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My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

blog.visionarycto.com

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Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#71

Post by KerrAvon »

chasil wrote: post #9

Brian Kenighan wistfully removed the lex/yacc parser in the OneTrueAwk many years ago, and replaced it with a custom parser (I believe for performance reasons). The OneTrueAwk remains the standard awk in BSD, renewed, but not replaced. I don't think it's going anywhere. The POSIX standards, flawed as they may be, have incredible staying power. These standards run our phones and embedded, supercomputers, current Apple…

Counterpoint: POSIX is increasingly a creaky anachronism required to support a legacy base of old Unix software. Every modern Unix-derivative OS replaces or significantly augments core POSIX functionality with something that works better for modern hardware and software needs, or suffers in some areas if they don’t/can’t.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#72

Post by nostrademons »

smackeyacky wrote: post #14

I am somewhat amazed at the list of tech from that article, it's like he has a magical knack for picking dead ends. C was the 2nd language I learned and I'm still using it. The big surprise for me has been javascript - it's so...bad it became good or at least ubiquitous.

C and Javascript are both worse-is-better languages, as is SQL. They have known gotchas and quirks and lots of them. But they basically work, they were good enough, and because of that they became so ubiquitous that it's impossible to replace them.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#73

Post by ThePhysicist »

I think it's normal. Some systems I've built were quite sticky in the sense that they started as prototypes to be scrapped once we figure out the "real" system architecture, and 8 years later they're still in use and integrated into dozens of business processes, so hard to replace.

In general, looking back at old code I wrote it seems my solutions were better when I was more naive / less experienced, as I would often go for the immediately obvious and simple solution (which is the right one in 90 % of cases). Working many years in software development and reading HN seems to have made me more insecure regarding software, as I tend to over-engineer systems and constantly doubt / second-guess my technical decisions. So one thing I'm actively trying to do is to go back to using simpler approaches again, and caring less about perfect code.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#75

Post by dagss »

djbusby wrote: post #31
29athrowaway wrote: post #15

What do all these things have in common? MS Visual Basic 6, MS ActiveX, MS Silverlight, MS Visual Foxpro, MS C# .NET Compact Framework, MS ASP.NET WebForms, MS ASP.NET MVC, MS Windows Communication Foundation... I think there common is a theme there. But shhh, don't tell him.

Why not just say what's common (over hyped dead-ends)? Snark don't make you sound smarter.

Microsoft.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#76

Post by froh »

chasil wrote: post #9

Brian Kenighan wistfully removed the lex/yacc parser in the OneTrueAwk many years ago, and replaced it with a custom parser (I believe for performance reasons). The OneTrueAwk remains the standard awk in BSD, renewed, but not replaced. I don't think it's going anywhere. The POSIX standards, flawed as they may be, have incredible staying power. These standards run our phones and embedded, supercomputers, current Apple…

> that are not Linux, but serviced by the Windows kernel's POSIX layer under WSL1.

that's not how that works.

wsl is a Linux kernel running under a hypervisor integrated with windows.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#78

Post by asdfman123 »

Gigachad wrote: post #69
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…

I think this is by far the most common outcome for work. A chefs product only lasts an hour at most. Most jobs don’t create anything other than a temporary service.

That’s because most of the things we need are temporary services, of course. You need dinner. And gas to get to work. And a roof that will last 10 years. Etc.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#79

Post by asdfman123 »

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #34

Everyone one that has counter examples thinking they prove the opposite, are just not waiting long enough. All the kids think they will be young forever. Can't blame MS for new JS libraries every month, or a new language released every month. This web site is dedicated to people showing off things they created, which replace something that turns into debt, and in turn also become flavor of the month. Yes, biased old…

It’s so weird, I used to be much more of STEM triumphalist, the kind of person who used to think the past was evil and the future can’t come fast enough.

I wouldn’t consider myself conservative by any means but increasingly in 30s I’m beginning to think everyone needs to stop messing with stuff and accept imperfection.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#80

Post by asdfman123 »

hedora wrote: post #5

The fun thing is that, until CS slows down, stuff gets better so fast that we get to reimplement the same thing, but 10x better every 5 years or so. First I wrote single threaded code code with automatic memory management, then single threaded synchronous with manual memory management, then synchronous multi-threaded, then async, and then async lock free. Now I am writing async lock free, and the compiler is helping…

How do you make 7 figures writing code and not sitting in meetings all day talking about eye gougingly boring business requirements?
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