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Kinda a Big Announcement

joelonsoftware.com

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Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#81

Post by ilaksh »

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?

To me you proved the point. Centering with Flexbox requires styling the parent and they use two different properties for horizontal and vertical centering.

Truly simple to me would not be CSS but rather an attribute on the element. But with CSS, the simplest thing would allow one to just put a style on the element you want to center.

The other aspect of this is that there are multiple other ways of doing it.

Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#82

Post by asadm »

> (Bill Gates, 1990: “How many f*cking programmers in this company are working on rich text editors?!”

Where is this quote from? I haven't read this one before.

Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#83

Post by Graffur »

fennecfoxen wrote: post #9

Stack Overflow destroyed a lot of its social capital and pissed off its own community in the wake of the Monica Cellio affair a little under 2 years ago. (This one was touched off by the Judaism Stack Exchange moderators asking questions about pronoun policy, but ended up with basically every community involved up in arms, including many in their LGBTQ+ community.) One hopes the new owners will do a better job of man…

Honestly I've used stack overflow since it started and read tech news daily. I do not know or care about Monica Cellio or internet/twitter drama.

I would bet money that if I asked any of my friends or colleagues they wouldn't know either.

Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#85

Post by ilaksh »

mikewarot wrote: post #14

The days before Stack Overflow were far better. A search used to return a blog post in which a person described a bug, how they got there, and the resolution. The net effect of stack overflow was to spam the search engines with non-answers like "you asked in the wrong forum", "you didn't ask nicely", etc. Long ago I learned to route around it.

Really?? I remember frequently running into a site that was strangely named ExpertSexchange and having to fight through ads to get information.

Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#87

Post by HWR_14 »

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…

Am I the only programmer who finds Stack Overflow to be highly overrated? I used it recently for the first time in several years as I was learning a new technology, and the most valuable answers should have just been in the documentation (or maybe they were in the documentation but Stack Overflow covered up the results.) But the majority of the time I find the documentation just significantly better and give up on SO.

To say nothing about how outdated some of the results are. I tried exactly what Joel suggested. I typed "Rich Text Editor" and searched stackoverflow.com. All top three results were at least a decade old (okay, the youngest was like 9 years 7 months, but I'm going to round it up). They were closed, jut clogging up search results with deprecated answers.

In the time before Stack Overflow, I agree there were many good sources online. I also agree that the printed PDFs of sources that some people passed off as books were horrible. But I do remember a lot of very good books at Barnes and Noble.

Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#88

Post by bentcorner »

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…

Ironically the biggest problem I have today is that a lot of Q/As on SO are old, so it's hard to know if the answer I found is still canonical or if there's a better/different way to do the same thing, and I didn't perform the right incantations into google to find my answer.

Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#89

Post by HWR_14 »

CodeGlitch wrote: post #29
lliamander wrote: post #23

Talking with developers who started their career in the early 90's, it seems to me the two biggest changes in software development over the past 30 years are: - the rise of easily shared open source libraries and applications (supported by infrastructure like CPAN, Maven, and Github) - crowd-sourced documentation (blogs, forums, and Stack Overflow) It changed not just the way an individual programmer interacts with t…

What I love about stack overflow is that you don't just get the answer to your question (usually) but the top rated answers also include the "whys". Meaning you get to expand your understanding of the domain in question. People who write stack overflow answers really are the unsung heroes of the open source world.

What are you looking up that you get "whys"? I consider myself lucky if SO returns "here's the name of the library function you assumed existed that does what you want."

Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#90

Post by bitwize »

devit wrote: post #80

The article writer is quite ignorant. COM is not obsolete at all, it's the main way Windows APIs have been and are provided from the release of DirectX until now, where it underlies the current WinRT API.

Indeed. COM provided and provides integration that Unix nerds can only dream of. Windows in the 90s, in general, was technology indistinguishable from magic, compared to the state of the art from the Unix realm. That's why it would have killed Unix entirely but for Linux.
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