Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)

hanselman.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 94 posts

Re: Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)

#61

Post by sjclemmy »

IceDane wrote: post #24
Davertron wrote: post #7

The fact that you go mostly "unseen" online seems completely orthogonal to whether you love programming and keep up with the latest technologies, etc. I would consider myself "dark matter" in the respect that no one knows who I am and I'm not constantly blogging or tweeting about stuff. That doesn't mean I'm not interested in, passionate about and highly competent in technology. I find it kind of insulting actually t…

I think that by virtue of being here to comment at all, you are not one of these dark matter devs. The group of people he is describing I think largely don't bother to come to communities like this. They do their job, go home and only know about developments in tech if it is relevant to their job and most likely because it comes through in-house channels. I know a lot of people like this. Many of them aren't even awa…

I don’t think it’s about ability or interest. It’s about presence. There’s loads of developers out there with a range of skills. I work with devs who are great who you’ve never heard of and others who aren’t so great who you’ve never heard of. I’d consider myself in the 99%. I aspire to market myself but I’ve got lots of interests and I’m quite a private person so I find marketing myself in conflict with that aspect of my personality. But get me one to one and I’ll happily talk about my latest interest (which by the way is Directed Graphs).

Re: Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)

#62

Post by Animats »

The big mess seems to be in the CSS/Javascript space, where fad frameworks come and go rapidly. There's more change than improvement. Visually, most web pages haven't changed much, and web development has become much harder.

But we can now scroll forever. Slowly and jerkily.

On the language front, we really should have had a replacement for C/C++ by now. We don't. D never got traction. Go is mostly for web back ends, where it has really solid libraries heavily used within Google. Rust looked promising but was taken over by the "functional" crowd and is doomed to Haskell obscurity. C++ itself is now trying to fake ownership tracking at run time, with mediocre results. The abstractions always leak because too many old things need C pointers. Java was supposed to replace C/C++ but became tangled in its own libraries and ended up replacing COBOL.

There's been some progress. There's now grudging agreement that the way to go is type declarations with some type inference. Having to type everything is too much of a pain. Not typing anything makes for unreadable programs. Function definitions really do need type info. So C++ added "auto" and Python added "advisory typing", moving both towards the center. Which is about where Go started.

Re: Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)

#63

Post by rowanG077 »

mtbcoder wrote: post #60
rowanG077 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they are not really "code". Just like I don't consider someone making cookies from ready cookie dough a baker.

I mean, the underlying code base is still PHP (granted the code base is awful) but there's a lot of Java spaghetti code out there too you know.

Yes each of those websites still use PHP under the hood. But by that argument each of those websites can be counted as using C as well. As well as machine code.

It has nothing to do with the code being spaghetti or not. It's about a level of abstraction where I no longer consider something made with wordpress as something created with PHP. The PHP was allready created and then someone just clicked a few menus to choose what existing PHP he or she wanted.

The more fitting category would be just calling such websites "Wordpress" websites and not PHP websites.

Re: Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)

#64

Post by jcoffland »

progval wrote: post #15
acollins1331 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It is absolutely infuriating when an API is changed when the old API was working perfectly well. Good thing Google is reading this.

Do they care if the old API was working, if it didn't make them (enough) money?

This is why your software should avoid relying on cloud services that you have little or no control over.

Re: Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)

#65

Post by davnicwil »

Animats wrote: post #62

The big mess seems to be in the CSS/Javascript space, where fad frameworks come and go rapidly. There's more change than improvement. Visually, most web pages haven't changed much, and web development has become much harder. But we can now scroll forever. Slowly and jerkily. On the language front, we really should have had a replacement for C/C++ by now. We don't. D never got traction. Go is mostly for web back ends,…

> Visually, most web pages haven't changed much, and web development has become much harder.

Both true, yet engineers keep switching to newer frameworks and libraries anyway, rather than sticking with what they have and just building stuff.

The question then becomes, assuming they are rational, why?

