71–80 of 94 posts
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The phrase “old C# code bases” makes me feel incredibly old.
It's almost 20 years old. That said, many of the languages considered hip are older (Python, Ruby, Javascript, etc)
I've seen this article before. A lot of people that are active on the internet like to assume that everyone is using the latest tech and can just use whatever tech they like. This is rarely the case. I've spent the majority of my career tending to old code bases. There is a lot of legacy code that is still working fine. There is a lot of old C# code bases that are working exactly as intended in now unsupported .NET v…
That's why the JVM (and platforms with a similar philosophy), to me, is the best runtime there can be. Sure, there's fancy state-of-the-art stuff being integrated into it; but the most compelling feature is the continuing commitment to making dusty old jars work, unmodified.
Naturally I try to learn about everything that pops up, languages, trends, whatever.
But is a peace of mind of staying with such platform languages, while watching others coming and going, really feels gratifying to me.
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It's almost 20 years old. That said, many of the languages considered hip are older (Python, Ruby, Javascript, etc)
I started out working with .NET and C# in early 2001, feels like yesterday but suddenly it's ~18 years O_o.
That's a nice way to describe something, but it doesn't have to be a problem. Some devs around me (partially me too) just doesn't want to tweet or write blogs about tech, yet we could work in bleeding edge tech or writing cobol at the same time. Some people maybe don't need help, guidance, or something like that, maybe just maybe we like the things as they are now. Maybe we'll start doing all of social stuff some day…
While this is perfectly fine for you and for everyone who makes this understandable decision, what tends to happen is that people learning about bleeding edge of technology tend to have very different perception of what bleeding edge tech is. Every new buzzy technology is so oversold that it makes developers overly cynical and disappointed when it doesn't deliver on the promises made. If you or others such as yoursel…
There are stories which could certainly help engineers around the globe, but those friends of mine just doesn't feel any emerging feeling to write about it.
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"…
Rails has a very predictable cadence (once a year) and a published support policy. https://guides.rubyonrails.org/maintenance_policy.html > RoR has breaking API changes often enough ... magically break that often According to the support policy, nothing magic about those breaking changes: "Breaking changes are paired with deprecation notices in the previous minor or major release."
That said, I was referring more to the Ruby on Rails ecosystem in general. Our production deployment has 80 gems, which I'd say is a normal number for a big Rails webapp, and sadly many of them do not follow semantic versioning, so that minor gem version updates might contain unexpected breaking changes for us.
The advantage that old languages like PHP or C++ have here is that their standard libraries have been around for so long that the API rarely changes these days.
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"…
Is PHP still a thing?
On the other hand, not even using a service like Heroku can save us from constantly having to patch or update the Rails apps.
That's a nice way to describe something, but it doesn't have to be a problem. Some devs around me (partially me too) just doesn't want to tweet or write blogs about tech, yet we could work in bleeding edge tech or writing cobol at the same time. Some people maybe don't need help, guidance, or something like that, maybe just maybe we like the things as they are now. Maybe we'll start doing all of social stuff some day…
While this is perfectly fine for you and for everyone who makes this understandable decision, what tends to happen is that people learning about bleeding edge of technology tend to have very different perception of what bleeding edge tech is. Every new buzzy technology is so oversold that it makes developers overly cynical and disappointed when it doesn't deliver on the promises made. If you or others such as yoursel…
I've been in some projects where more experienced team members very clearly reminded everyone that technology X would not be useful here, but others on the team just resented them for disallowing the cool stuff.
So this could also be a conflict between the company's goals (stable product) and the individuals' goals (cool CV).
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Nobody was implying that the "Dark matter" devs do not get stuff done or don't have the skills, you missed the argument of the article.
Right, but some of the comments on HN imply that is the way people think - that most dark matter devs are using old code bases, or don't have the skills to be on the leading edge.
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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?
So if I got someone else to press the deploy button in bitbucket, it suddenly isn't python code? That doesn't make sense does it?
> Why don't you consider each and every website running PHP also a C website?
The web site/app logic is written in PHP, not C. The runtime for the vast majority of PHP deployments happens to be written in C.
Additionally while I did say interpreted earlier that really isn't true anymore. PHP runtimes these days tend to break the PHP script down into byte-code. There are alternative runtimes for PHP just as there is Java or .NET.
There are at least 4 I can think of. Two of those aren't C (C++ and .NET). However there is nothing stopping you from writing a runtime that runs on the JVM / Lisp / Go / Brainfuck / Lol code / 68k assembler.
I keep up with modern tech. I regularly learn new languages and frameworks. I lead agile dev teams. I work as a consultant modernizing devops and moving to cloud deployments. I write real software for real businesses doing real things. I don't blog. I don't go to conferences. I don't go to hackathons. I don't have any meaningful presence on GitHub. Hacker News is about the only place I have even the slightest footpri…
> If you spend all your time trying to prove to strangers that you're hip to the latest trends, just how much time are you spending doing anything of actual value? This is something I've wondered about a lot of social media users to be honest. I mean, if you're seeming spending all day on Twitter or what not, how are you finding the time to actually do any work? Do any of these super outgoing social media addicted co…
I would absolutely hate it to be interrupted in the middle of a good coding session by someone who wants to talk to me on twitter about the hype of the day.