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Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You

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Re: Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You

#51

It's odd to see an article emphasising backwards compatibility, but not a single mention of Microsoft (I even ctrl+F'd the page source to check!) They've regressed a bit in the recent years but I'd still consider MS the gold standard for back-compat. I have Win32 binaries I last modified over 15 years ago, small (or perhaps tiny - size measured in KBs) utilities that I use daily. They worked perfectly on Win95, and s…

> I'd still consider MS the gold standard for back-compat

No way! IBM mainframe (zSeries) is the gold standard for backward compatibility in IT.

Re: Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You

#52

So much ranting, yet not a single example of a GCP product that Google has actually killed. Got examples? I mean, there's stuff like Python 2 support being sunset on managed services, but as Yegge himself points out that's on Guido, not GCP.

No, the difference between python2 and python3 in the managed services goes much beyond unicode in the Google universe. The most obvious example is that in app engine standard python 2 you can send and receive emails while you need a third party service in python 3. In my other comment I've mentioned some other issues when Google start neglecting stuff.

Re: Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You

#54
post #35

I'd be interested in some concrete examples of things GCP have depreciated. I'm an (admittedly fairly light) user of GCP and haven't come across any myself.

I saw that he mentioned a few of them in the article. He writes:

I can tell you that virtually everything I’ve used, from networking (legacy to VPC) to storage (Cloud SQL v1 to v2) to Firebase (now Firestore with a totally different API) to App Engine (don’t even get me started) to Cloud Endpoints to... I dunno, _everything_, has forced me to rewrite it all after at most 2–3 years.

Re: Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You

#55
post #47

It's odd to see an article emphasising backwards compatibility, but not a single mention of Microsoft (I even ctrl+F'd the page source to check!) They've regressed a bit in the recent years but I'd still consider MS the gold standard for back-compat. I have Win32 binaries I last modified over 15 years ago, small (or perhaps tiny - size measured in KBs) utilities that I use daily. They worked perfectly on Win95, and s…

You missed this: > I’ll also give a shout-out to our friends in the Operating Systems business: Windows, Linux, NOT APPLE FUCK YOU APPLE, FreeBSD, and so on, for doing such a great job of backwards compatibility on their successful platforms. I share your desire for stability. I don't necessarily mind frequent updates for security reasons, but I'm getting to the point where if things are changing in big ways often, I…

OK but he talks about how Android OS has had backward compat for over ten years, but Windows has been doing it far longer and with a much bigger OS and more complex hardware base.

Re: Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You

#56
The mishandled Python 3 transition sure created a lot of pain (I experienced some of it, even though I only started with Python in 2016), but I never realized how much it hurt the language’s momentum. This must be one of the reasons why JavaScript is so popular today. JS benefits here from being run in browsers, which the author points out are fantastic at back compat, even as the dev culture surrounding the language doesn’t value it at all.

Re: Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You

#57

It's odd to see an article emphasising backwards compatibility, but not a single mention of Microsoft (I even ctrl+F'd the page source to check!) They've regressed a bit in the recent years but I'd still consider MS the gold standard for back-compat. I have Win32 binaries I last modified over 15 years ago, small (or perhaps tiny - size measured in KBs) utilities that I use daily. They worked perfectly on Win95, and s…

I think NetBSD, or any other BSD generally, is also pretty good with backwards compatibility. I run programs well over 15 yrs old using the latest kernels. If I need to, I can build any of the older kernels, too, because all the code is still readily available (=gold standard). Earliest one predates Win95.

Your Win32 binaries sound better than whatever software is being distributed by the companies today.

Re: Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You

#58

The answer to why this is, I’m beginning to realize after talking to dozens of Googlers working at Google as acquaintances, friends, former coworkers, HN comments and twitter personalities is - Google has an active disrespect if you’re not part of their in group . If you haven’t passed their tests, you’re basically an object of derision - a mark, an object just used for incrementing a CPM metric, or an incompetent, l…

On the other hand, when someone expresses an opinion like this, you never know if they were contacted at some point by a Google recruiter and ended up with a case of sour grapes. I had a phone conversation with a hiring manager once, and obviously I was not the right type or class or caste or something, but it wasn't a technical screen at all, so it's a mystery to me forever what exactly determined the "in group" as…

I've never been hired or approached by Google.

However, as a University lecturer I know a lot of people Google have employed. In my opinion, they have rejected some of the greatest students I have ever taught, and accepted some idiots who know how to speak well.

While they have employed some good people, I believe they purposefully taret the type of people who think working at Google makes you a fundamentally better person than anyone else, rather than the best programmers/researchers/AI/whatever.

Re: Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why don’t you move to google if you know they pay better?

I've studied hundreds of hours, failed HC for full time once and I've concluded that I'm mentally incapable of doing so (I blame my parents due to the slight heritability of IQ). "Just move" is something someone without any empathy for other people's circumstances would say - most people aren't capable of "just moving" as if the only concern is choosing an employer.

I worked at Facebook for years and did a lot of interviews and the hiring process has inconsistent results for all but the best and worst candidates. The amount of times a candidate was rejected because one iterviewer who had questionable rationale was surprising.

Re: Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You

#60

It's odd to see an article emphasising backwards compatibility, but not a single mention of Microsoft (I even ctrl+F'd the page source to check!) They've regressed a bit in the recent years but I'd still consider MS the gold standard for back-compat. I have Win32 binaries I last modified over 15 years ago, small (or perhaps tiny - size measured in KBs) utilities that I use daily. They worked perfectly on Win95, and s…

The absolute worst in my small experience with it is anything touching the node ecosystem. Try to follow any guide or use any library not updated in the last week and there will be breaking API changes and deprecation warnings everywhere.
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