Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018) • Hacker News Board

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#81

Post by jancsika » Sat, Apr 17, 2021, 7:10 PM UTC

> For instance, last week I was reading a post about the benefits of not using stylesheets and instead having inline styles for everything.

Back in the day, this probably meant one of a handful of things:

* manually writing all the HTML and putting the inline styles there

* some kind of PHP thingy where you would be essentially rolling your own CSS variables

* some kind of Perl thingy where a verySmart dev is trying to maintain an entire CMS using only regexes

Today, the user could be "having inline styles" in one of 10,000 frameworks-- Vue thingies, React thingies, or perhaps a build flag in a Javascript thingy that spits out a CSS thingy...

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#82

Post by grawprog » Sat, Apr 17, 2021, 7:11 PM UTC

yarcob wrote: post #56

grawprog wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love Linux based operating systems and I've used them pretty much exclusively for at least a decade now, and I agree with a lot of your post, but >By cutting away abstraction, I don't think I agree with this take. You haven't cut away abstraction, you've changed to a different kind of abstraction. Linux's 'everything is a file' abstraction is just that, an abstraction. >Linux is arranged masterfully, and makes the…

My early web dev experience was mostly just figuring out where the hell config and log files for apache, php and mysql were. If the docs told you the default location of the config file, you could be sure that on your distro they are somewhere completely different.

>My early web dev experience was mostly just figuring out where the hell config and log files for apache, php and mysql were

Yeah but once you track it all down you feel like a developer superstar genius...

Then you confidently sit down and proceed to repeat the process on another distro and immediately feel like a complete noob again as nothing is where it should be and you realize, you mastered nothing.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#83

Post by rossdavidh » Sat, Apr 17, 2021, 7:14 PM UTC

kgin wrote: post #72

The simple page you could make 20 years ago is the simple page you can make today. With a few minor tweaks, it will work as well as it did 20 years ago. If you want to make a complex web app today, that's easier than it was 20 years ago. The tools are infinitely better. If for some reason you decide to use the tools meant for complex web apps to make your simple page, you're going to feel like everything has gone hor…

Amen. If a static web page does what you need, one should not be unwilling to just make a static web page.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#84

Post by ChrisMarshallNY » Sat, Apr 17, 2021, 7:15 PM UTC

nitrogen wrote: post #67

volkk wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what kind of work did you get into after programming out of curiosity? rare to see people go the other way

rare to see people go the other way I suspect this is literally true, but only because we don't see them. I've heard second-hand the story of a top developer at a famous unicorn who just couldn't keep up with all the stimulants everyone was using to code more and burned out, bought a cabin in the woods, and became a hermit.

> all the stimulants everyone was using to code more

That's interesting. Do you mean Adderall/Ritalin?

That stuff has a relatively fixed useful half-life. It doesn't work for as long as people might think. It also doesn't actually make thinking clearer. It makes people feel as if they are thinking more clearly. I don't feel like looking for it, but this has been studied and reported, somewhere.

If you are referring to crank, well, the half-life of that stuff is even shorter...

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#85

Post by anthk » Sat, Apr 17, 2021, 7:16 PM UTC

_0w8t wrote: post #58

devchix wrote: post #17

At some point in my organization's press toward Ansible, I came to the realization that Ansible the product is yet another layer of abstraction that is there for its own sake, and of dubious value. I converted a simple script to patch stuff, something that is trivial to write and run, and the yum module behaves different enough from the command-line yum that I have to learn a different way to get and parse the output…

This is the my experience as well. For an activist website that I maintain I just use a PHP script to install everything and to ensure that everything has proper permissions. The site uses Wordpress and patching config files in PHP is simpler than in bash. I am glad that I have not bothered with Ansible, as I would most likely ended up with YAML programming which is way worse than bash.

Perl was made exactly for that.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#86

Post by matheusmoreira » Sat, Apr 17, 2021, 7:18 PM UTC

smoldesu wrote: post #10

The delineation of this argument is what made me switch to Linux. On Windows, things that should have been getting easy were getting harder for me: software management was getting worse, updates were getting worse, and everything that should "just work", just wouldn't. My experience on MacOS was just as bad, with all of the 32-bit apps I used gone in the wind. Now the 64-bit apps are up on the chopping block, and I h…

Linux is also stable. The binary interface isn't going to change. It's possible to write Linux software that you can boot directly into and it will never stop working or do anything you don't want it to do.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#87

Post by dzolob » Sat, Apr 17, 2021, 7:18 PM UTC

smoldesu wrote: post #10

The delineation of this argument is what made me switch to Linux. On Windows, things that should have been getting easy were getting harder for me: software management was getting worse, updates were getting worse, and everything that should "just work", just wouldn't. My experience on MacOS was just as bad, with all of the 32-bit apps I used gone in the wind. Now the 64-bit apps are up on the chopping block, and I h…

I have been having a terrible time staying away from conda in windows, but the ridiculous amount of time and spent trying to install some python modules using pip is just not worth it.

I’d be lost without wsl.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#88

Post by lelanthran » Sat, Apr 17, 2021, 7:19 PM UTC

grawprog wrote: post #26

smoldesu wrote: post #10

The delineation of this argument is what made me switch to Linux. On Windows, things that should have been getting easy were getting harder for me: software management was getting worse, updates were getting worse, and everything that should "just work", just wouldn't. My experience on MacOS was just as bad, with all of the 32-bit apps I used gone in the wind. Now the 64-bit apps are up on the chopping block, and I h…

I love Linux based operating systems and I've used them pretty much exclusively for at least a decade now, and I agree with a lot of your post, but >By cutting away abstraction, I don't think I agree with this take. You haven't cut away abstraction, you've changed to a different kind of abstraction. Linux's 'everything is a file' abstraction is just that, an abstraction. >Linux is arranged masterfully, and makes the…

> It's arranged more simply and straightforward, masterfully though, I dunno...

It's easy to make "complicated". It's very hard to make "simple and straightforward".

Whether that's an indication of mastery is not a closed question.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#89

Post by em-bee » Sat, Apr 17, 2021, 7:21 PM UTC

abnercoimbre wrote: post #71

em-bee wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i strongly disagree with this: Every flavour of Linux uses a different layout for its root directories, stores configs in different places and generally is not consistent from distro to distro. there are differences, but it's 90% the same in the major distributions. and while you do have a point about user configs, it is getting better. .config and .local are getting used more and more and are an improvement over eve…

> and while you do have a point about user configs, it is getting better Are people finally following the XDG standard? [0] [0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/XDG_Base_Directory

i have no hard data, but my impression is that more and more apps are

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#90

Post by taeric » Sat, Apr 17, 2021, 7:22 PM UTC

kgin wrote: post #72

The simple page you could make 20 years ago is the simple page you can make today. With a few minor tweaks, it will work as well as it did 20 years ago. If you want to make a complex web app today, that's easier than it was 20 years ago. The tools are infinitely better. If for some reason you decide to use the tools meant for complex web apps to make your simple page, you're going to feel like everything has gone hor…

I don't know if I really agree. I want to. But flash was supported by much better tooling than what I see in most spots today. Dreamweaver, for all the hate we have it, seems laughable simple compared to common frameworks today.