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Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)
41–50 of 94 posts
Re: Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)
#42I feel like the article misses out on two crucial truths: 1. Most of the new tools are pure nightmare to maintain. RoR has breaking API changes often enough that you need multiple people to maintain a large codebase, whereas in PHP you'd only need one person because things don't magically break that often. And MongoDB is so convoluted and complicated that almost nobody can deploy it correctly. And then there's "new"…
Is PHP still a thing?
PHP is horrible as a language, but it fills its niche very well:
* You can get it to run dang near anywhere.
* It has an extremely low barrier to entry for new devs (blessing and a curse).
* There's a large volume of code already out there.
* If you need something that's a little more than a static site but not a full blown custom system, it's one of the simplest ways to get something out the door.
* If you know how to use it, there's likely someone willing to pay you to do so on their behalf.
So yeah, PHP is still a thing.
Re: Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)
#43I feel like the article misses out on two crucial truths: 1. Most of the new tools are pure nightmare to maintain. RoR has breaking API changes often enough that you need multiple people to maintain a large codebase, whereas in PHP you'd only need one person because things don't magically break that often. And MongoDB is so convoluted and complicated that almost nobody can deploy it correctly. And then there's "new"…
Is PHP still a thing?
30% of web sites are based on WordPress.
Re: Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)
#44I feel like the article misses out on two crucial truths: 1. Most of the new tools are pure nightmare to maintain. RoR has breaking API changes often enough that you need multiple people to maintain a large codebase, whereas in PHP you'd only need one person because things don't magically break that often. And MongoDB is so convoluted and complicated that almost nobody can deploy it correctly. And then there's "new"…
> You might also get flooded with rather demanding emails by technically incompetent people who complain that your free source code release didn't solve their problem.
This. Happens so frequently, that making things OSS now carries an additional burden. I personally find it very painful to e.g. ignore the PR or issue opened by some hapless person in a bad situation trying to figure out the most dumbest thing. It makes the alternative (never OSS'ing anything) sound better, if only for my own peace of mind.
Re: Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is always going to be major flux as new architectures are evolved until they are stable. If this was hidden, there would have been little input from outside Microsoft. While there have been legitimate problems with this process - for example, the explicit ‘go live’ given by Microsoft before things were truly stable, there was a choice made to develop in public and the net result (sorry) seems positive to me.
Depends on the success metric. If you look at the cost of the tech churn to the businesses that have to spend much more than before to achieve similar results as before, then it is not positive result to anyone but tech providers, and (young) developers that are needed to redevelop. I wonder how much will businesses tolerate this if promised efficiency gains do not materialize for most of them.
> I wonder how much will businesses tolerate this if promised efficiency gains do not materialize for most of them.
I think you've stumbled on the core issue here. For an unchanging company for which their digital business does not need to evolve very much, having a basic IT department may just work. But as we digitize more and make technology a core competency and critical differentiator, a legacy, inflexible tech stack becomes a burden. It doesn't let you add the features that your customers may want, features which might be critical to a continuing and successful business relationship. Your customers then have similar demands from _their_ customers... all the way back to the primary sector.
Re: Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)
#46That's a nice way to describe something, but it doesn't have to be a problem. Some devs around me (partially me too) just doesn't want to tweet or write blogs about tech, yet we could work in bleeding edge tech or writing cobol at the same time. Some people maybe don't need help, guidance, or something like that, maybe just maybe we like the things as they are now. Maybe we'll start doing all of social stuff some day…
While this is perfectly fine for you and for everyone who makes this understandable decision, what tends to happen is that people learning about bleeding edge of technology tend to have very different perception of what bleeding edge tech is. Every new buzzy technology is so oversold that it makes developers overly cynical and disappointed when it doesn't deliver on the promises made.
If you or others such as yourself did blog about success stories, or real-world experiences in General, other engineers would perhaps have a more sober perspective of the bleeding edge and would make more informed decisions when deciding to switch stacks instead of just "hey its cool and the latest fad".
Again, I don't really expect you to change your behavior at all, this is just a description of what happens in aggregate.
Re: Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Plenty of us are using the latest technologies to push our particular domains forward but we aren’t writing blogs or evangelizing. This doesn’t mean we are in the dark. It just means we get stuff done. It doesn’t mean we don’t have skills. What it does mean is I don’t need google or stack overflow to write my code for me. I can solve my own problems thank you. So, I think I am pretty well balanced.
Nobody was implying that the "Dark matter" devs do not get stuff done or don't have the skills, you missed the argument of the article.
Right, but some of the comments on HN imply that is the way people think - that most dark matter devs are using old code bases, or don't have the skills to be on the leading edge.
Re: Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)
#48Re: Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)
#49I've seen this article before. A lot of people that are active on the internet like to assume that everyone is using the latest tech and can just use whatever tech they like. This is rarely the case. I've spent the majority of my career tending to old code bases. There is a lot of legacy code that is still working fine. There is a lot of old C# code bases that are working exactly as intended in now unsupported .NET v…
The phrase “old C# code bases” makes me feel incredibly old.
It's almost 20 years old. That said, many of the languages considered hip are older (Python, Ruby, Javascript, etc)
Re: Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's why the JVM (and platforms with a similar philosophy), to me, is the best runtime there can be. Sure, there's fancy state-of-the-art stuff being integrated into it; but the most compelling feature is the continuing commitment to making dusty old jars work, unmodified.
For the most part the situation is the same with .NET. Any code written in .NET 2.0 should work with 4.7. The newer .NET Core most stuff is now compatible and it is pretty easy to write code that is compatible. Stuff that isn't compatible normally needs you to install a compat shim that Microsoft provides, but I've not needed them so far. My major frustration is with the JS frameworks. I wrote some perfectly good Ang…
I haven't been working with .NET for very long, but my experience is that mixing .NET Core and .NET Framework leads frequently to very confusing, inscrutable error messages about incompatibility between the two. Though if it builds it works fine.