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Kinda a Big Announcement

joelonsoftware.com

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Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#61

Post by davnicwil »

arduinomancer wrote: post #53

> some things (like handing a file upload, or centering) that were, shockingly, still just as randomly difficult as they were in VBScript twenty years ago. I don't get why the "centering is hard" trope is still being repeated in 2021. I'm a recent new grad front end dev and have never had issues with this. Hasn't it been years at this point since flex-box became standard?

You're not wrong, but you may be reading it in the wrong tone.

There is a certain type of joke where the punchline is something that was true for so long, it's acceptable to repeat it ironically as a sort of inside joke, knowing it is obviously not true any more. Best pulled off if you were actually there, of course. I think that's what's going on here.

Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#62

Post by a1369209993 »

cactus2093 wrote: post #54
necovek wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, Google returning SO answers for something that is exactly not what I am looking for instead of language/library reference documentation as it used to is one the most annoying things for me as a developer today. Though I think that's mostly on Google "optimizing" my queries by dumbing them down. As an example, try looking for "python setattr" in your search engine of choice, and look for python.org docum…

I also frequently run into the situation where I Google something, there is a perfect match on a SO question, but then the answer is "Actually, you don't want to do that thing you asked about, here is a different solution for your specific scenario". But often that alternative solution is not relevant in the general case, and there really are good reasons to want to do the thing as originally asked in the question. B…

> there is a perfect match on a SO question, but then the answer is "Actually, you don't want to do that thing you asked about, here is a different solution for your specific scenario".

That describes seemingly every Stack Overflow question I've found in the past four years. SO is basically useless for anything advanced enough to need SO.

Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#63

Post by stingraycharles »

tdeck wrote: post #13

> almost anyone I talk to is too young to imagine The Days Before Stack Overflow, when the bookstore had an entire wall of Java and the way you picked a Rich Text Editor was going to Barnes and Noble and browsing through printed books for an hour, in the Rich Text Editor Component shelf. I remember the "Days Before Stack Overflow" and Joel is giving himself a bit too much credit here. Before SO, when I googled a prob…

Yup. I remember in 2005 I was teaching my fellow students a “debugging” course, which was of course not normally part of a curriculum. It basically involved “copy / paste your compiler error into Google and tada.wav, you’ll have mailing lists or Usenet or blog posts about your issues”.

SO changed some of that landscape, but it was mostly a better ExpertsExchange.

Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#64

Post by topsteplocal »

tdeck wrote: post #13

> almost anyone I talk to is too young to imagine The Days Before Stack Overflow, when the bookstore had an entire wall of Java and the way you picked a Rich Text Editor was going to Barnes and Noble and browsing through printed books for an hour, in the Rich Text Editor Component shelf. I remember the "Days Before Stack Overflow" and Joel is giving himself a bit too much credit here. Before SO, when I googled a prob…

For me it was usenet and IRC... I still remember discovering usenet and the incredible resources on comp.lang.c++.moderated... those were the good ol' days where reputation was based on people recognizing you and not based on some score / number of followers...

Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#65

Post by OJFord »

necovek wrote: post #30
tdeck wrote: post #13

> almost anyone I talk to is too young to imagine The Days Before Stack Overflow, when the bookstore had an entire wall of Java and the way you picked a Rich Text Editor was going to Barnes and Noble and browsing through printed books for an hour, in the Rich Text Editor Component shelf. I remember the "Days Before Stack Overflow" and Joel is giving himself a bit too much credit here. Before SO, when I googled a prob…

To be honest, Google returning SO answers for something that is exactly not what I am looking for instead of language/library reference documentation as it used to is one the most annoying things for me as a developer today. Though I think that's mostly on Google "optimizing" my queries by dumbing them down. As an example, try looking for "python setattr" in your search engine of choice, and look for python.org docum…

> As an example, try looking for "python setattr" in your search engine of choice,

!python setattr

Or am I not allowed to add a character? :)

Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#66

Post by jamesmontalvo3 »

a1369209993 wrote: post #62
cactus2093 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also frequently run into the situation where I Google something, there is a perfect match on a SO question, but then the answer is "Actually, you don't want to do that thing you asked about, here is a different solution for your specific scenario". But often that alternative solution is not relevant in the general case, and there really are good reasons to want to do the thing as originally asked in the question. B…

> there is a perfect match on a SO question, but then the answer is "Actually, you don't want to do that thing you asked about, here is a different solution for your specific scenario". That describes seemingly every Stack Overflow question I've found in the past four years. SO is basically useless for anything advanced enough to need SO.

