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Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

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Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#51

Post by throwanem »

EpicEng wrote: post #46

Please. Reduction to absurdity isn't a valid argument. Are those folks working at large scales? Are they tuning DB's for applications which have to handle hundreds of thousands or millions of transactions per second? I don't imagine you actually know what you're talking about here.

> Reducing anything to absurdity isn't a valid argument.

You're absolutely right! That applies to frontend dev, too. Anything is easy at trivial scale. Comparing trivial frontend dev to nontrivial everything else does nothing to advance the conversation.

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#53

Post by [deleted] »

EpicEng wrote: post #19
Zyst wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twentysomething year old here, so you know, not like you don't have a point but: >the other reason is because it's easy/boring as hell I legitimately think front end development is not only very fun, it can have some really challenging aspects. I wouldn't think there's any programming challenge that is inherently easier because it's on web as opposed to something else. Of course I bet there are domain-specific tasks…

Well, sorry, but... it is. Maybe you find it interesting, that's subjective, but there's no real technical challenge in front end stuff. You're not solving hard engineering problems; you're pasting together libraries other people wrote on top of libraries other people wrote (and on it goes) and searching google to figure out why your opaque stack doesn't seem to be working. Developing a good UI is difficult, no quest…

[deleted]

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#55

Post by EpicEng »

throwanem wrote: post #51
EpicEng wrote: post #46

Please. Reduction to absurdity isn't a valid argument. Are those folks working at large scales? Are they tuning DB's for applications which have to handle hundreds of thousands or millions of transactions per second? I don't imagine you actually know what you're talking about here.

> Reducing anything to absurdity isn't a valid argument. You're absolutely right! That applies to frontend dev, too. Anything is easy at trivial scale. Comparing trivial frontend dev to nontrivial everything else does nothing to advance the conversation.

No, not everything is trivial at small scale. Scale is not everything in software development, it just happens to be the most common hard problem web devs will face. There's a whole world of software out there that isn't web development. Some problems are just hard, regardless of scale.

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#56

Post by RandomOpinion »

JSDave wrote: post #42
EpicEng wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, sorry, but... it is. Maybe you find it interesting, that's subjective, but there's no real technical challenge in front end stuff. You're not solving hard engineering problems; you're pasting together libraries other people wrote on top of libraries other people wrote (and on it goes) and searching google to figure out why your opaque stack doesn't seem to be working. Developing a good UI is difficult, no quest…

Ok, then backend folks just do API integrations and database guys just make tables, no real technical challenges anywhere. Anybody getting stuff done is pasting together libraries.

>Ok, then backend folks just do API integrations and database guys just make tables, no real technical challenges anywhere. Anybody getting stuff done is pasting together libraries.

The original poster said nothing about frontend vs. backend. Still, you're absolutely correct, backend work is mostly gluing together pre-built libraries and software too.

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#57

Post by WildUtah »

EpicEng wrote: post #46

Please. Reduction to absurdity isn't a valid argument. Are those folks working at large scales? Are they tuning DB's for applications which have to handle hundreds of thousands or millions of transactions per second? I don't imagine you actually know what you're talking about here.

Reduction to absurdity isn't a valid argument.

The Wik says Aristotle called it "ἐις ἀτοπον ἀπαγωγή" and reductio ad absurdum has been considered an important and valid form of argument for at least 2500 years. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#58

Post by RandomOpinion »

dkarapetyan wrote: post #7

This statement is false > Half of what a programmer knows will be useless in 10 years. and the rest of the article seems to be based on it so it negates much of what is said. Foundational knowledge does not decay. Knowing how to estimate the scalability of a given design never gets old. Knowing fundamental concurrency concepts never gets old. Knowing the fundamentals of logic programming and how backtracking works ne…

While I agree with the rest, there is one nit I must pick regarding:

>This statement is false: "Half of what a programmer knows will be useless in 10 years."

The idea of a half-life of working knowledge has been around for decades; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-life_of_knowledge

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#59

Post by nostrademons »

EpicEng wrote: post #47
sotojuan wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's engineering challenges in frontend but they only apply to Facebook-tier scale. There's also cooler stuff like data visualization, advanced animations/design and WebGL but those seem to be done by designers. For most of us, it truly is gluing X framework to Y backend over and over again.

Sure, but even then I wonder how much of that complexity (the scaling bit) is actually implemented by the front end devs. I would assume that it's handled on the back end, but of course a UI like FB, used by 1.7 billion people, can't be an easy thing to design.

At least at Google, "front end dev" extended down to the webserver tier, written in C++/Java. You were expected to make any changes necessary inside the webserver to complete your feature. That's part of what made hiring so hard: the number of devs who know Javascript and C++ and have their algorithms down cold is relatively low.

I imagine it's fairly similar at Facebook.

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#60

Post by WildUtah »

rmason wrote: post #26

Only in two professions pro athletics and computer programming is forty years old.

Only in two professions pro athletics and computer programming is forty years old.

Also, forty is old in the oldest profession that those two most resemble in their degree of exploitation and social stigma.

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