Negative focus

Or use a 3rd party framework until you see it's problems and more fully understand it's actual use. Then you can write your own

The author suggests that the enormous economic success of software suggests that the methods used are not "crap", but I don't think this is valid. In fact, it's somewhat the opposite - the strong economic growth in the software world (and the exponentially improving performance and reach of the underlying hardware) allow low-quality software to proliferate.

The economic argument for quality engineering is, "it may cost more upfront, but will deliver a more reliable product with lower total costs." But this argument is invalid in the current software world, where network effects and first-mover advantage are enormous, and a successful company can grow explosively. No one would follow the strategy of "build a quick bridge out of plywood, then when we have 10 million people using it and it starts falling down every other day, we'll have enough money to hire some people to build a real bridge." But that's what twitter did.

As software developers, a lot of our job is just putting up with the crap that the software world has been built on, because the people in charge have made the rational calculation that it's better to hire ten times more engineers and expand to Asia, expand to mobile, expand up market and down market and into different markets a little sooner.

I agree entirely though, that it's counterproductive for programmers to blame ourselves or to seek a technical fix to what is basically an economic and organizational problem.

Or this, yes.

The problems I see, are, you have to get fluent in the new framework and sometimes this requires as much time as writing your own stuff :\

As a borderline ranter/troll myself, I recognize the sentiment that there is too much negativity in the developer sphere. But, the difference between what I say and what the typical mouth breathers spout on, say, political forums, is that I can point to specific examples and evidence of why the status quo sucks.

What the people with a positive slant on all this seem to miss is that it’s not just any one area of computer science that is facing difficulties, it’s all of it. For any technology or methodology, I immediately see flaws that range from merely annoying (semicolons in C, colons in Python) to downright devastating (shared mutable state between processes, the inability to statically analyze imperative code). Very little software has been written that is provably bug-free, and it came at great cost. Some of the control code that NASA has written comes to mind, or perhaps some of the early work in lisp, maybe a few other things like Excel that attempt to avoid programming altogether. Most everything else succumbs to an inability to scale, because code complexity grows exponentially while performance grows linearly. So code that works is generally small and modular. Unfortunately, when we try to tie everything together under umbrella frameworks like UNIX, something is lost and we’ve never solved that in a mainstream way, at least not to my satisfaction.

The great successes today have come in spite of existing technology, not because of it. I very much wish that the world would slow down for a moment, take a step back, and really assess the numerous ways that computing as we know it today has failed to deliver on the promises made by pioneers 50 years ago. It’s like the recent post on HN of how concurrency is the new memory management. While that’s true, it merely reveals the tip of the iceberg, not just in the fact that most languages fall down in the face of concurrency, but that even hardware has been unable to keep pace with the newest trends. It doesn’t even scratch the surface of the wetware issue, that generations of programmers have been raised on orthodoxy that can’t take us to the next level. I know that something is terribly wrong when I point out a problem and am met with such hostility, disguised as positivity. To me, this can be as damaging as excessive criticism. But it’s shielded behind the enormous profitability of the tech sector, where people would rather jump through hoops and make money than solve problems once and all for society and increase everyone’s wealth.