think plurality of situations it's actually used for currently would be a better standard than what you're advocating for. This has the advantage that the merits people judge things on, and the experience they will most likely have using it will line up. The downside is that, the merits used…

The problem with judging a language by how it was a decade ago is that you're going to be left claiming absurd, outdated things. Imagine if I claimed I didn't like Java because it lacks generics, or because it lacks lambdas, or because I really, really dislike working with EJBs, or because working with Java means "working with a lot of XML" (this would flunk you in an interview, by the way). Imagine if I complained a…

That depends on what you want from the judgement doesn't it?

If you want to be able to know the theoretical things you could do with the language, I think your definition is right.

If you want to know the most likely experience you would have using the language, I think mine is right.

I think it also depends on what circumstances you're using the language. Spinning up a new project probably lends itself more towards your definition. If you're looking to join an existing project, mine is probably more useful.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#293

Post by jakelazaroff »

arsenico wrote: post #286
jakelazaroff wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but what I was trying to get at was that it strikes me as very weird to count “CSS” or “a load balancer” or “a backend language” or “an SSL certificate” in a list of examples of how web development stacks have gotten out of hand.

CSS in itself is not getting out of hand. Supporting LESS, SASS and Stylus and vanilla CSS in one project is getting out of hand. Same for everything else.

Who is supporting all of these things in one project? I’ve literally never worked on a project that’s used more than one CSS preprocessor.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#294

Post by robert_g »

wilsonfiifi wrote: post #120
robert_g wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There should also be an explicit call out to both tooling and community. Even if a programming language ticks all the other boxes, Without a sizable and stable community to constantly push tooling languages will fade, not necessarily die. In my past job I was ColdFusion programmer for 15 years. ColdFusion ticks all the other boxes. * Created in 1995 and is a very mature platform * Easy to learn and productive * I was…

Do you think open source colfusion engines such as lucee[0] are worth using/learning? [0] https://lucee.org/

If you're thinking of learning CF, only do so with the understanding that it's now a niche product mostly used in government and large companies. Learn it either as a hobby or look at the Lucee source for educational purposes. Even my last company is moving away from CF.

About Lucee ...

I actually helped the company migrate away from Adobe ColdFusion to Lucee due to a chance in Adobe's licensing. We migrated a large, 10yr old, application and all clients over to Lucee in about 1 year.

Lucee is a nice platform but I'll warn that it's not as polished as Adobe CF and there's some difference in features. You'll run into rough edges in their documentation and language implementation (especially the scripting languages). One nice thing I really enjoyed was being able to download the source and figure out how my CF code was actually being compiled into Java. It took me a few days to understand the parts I needed but I actually figured out some issues I was having. I also was able to build Lucee from source, just for learning, which was really nice.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#295

Post by GavinHoltUK »

There are many parallels here for the selection of medical drugs and implants. Use treatments with a good evidence base, predictable outcomes and known complications (preferably with known solutions).

Don't insist upon the latest new treatment, unless you fully accept the rôle of guinea pig - for better or worse!

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#296

Post by limomium »

pdimitar wrote: post #154
limomium wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Choose PHP.

PHP silently transforming all string keys of a map to integers when they are all integer strings ("123", "456" etc.) is exactly one of the reasons I'll never choose a language that pulls the rug from below my feet and replaces it with parquet.

If you bother to read the manual [1], it explicitly states that this happens. Almost at the top of the page. Hardly "silent".

[1] https://www.php.net/manual/en/language.types.array.php

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#297

Post by pdimitar »

limomium wrote: post #296
pdimitar wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PHP silently transforming all string keys of a map to integers when they are all integer strings ("123", "456" etc.) is exactly one of the reasons I'll never choose a language that pulls the rug from below my feet and replaces it with parquet.

If you bother to read the manual [1], it explicitly states that this happens. Almost at the top of the page. Hardly "silent". [1] https://www.php.net/manual/en/language.types.array.php

It's not reasonable to expect such gotchas. It might have been a 20px red bold text on top of php.net and it would still be very not okay.
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