Always seems odd that the cranky dinosaur doesn't use his/her unix super powers to gather likeminded talent to build the world's greatest, simplest, cheapest app and retire a billionaire. It's almost like there is more to the decision making process than that. /s
Is the madness ever going to end?
291–300 of 629 posts
Re: Is the madness ever going to end?
#292No it probably won't end. No you are not a dinosaur, but development has changed. Decades ago you could build an app from the ground up. This gave you a bunch of different layers to compose, and probably made the app overall simpler. Now most developers are given a box to create their feature in whether it's a Spring Bean, a React Component, or a serverless function, with an entire application stack under it. You cou…
I sincerely doubt all that layered complexity helps push features faster. I left a next.js React job a couple of months ago where the team spent 90% of the time dicking around with the setup and wrangling with dependency issues instead of delivering any useful features. The amount of time they took to set up their "stack" and the number of issues they had with it was mind boggling. I left and swore to never again come near that mess of an ecosystem.
Re: Is the madness ever going to end?
#293I had a meeting today with a "cybersecurity expert" who was consulting a big company that had no idea what a hash function was. Literally no idea, as in "never heard the term before".
I explained the concept to her and she started referring to it as "encryption", I told her it wasn't encryption and she immediately started to debate me about that. Let that sink for a bit, she really thought she knew more than me about a (fundamental) concept that I just introduced to her world a few minutes before.
There's a plague of incompetence and mediocrity everywhere, and that is one cause for the issues that OP is talking about. It won't get any better soon so expect to have a lot of fun in future years.
Re: Is the madness ever going to end?
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that's what's offensive to the purist engineer mind. These aren't engineering decisions, they're business decisions (or maybe the closest thing you could call them would be "financial engineering" decisions). The best thing, by pure engineering criteria, is not what gets built. The best thing for the business is what gets built. In that context it's a complaint as old as the hills. ...and not specific to comp…
Well it's a net negative for the end user, which should have been the priority for everyone involved, and what you're describing sounds like a corruption of this system. So I wouldn't call it an engineering thing, it seems far more general than that.
Unless the product would have never been shipped if it could only be done natively.
Re: Is the madness ever going to end?
#295The author is fighting a strawman. Rather than engage with the specific problems these solutions were built to solve they dismissively regard them as just flavor of the week trends purely for the sake of chasing newness. This is true of the entire post, but I'll tackle just one since it's emblematic of my issues with all the rest: The argument for Electron and React Native isn't "it's modern", it's "it's much cheaper…
What is it about building "web-related technology" that makes it so cheap? Is it actually that much cheaper? And if so, why? Why isn't there a platform for making apps that compares?
Re: Is the madness ever going to end?
#296It will end when people like the author drop their victim mentality and start putting their own ideas into practice. It seems that this person is content with yelling on the sidelines about how good and efficient things used to be. Meanwhile, the shitty tech is winning. According to this author, bad code and bad tools and bad frameworks are reigning supreme over real engineering. Why? "The situation is really bad for…
Internet complaining gets eyeballs. Look at this comment thread. Look at the position in the HN queue. I'm not a fan of it. I understand the author's complaints and frustrations (I am also "chronologically-challenged"), but I have found that complaining doesn't really buy me much. I'll do a minor whine, from time to time (usually about the ageism in tech), but, for the most part, I try to bring some light to the conv…
> I write native (Swift) apps for Apple systems.
Swift is only 7 years old, one of the newest languages/tools in existence. This is an implicit argument against the author's case.
One might perhaps argue that Swift's newness/modernness is an exception, that it's "one of the good ones" when it comes to new systems. But this doesn't really work. Using Swift for native GUI app building is platform-specific, and writing native apps for other platforms requires other tools. If Swift represents an improvement on what came before, it implies that such improvements are needed on other platforms also. (If it doesn't represent an improvement, why are you using it?) This also implies that cross-platform solutions might be useful - like Electron or React Native!
Being chronologically challenged doesn't actually prevent one from understanding the driving forces behind modern software technology. Certainly, fads and cargo cults exist, driven in part by people's inevitably incomplete understanding and desire to follow practices that others seem to be using successfully. But to be able to distinguish between the fads and the useful advancements requires a better understanding than the OP exhibits.
Complaining seems like a perfectly fine activity to me if there's some valid content in it. But it becomes fairly useless otherwise, except possibly as you say for driving social media engagement.
Re: Is the madness ever going to end?
#297The author is fighting a strawman. Rather than engage with the specific problems these solutions were built to solve they dismissively regard them as just flavor of the week trends purely for the sake of chasing newness. This is true of the entire post, but I'll tackle just one since it's emblematic of my issues with all the rest: The argument for Electron and React Native isn't "it's modern", it's "it's much cheaper…
I’m on a team of 3.
React Native and similar options allow us to do so much more than we otherwise would.
Re: Is the madness ever going to end?
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
The original article isn't substantive. I mean, c'mon, the entirety of the argument against Electron apps is > They eat up all the memory you have and still ask for more. They constantly crash and has no value over a native desktop application what so ever - well, perhaps with the only exception that now a 2 year old baby can make something shiny that you can click on with your mouse. I'm kind of a curmudgeon about E…
> I would not normally be quite so much of a jerk about the numerous syntax errors, except that this ends with a suggestion that people, you know, pay for this writing. I don't expect perfection (God knows I make tpyos all the time), but the closing paragraph starts with a sentence that literally has no verb. Are you really bashing the author for imperfect English? The about page clearly mentions that they are not a…
I didn't read the About page, I read this article. If I'd known that, would I have not been "quite so much of a jerk," to quote myself? Probably. But "that this ends with a suggestion that people pay for this writing" is still something of a sticking point: if I was writing in a language I wasn't fluent in, I would be very hesitant to ask people to give me money based on the strength of my writing. If you decide that such a standard is unreasonable of me and that I'm still an English imperialist or whatever, I'll take the L, I guess.
However, when you rather archly tell me
> Make arguments against what they wrote, not who they are.
I will respond: I did. The vast majority of my arguments were against what they wrote. I took a couple pot shots at how they wrote it. I don't know who they are, and certainly didn't argue against that either way.
> A little kindness also goes a long way.
Does that apply only to critics of the article and not the article itself? Because I don't think you can call the author's tone "kind" by any measure.
Re: Is the madness ever going to end?
#299No, the madness will never end. Once you've been programming in the industry for awhile, and have seen a few fads come and go, you start to get fed up with the churn and just want to do things in the simplest way. Electron? Bah, I'll just make native apps for Windows and Mac in C++ and Swift! React? Bah, I'll just write a simple pure-JS app as a .js file.
Because you know that in 10 years you'll have to un-learn all of your Electron and React skills and re-learn something new. Equivalent, pointlessly new, but new nonetheless.
The problem is, nobody is going to let you do that. Chasing the new shiny thing is, for better or worse, part of the software industry. You will always have to learn something new that does the exact same thing the thing you already knew how to use did 10 years ago. The best you can do is find some company that's stuck on some previously-cool technology, but even then they'll want you to rewrite it in the new thing.
Re: Is the madness ever going to end?
#300This gave me flashbacks of Flash before Steve Jobs killed it.