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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

#291

Post by aspyct »

jraph wrote: post #164

That's fine. We build code for issues that are here and now. Like most jobs: they answer immediate needs. The small amount of code that's useful for years or decades needs to be built on a stable foundation and with few dependencies. This probably matters a lot more than the code being a bit messy. It should require as little maintenance as possible. I have two pieces of PHP code I wrote more than 10 years ago, in PH…

I must say, I never quite liked PHP as much as other environments, but I keep using it because it just gets the job done.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#292

Post by _fizz_buzz_ »

revelio wrote: post #138
QuadrupleA wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder where python will fall in history - it seems one of the few common languages that gained usage because people like it.

Python is weird. It's a nice language but it was heading for tech debt status along with (maybe) Ruby, then the ML guys went all-in on it and that saved it. But how often do you find new programs being written in Python outside of the ML/AI space? People got burned repeatedly in the 2000s/2010s by building giant empires on the back of dynamically typed scripting languages and they all ended up either doing rewrites i…

I use it - and I suspect a lot of other people also - as a replacement for Matlab. I am an electrical engineer and I write short scripts to calculate stuff and hook it up to simulations etc. Matlab has great toolboxes, but is pretty expensive and the language is a bit clunky. Python is just very versatile and has a huge eco-system now that would be hard to replace. A lot of system administratiors also use it for scripting.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#293

Post by sam_goody »

PHP.

Still works and the codebase is still being incrementally updated ~20 years in.

Stint with Laravel, which was a huge task to add, and an even huger task to eventually remove; After an update by Laravel that was not backwards compatible made us rethink the cost/value.

Javascript on the frontend, with no libraries as critical infra except for HTMX.

Was once a contributor to Mootools; now use quite a bit of homegrown funcs, and use libraries for spot instances (Alpine, Uppy, QuillJS - all of which are written modular with intention to be traded out.)

MySQL and eventually Postgres. "NoSQL" only when it was added (as JSONB) to Postgres.

All of those years of coding are an asset, not a liability.

Don't go chasing the new and shiny, it doesn't last. (And steer clear of Web3, will ya?)

EDIT: We use Tailwind - and time will tell if that is a mistake.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#294

Post by mediascreen »

> Fast forward to today, and MVC has since fallen out of fashion. Everything is now done in React, Angular, Vue, and other frameworks.

I wouldn't be so sure about that. Fallen out of fashion perhaps, but still very stable, easy work with, predictable and with pretty clear best practices that don't change every three months.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#295

Post by [deleted] »

ilyt wrote: post #217
negamax wrote: post #193

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

They don't hate it coz it's in Java...

[deleted]

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#296

Post by wernercd »

throwaway019254 wrote: post #274
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.

Java, COBOL, C#, JavaScript, etc... all tech that's not "sexy" but are the backbones.

Even dead languages like COBOL aren't dead.

These techs are the tech that'll be here in 40+ years - or atleast until Skynet rewrites them in binary and we're nuclear ash. I think COBOL will be driving the satellites that monitor the heat death of the universe.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#297

Post by cyber_kinetist »

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

Minecraft is actually a really good example of the opposite. Maybe some might hate the Java edition of Minecraft because of its frequent GC pauses, but the new performant Minecraft Bedrock written in C++ isn’t really that popular because of lackluster mod support.

The reason Minecraft was able to have such a large mod ecosystem (even when it still doesn’t have an official modding API!) is that JVM bytecode is easily reverse-engineerable and extendable (…relatively, compared to fully compiled C++ code). Bedrock actually tried providing a modding API via JS scripting, but it was pretty lackluster in its flexibility and thus users mainly stayed in Java edition for the mods (using robust ecosystems like Spigot/Paper)

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#299

Post by watwut »

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…

> The IDE that's written in Java most likely shares nothing with Java ecosystem parts they "hate"

Most vocal java haters I had met were JavaScript programmers who knew basically nothing about Java. Their hate was purely cultural - they learned on discussion forums that they should hate java. But, they had literally zero knowledge whatsoever.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#300

Post by watwut »

josephg wrote: post #228
negamax wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Jira does, somehow, faintly smell of Java. There's just something about how slow it is, and how maximalist it is in supporting every whimsical idea that any rich corporate customer has ever asked of them. No matter how poorly the request blended with everything else Jira does. 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…

Java is not slow.
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