I'll propose at least one major reason: efficiency. What's improving isn't what is possible to build with these technologies, but how effectively those things can be built, to a reasonable degree of reliability, in the same amount of time, even accounting for the greater difficulty in learning and using the technologies.

That's where progress is being made here. Not in the what but in the how easily, how quickly, how well. You could do anything you can do in React (say) with vanilla JS, imperatively updating the DOM with cumbersome APIs etc. The question is how much longer would it take / what more could you have built in that time using React.

Re: Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)

#66

Post by bmurphy1976 »

Animats wrote: post #62

The big mess seems to be in the CSS/Javascript space, where fad frameworks come and go rapidly. There's more change than improvement. Visually, most web pages haven't changed much, and web development has become much harder. But we can now scroll forever. Slowly and jerkily. On the language front, we really should have had a replacement for C/C++ by now. We don't. D never got traction. Go is mostly for web back ends,…

>Rust looked promising but was taken over by the "functional" crowd and is doomed to Haskell obscurity.

I think that's unfair and inaccurate. Rust is going to remain niche because most developers are happy with garbage collected languages and have no need to switch to Rust. Rust will eat a bit into C++'s domain, but I don't think it'll ever take over the world. GC is good enough, works great now and worked great 20 years ago.

Re: Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)

#67

Post by jcoffland »

fxtentacle wrote: post #31

I 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.

Once I learned to listen to incompetent users, I started to create usable software.

My gut reaction is still, "RTFM you're doing it wrong." But now I follow that up by figuring out how to make the software work like the user thought it should or I change it so they never get in the frustrating situation in the first place.

What I finally realized was that if one person got frustrated enough with my software that they took the trouble to post an incoherent and technically incorrect rant on Github then it's likely that 100s more users had similar problems and said nothing.

Now I receive effusive emails about my Open-Source almost weekly.

Re: Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)

#68

Post by davesmith1983 »

rowanG077 wrote: post #63
mtbcoder wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, the underlying code base is still PHP (granted the code base is awful) but there's a lot of Java spaghetti code out there too you know.

Yes each of those websites still use PHP under the hood. But by that argument each of those websites can be counted as using C as well. As well as machine code. It has nothing to do with the code being spaghetti or not. It's about a level of abstraction where I no longer consider something made with wordpress as something created with PHP. The PHP was allready created and then someone just clicked a few menus to choo…

The categorisation you are trying to make us accept is ridiculous.

I can deploy a python web application I have written to a new web server within minutes by clicking deploy in bitbucket.

So using your definition:

* The code is already written.

* I clicked a few menus and I had the python code I wanted running.

It isn't a python application. However the web application when it receives a request will run python code. It is clearly a python based web application.

Re: Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)

#69

Post by rowanG077 »

davesmith1983 wrote: post #68
rowanG077 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes each of those websites still use PHP under the hood. But by that argument each of those websites can be counted as using C as well. As well as machine code. It has nothing to do with the code being spaghetti or not. It's about a level of abstraction where I no longer consider something made with wordpress as something created with PHP. The PHP was allready created and then someone just clicked a few menus to choo…

The categorisation you are trying to make us accept is ridiculous. I can deploy a python web application I have written to a new web server within minutes by clicking deploy in bitbucket. So using your definition: * The code is already written. * I clicked a few menus and I had the python code I wanted running. It isn't a python application. However the web application when it receives a request will run python code.…

I wouldn't consider it python code if it is a cookie cutter website where the creator didn't have to write a single line of python. It's not about deployment it's about the process of creation. Why don't you consider each and every website running PHP also a C website?

Re: Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)

#70

Post by fxtentacle »

jcoffland wrote: post #67
fxtentacle wrote: post #31

I 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. Once I learned to listen to incompetent users, I started to create usable software. My gut reaction is still, "RTFM you're doing it wrong." But now I follow that up by figuring out how to make the software work like the user thought it should or I chan…

I fully agree with you that listening to users is the best way to create usable software.

But after reading the article, I thought that the 99% number was about developers not joining the discussion with other developers. And for that purpose, I'm not sure if open source is still a good idea.

Post reply on HN