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My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

blog.visionarycto.com

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Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#361

Post by Scubabear68 »

klibertp wrote: post #281
josephg wrote: post #222

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…

I think a lot of it comes from the Spring framework. People saw those gigantic stack traces with all the crazy abstractions and huge names, and took it as the norm.

It doesn’t have to be that way (see also Guice).

But the Uncle Bob effect is sadly real.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#362

Post by akdor1154 »

jeff_d_miller wrote: post #359
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…

I'd rather claim that the main reason is that the author seemed drawn towards proprietary tech stacks that the companies behind them wanted to fully control and that contributed to their demise. It was clear from the start that Flash and VB and ColdFusion and all that wouldn't last long, just because no open ecosystem could form to keep them adapting and vibrant. I feel that's substantially different with Python, Go,…

I love go, but still, one of those things is not like the others.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#363

Post by Jorengarenar »

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…

Python is great for stuff which could technically be a shell script, but really shouldn't; it essentially replaced Perl.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#365

Post by parthianshotgun »

revelio wrote: post #322
lbriner wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why you are downvoted, this is one of the best comments I've read in a long time. How idealism turns into realism and the sweet spot is probably somewhere in the middle.

It's because conservatism whether big or small c, political or technological, tends to be seen as standing in the way of progress by those who didn't arrive at the same underlying intuitions about the difficulty of tabula rasa development. Because the intuitions are so deep, we barely articulate them and that leads quickly to misunderstandings. Conservatism can easily be perceived as errant obstructionism or even the…

Steven Colbert once jokingly said, "Reality has a well known liberal bias".

It should probably be the other way around, that liberals have a reality bias, but it doesn't quite land. Liberalism is based on what can be proven. Especially in science, starting with some preconceived reservations leads to inaccurate models. If you can't articulate it, all the worse. Even things like categorization and taxonomy can't account for our in-built intuitions, there's always an exception. So, we really must try a tabula rasa type approach. This tends towards a, you guessed it, a world view more constrained by reality, which typically falls left (see, most of academia).

I'd say holding on to heuristics is good, but I don't think we'd be where we are today by not trying to rethink, destruct, unravel, play, squish, open many mental gateways.

If your contention is with Whig history then we might agree. But I don't think there's any surity in being sure.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#366

Post by GreymanTheGrey »

cipher_system wrote: post #201
Hamuko wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who are the people who belong to "I hate Java" and "I love Jira" sets? I'd love to see that Venn diagram.

Do people who loves JIRA exist for real?

I wouldn't say I 'love' it, but at the same time I don't really get all the hate. I've recently moved from a large'ish (50+) dev shop to a much smaller team of 3. JIRA was and is used at both places. It continues to serve both orgs equally well.

Perhaps what people hate are all the ceremonies and bureaucracy that arise around JIRA in dysfunctional organisations, and not the product itself? The red tape and bullshit was just starting to take over at the old place (part of the reason I jumped ship), which made 'standups' that should have taken 5-10 minutes a 90-minute soul-destroying odyssey. But that's not JIRA's fault either.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#367

Post by arcbyte »

josephg wrote: post #222
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. 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…

I've seen people take Bob Martin's concepts and do some truly awful things with it. Mind-bogglingly awful contortions of concepts into classes in arrangements that have to be sourced from demonic inspiration.

At the same time, I've seen the best code of my entire life formed from his concepts. Code that will last decades, far outlasting the UIs that feed it data or the databases that will store it.

I think the difference is all on whether the developers who wrote it understood that the "concepts" are not meant to be put into code on a 1 for 1 basis. For example, making a AddToDoUseCasePresenterInteractor class is literally taking the concept and making it 1 to 1 in the code. On the other hand, writing domain appropriate code, minimizing accidental complexity, and recognizing the clean code concepts as emerging from groups of classes and methods and packages in a code base leads to really clean, testable, maintainable, and FAST TO WRITE code.

I think the single biggest improvement for java programmers is to group all the classes related to a use case together in the same package - which means STOP MAKING "controller", "service", "model", etc packages where every different unrelated except by use is just dumped. If you're working on a part of the code base you should just have to change classes in one single folder. A new feature should just be a new folder. That change alone speeds up teams by huge factors.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#368

Post by Arch-TK »

negamax wrote: post #255
animuchan wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, Jira is indeed very hatable before knowing its implementation details. I don't know if it's a strong argument for Java however, saying that god-awful software written in it is universally despised, but for reasons other than the language choice.

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

Software success seems to be 90% about advertising and finding innovative ways to destroy your competition. Microsoft are the masters of that approach.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#370

Post by inflam52 »

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…

Definitely agree. It’s not “the code has been deprecated”, it’s “your attitude has been deprecated”. One of the big challenges with technology is staying current because it moves so fast. We’ve all seen trends come and go, even outside of software. If it wasn’t evolving we’d be doing something wrong.
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