My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated • Hacker News Board

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#581

Post by johncowan » Fri, May 19, 2023, 10:06 PM UTC

turtleyacht wrote: post #64

kragen wrote: post #53

a thing most of these have in common is that they're proprietary, so the users are dependent on the companies that own them for enhancements, bug fixes, and ports to new platforms. this is a recipe for wasting your time visual basic, asp, coldfusion, foxpro, activex, flash, and silverlight, windows ce, asp.net, webforms? proprietary, proprietary, proprietary, proprietary, proprietary, proprietary, proprietary, and pr…

> whose preferred programming editor is ex It's intriguing, because that implies he can work on most things in a way that "fits inside one's head." Do you know if he extensively calls out to external tools, custom aliases, and the like? I imagine there is some fullscreen mode where he can--temporarily--suspend ex, make use of custom sourced mappings, and the output is piped back into his editing session. It's hard to…

I'm the ex(1) troglodyte in question. I don't use custom aliases, because I have had all editing tasks hardwired into my brain for decades, ever since I dropped Teco for ed and then ex. (Ed is the standard editor, but I'm willing to trade off a little standardosity for added convenience.) If the te command had been widely available, I might have stayed with it and not used ex, but that day has passed.

I do pipe stuff through various commands more or less constantly. I most often pipeline through awk, sed, sort, uniq, cat -n, etc. I have a back-burner project to write a meta-editor that works by pipelining and maintains a whole persistent undo-redo history.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#582

Post by kragen » Sat, May 20, 2023, 4:18 AM UTC

johncowan wrote: post #581

turtleyacht wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> whose preferred programming editor is ex It's intriguing, because that implies he can work on most things in a way that "fits inside one's head." Do you know if he extensively calls out to external tools, custom aliases, and the like? I imagine there is some fullscreen mode where he can--temporarily--suspend ex, make use of custom sourced mappings, and the output is piped back into his editing session. It's hard to…

I'm the ex(1) troglodyte in question. I don't use custom aliases, because I have had all editing tasks hardwired into my brain for decades, ever since I dropped Teco for ed and then ex. (Ed is the standard editor, but I'm willing to trade off a little standardosity for added convenience.) If the te command had been widely available, I might have stayed with it and not used ex, but that day has passed. I do pipe stuff…

i was wondering too! thanks!

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#583

Post by harleypig » Sat, May 20, 2023, 11:19 PM UTC

tuchsen wrote: post #36

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…

People are commenting core OS libraries and kernels, but the Space Jam movie website from 96 is still up. I bet the guy that wrote that didn't think it'd be around nearly 20 years later, I hope it never goes down. https://www.spacejam.com/1996/jam.html

https://imdb.com started in 1990.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#584

Post by cies » Sun, May 21, 2023, 5:30 PM UTC

cbm-vic-20 wrote: post #272

cies wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too bad immutability breaks the quite-ubiquitous-in-JVM-land Bean spec (and I wonder what one was smoking before drawing that spec). I think having proper sum-types with pattern matching would have also made it a much better language.

It was designed when UML and tools like Rational Rose was being pushed hard by the big consulting firms on their clients as the One True Way to build Serious Business Software. JavaBeans was designed as a way to have a conventional interface that allows code components to be snapped into GUI applications. But someone thought it would be a great idea to use it everywhere else, too.

Can we all agree that the bean spec was not a good idea? No matter how old, or what other stupid ideas were fashionable back then. I cannot see how making things "beans" actually solves anything (besides maybe a slight reduction in boilerplate when (de)serializing bean-classes).

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#585

Post by FrustratedMonky » Thu, May 25, 2023, 11:13 AM UTC

revelio wrote: post #537

TRiG_Ireland wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If something is genuinely proven then everyone does actually accept it. This is demonstrably untrue. Vaccines. Evolution. Anthropogenic Global Warming.

Vaccines aren't proven compared to things like the color of the sky, are they? Who on earth still believes that after "95% effective against COVID infection and will end the pandemic" turned into whatever this week's version of the story is. COVID shots demonstrated unequivocally that scientists and officials will happily assert things with 100% certainty that are falsifiable, and then continue to assert them even af…

I don't think your take on vaccines is accurate. The recent handling of covid vaccines is being miss-understood because it was a fast moving and dynamic situation. There was an effort to provide information as it was being learned, with partial small studies. Knowledge was changing in front of us, and yet scientist are blamed for not being 100% accurate about everything instantly. But that is covid, there are many Republicans that also stopped giving kids measles and polio vaccines and then there were outbreaks. SO, yes, conservatives are wrong, they want to 'conserve' themselves to pre-scientific ways of life, where we ignore things we do know for fact. I'm not sure some of them do doubt that electrons exist.