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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

#401

Post by Avalaxy »

I'm a freelancer in data engineering / machine learning engineer. I've so far never held a role that I had the technical skills for (well... I do have the underlying knowledge, but not the particular frameworks/tools), because every time my freelance project ends and I'm looking for the next one, the tools have already changed to something else that is hip. Or the go-to architecture is now a different one. Or the way you deploy it all is completely different.

It's pretty frustrating. I keep trying to do courses to keep my skills up-to-date, but it doesn't matter. Those courses by themselves are already outdated a year later. The only things that have been solid in my career, is the CS knowledge and theoretical knowledge from books like 'designing data intensive applications'. That stuff rarely changes. The rest is like waves in a sea. They come and go.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#402

Post by metafunctor »

The stickiest code I ever wrote was an open source library released in 2000 or thereabouts. It’s still in use, and still new users are adopting it. Someone made a Wikipedia page for it. I think it’s embedded in most Apple products.

Other than that, yeah, most of what I’ve made is no longer used by any significant number of people.

Not sure if there’s any wisdom to draw from this anecdote, but I did spend a lot of cycles in trying to perfect that library!

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#403

Post by FpUser »

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…

>"It seems like there's a lot of people in the Java community who still think OO is a great idea."

Java is not the only language in existence and the OO is a great idea as well as many other paradigms when not being overused. Problem is with the programmers who learn one language / paradigm and would fight tooth and nails to solve all world problems with it no matter how poor for particular case.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#404

Post by jcranmer »

josephg wrote: post #306
klibertp wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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: “…

> 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 for one would rather punch the person who proposes such a global function as the only mechanism for conversion, because charset conversion is a reasonable thing to do on chunked partial inputs, and maintaining the state for conversion yourself is actually quite painful. Wrapping a stream converter into a one-shot function is much easier than the reverse, wrapping a one-shot function in a stream converter.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#405

Post by capitainenemo »

BigJ1211 wrote: post #307
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…

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.

https://kyren.github.io/2018/09/14/rustconf-talk.html I rather liked kyren's keynote. It's particularly focused on games, but some of the same issues arise in other complex apps.

"Rust highly rewards data-oriented design with simple, understandable ownership semantics, and this is great news because this is a really good fit for game development. I suspect this is also true generally, not just for game development! (but what do I know?)"

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#406

Post by Izkata »

za3faran wrote: post #285
josephg wrote: post #228

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

JVM startup time is how it got that reputation, I'm guessing benchmarks tend to exclude that.

Back in the early/mid 2000s, Java-based applications often had a Java splashscreen as it loaded, so even non-technical people made the association.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#407

Post by Izkata »

peterfirefly wrote: post #109
chrisco255 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's comforting to think that 2000 years from now, all that may remain of the early web and modern culture is the Space Jam website. Maybe Space Jam the movie will be looked at as our Gilgamesh or Iliad.

And the Galaxy Quest site -- will people in the future know it is a parody? http://www.questarian.com/

Well that's just disappointing:

> Greater then [an error occurred while processing this directive] Pages requested since December 28, 1999

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#408

Post by cameronh90 »

MartinMcGirk wrote: post #18

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…

Consider constructions that have survived thousands of years such as the Tarr Steps or Stonehenge, or more recent constructions such as roman roads, Dunfermline Abbey or St Bartholemew's Hospital.

These sorts of constructions have been repaired and re-set hundreds of times over their existence, and have sometimes gone through periods of destruction during war and natural disasters, disrepair then subsequent periods of restoration and reuse. At a certain point, very little or nothing of the original construction really remains, but you can nevertheless draw a line through hundreds or thousands of years of history.

Software may be more like this: continually rebuilt and maintained, but still physically or philosophically related back to some original construction. Nobody uses Multics any more, but almost everything in use today is derived from it in some way.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#409

Post by klibertp »

Izkata wrote: post #400
raverbashing wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “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. Lol true Don't forget all the getters and setters merely updating/reading a variable Python says "explicit is better than implicit" but Java goes too far with it, and in the most verbose/inflexible ways possible

> Don't forget all the getters and setters merely updating/reading a variable > and in the most verbose/inflexible ways possible It's actually extra flexibility meant for two things: being able to override the getter/setter in a subclass, and keeping a consistent interface so users don't need to change how it's called if there was a refactor that adds something to the getter/setter (such as transforming the value bec…

> these Java conventions started when no such thing existed in the language.

Is there language support for these in the newer Java versions (I'm not up to date with newer features, since I won't be able to use them on Android anyway)? The reason for these getters/setters is as you said: a workaround for the language deficiencies. It's true for quite a few patterns, and it's not unique to Java; you get similar (in nature) patterns emerging in all languages. Greenspun's tenth rule and all that.

What's problematic is porting these workarounds wholesale to languages that don't have the limitations that originally led to their creation. In Kotlin, for example, every property has an implicit getter and setter, by default - you can override either easily with a dedicated syntax. In that case, insisting on writing explicit methods for getters and setters is simply a misuse of the language. Same in Python, as you note, where you can replace direct access to object attribute with a property without changing the user-facing interface of a class. I think JS also developed a feature like this? It's kind of impressive the OO languages managed to get this so wrong for so long, even though Smalltalk got it right in the 70s...

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#410

Post by veidr »

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…

Indeed. We moved off of JIRA years ago, but not that many years ago that this isn't still funny every time I think of it:

    veidr 2016-08-22
    Haha, JIRA is very "enterprisey":
    > Unable to find source-code formatter 
    > for language: python. Available 
    > languages are: actionscript, html, 
    > java, javascript, none, sql, xhtml, xml
That's me commenting, but I can find it easily whenever I want just by searching my company's chat for "XHTML".

We were using their hosted service, and it was a dumpster fire inside a meth lab...

(I did have a fine experience with JIRA before, though I want to say it was 20+ years ago (?) but my takeaway was that you needed a full-time JIRA admin person (and of course back then "on-premises" wasn't a thing, because it was the only thing...))

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