Perhaps there’s a point at which you become advanced enough to not need SO. I’m certainly not there after a decade of software development. Do I have to dig a bit sometimes and go beyond the first few results on google? Sure. And if that doesn’t work I submit a question. I normally get an answer fairly quickly.

Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#67

Post by svachalek »

arduinomancer wrote: post #53

> some things (like handing a file upload, or centering) that were, shockingly, still just as randomly difficult as they were in VBScript twenty years ago. I don't get why the "centering is hard" trope is still being repeated in 2021. I'm a recent new grad front end dev and have never had issues with this. Hasn't it been years at this point since flex-box became standard?

Standard? I'd be happy if 10% of my interview candidates could do a flex layout.

Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#68

Post by dsjoerg »

arduinomancer wrote: post #53

> some things (like handing a file upload, or centering) that were, shockingly, still just as randomly difficult as they were in VBScript twenty years ago. I don't get why the "centering is hard" trope is still being repeated in 2021. I'm a recent new grad front end dev and have never had issues with this. Hasn't it been years at this point since flex-box became standard?

Google doesn't seem to think it's standard: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=how+to+...

Do you accept this as relevant evidence about what is standard? (Or would a different search be better?)

Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#69

Post by bena »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #11

> Where are the flying cars? Understanding why we don't have flying cars will tell you how the entire world works. It turns out that "progress" has nothing to do with "want", and more to do with need, availability, and timing. > They lack the structure to make the data they contain readily accessed programatically, so step one is miserable screen scraping and data cleanup. That’s where a lot of people give up. > We t…

All of those address the issue from the other side.

If I'm aware of the Semantic Web, agree with their conclusions, and wish to do so, I can make my site Semantic. That's true. And if I wanted to publish data and make sure others could access it, I would.

It's not required however. And if I want to make my data only accessible through my portal, I have a vested interest in making my site as anti-Semantic as possible. Like I don't think Multiple Listing Service (MLS) companies would ever make their sites Semantic. Nor would any company that consumes their data (like Zillow or Realtor). It's the data itself that has value, so they want to put hoops in front of it.

But it's technically publically available data that they're publishing for free. Technically, if you acquire the facts themselves, it doesn't matter how, they can't do anything to you if you redistribute that data. The only thing they can do is make their site as difficult as possible to scrape.

Then there are the sites that don't care either way and making their site Semantic is only additional work. For example: Lego's storefront. All of that information is from their databases. They already have the information and don't care whether or not someone else has access to it. The information provides little to no value. So they have no incentive to invest resources in making that data more easily available to others.

So to get the information from these sites, you have to scrape. It's unfortunate, it's miserable, but those are the facts.

Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#70

Post by iainmerrick »

johnfn wrote: post #24
bosswipe wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I definitely used to buy and read more books back then, and documentation in general. Maybe that was a good thing.

I feel like this argument is akin to "back before cars, I used to walk all the time, and I was in much better shape." There's nothing to stop you from going and doing it again!

Well, yes and no... As an Apple developer, I used to be able to rely entirely on Inside Macintosh books because Apple’s docs were the best in the business, probably the best ever. Nowadays, even if I wanted to rely on Apple’s own documentation, I can’t, because the docs are just no good any more.

(Their header files are still very informative! But much less so in the Swift era, sadly...)

To use your analogy, I’d really like to walk as much as I used to, but they ripped up all the walkable districts to build highways!

I don’t think things are bad across the board, at least. For example, you can get a very long way in Javascript purely from MDN rather than needing SO.

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