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My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

blog.visionarycto.com

301–310 of 585 posts

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#301
post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying that a software is god awful when it's commercially successful is not a good argument. Certainly tons of people and orgs out there are deriving value out of it. I still have to see anything that comes closer to Confluence for arranging organisational knowledge

How would you explain SharePoint if this followed?

Oh, how I hate our management for forcing SharePoint on us.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#302

I feel like this is heavily connected with the idea of legacy. I grew up in Scotland, and lots of the buildings, culture, etc, have been around for hundreds of years. It would be nice to feel like something I was building would last as long and outlive me. It doesn’t though. Sometimes I think that this is just the nature of software development. Most of the stuff I build is built to solve an immediate business proble…

> If there’s a software equivalent of a Cathedral then I still haven’t found it.

Actually you have. It’s HN! The website that hasn’t changed in decades… used by the most tech savvy people in the world!

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#304

> 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.

I think Java virtual threads and structured concurrency are going to only improve its standing.

People complain about Java, but then it could be much, much worse. What we have is a rich open-source ecosystem, great backwards compatibility and carefully considered new features.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#305
I predict WebAssembly will eventually overtake how front-end development is today, and a whole new world will evolve.

I have heard this with great emotion for at least 6 years now and nothing. It’s starting to look like bitcoin: all these dreams and ideals that come to nothing in practice but a Ponzi scheme.

The funny thing is that it clearly indicates nobody know what they are doing. People advocating for WASM want DOM bindings because the DOM is great and JavaScript is the great evil. Most people who actually write JavaScript professionally feel equally about the DOM, a great evil, and so they are completely reliant on some massive framework to justify the their existence.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#306

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. Guilty as charged! I hate using Java because everything written in java seems to blend into the same indistinguishable swamp of classes with meaningless names, full of methods that constantly find new and interesting ways to obscure what your program is actually trying to do. De…

Does anybody know where I can find a good, substantiated, critique of the common Java coding patterns, including on Android? This niche is such a huge mess that simply documenting all the bad things in a single codebase (along with explanation why they're bad) took me a month. It's tiring and mentally draining to do this: every other line of code you read makes you go "Why. Please, just tell me why anybody could ever…

Hah. I’ve spent several years writing javascript for a living. You can always tell when code was written by someone who’s arrived fresh from Java or C++. Their code is full of hundreds of lines of useless classes which can often be replaced by a few simple object literals. Unlike class instances, object literals can be easily json stringified and parsed, too! You can torture people who are like this in code review: “This isn’t idiomatic. Please rewrite this code without the class keyword”. I’ve seen people people make a face like I just had their child expelled from kindergarten.

I don’t know any good resources unfortunately. I feel like we need a “motherfuckingwebsite” equivalent for this - “just use a motherfucking function”. I want to link it to whoever insisted on adding a useless TextDecoder class in javascript that you have to instantiate, instead of just calling textDecode(…, “utf8”) using a global function like the rest of the standard library.

I think part of the problem is that most people who hate enterprise java just learn a different language, set their resume on fire and start over somewhere better. That’s certainly what I did. I’m writing rust at the moment, and thankfully the lack of classes and distance from the JVM seems to keep most of this nonsense out. But having all the doubters leave makes the problem within the java ecosystem worse.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#307

> 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. Guilty as charged! I hate using Java because everything written in java seems to blend into the same indistinguishable swamp of classes with meaningless names, full of methods that constantly find new and interesting ways to obscure what your program is actually trying to do. De…

Do you know of any well written articles of critique against OO? I've read a few against Clean Code, that actual went over the problems with the actual examples given. Nevertheless I hardly ever see good critiques against the principles themselves.

I'd be interested in reading about it in more detail.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#308
> All code rots or gets replaced

> Over time, you can see how almost everything you create gets scrapped and replaced for various reasons or is now based on old technology.

Is this problem fixable by using some great technologies? React code does not rot and Common Lisp applications are famous as having the most time without getting rot among other programming languages.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#309
post #220

That's like calling a chair you built 10 years ago "technical debt" because it can eventually break. No, it's just a fucking product you made. The fact it has to be maintained doesn't mean it is "debt", it's just like any other asset. You don't get to your car and think "that's technical debt". There is nothing technical about it. It's a tool with maintenance needs. The difference is choosing worse now to get it fast…

thank you.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 isn't slow, quite the opposite in fact. https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r21

Don’t worry, enterprise Java programming patters will fix that “performance” thing right up. Call a function? Goodness no, not without an helper class being instantiated first. Oh you wanted to instantiate a helper class? Better call a factory to do that. Not directly - have you heard of Dependency Injection? We configure that via XML here.

See? Fast performance isn’t a problem any more. You can make it go away in the time it takes you to load Jira.

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