81–90 of 585 posts
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.
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.
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…
Our cathedrals are surely [L,U]inux and the C programming language, HTML has done pretty well too.
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.
# Job 1 (3 yrs)
- Worked on around three products, all shut down, code probably lives in some SVN archive.
- Learnt advanced JS, PHP, MySQL, Photoshop, jQuery etc (skills mostly relevant)
- Project never launched, code never saw the light of the day. Probably lives in some Git archive.
- Learnt a few in-house frameworks (irrelevant) but also leant Git (relevant)
- Worked on several products, the biggest one is still active and seeing millions of users weekly. Rest got shut down and live in a Git repo.
- Learnt about some inhouse frameworks (irrelevant). React, React Native (skills still relevant)
- Actively working
- Learnt Vue (skills still relevant)Maybe implementations have much less value than has been assumed and paid for by stakeholders over the decades. If code is a throw-away implementation detail of some model/abstraction then why are we getting paid so much money again? Really makes me worry about generative AI approaches; just as well there is no universal very high level modelling language everyone loves yet. I think this is why working on games is ni…
We're not getting that money for generating realistic-looking syntax, but for discussing with stakeholders and choosing appropriate designs with an eye for both the bigger picture and details. These are language-and-library-independent things, mostly, and incredibly difficult work.
You may be able to give an LLM directions to do something like what you would have been able to do, but the money is not in the parts the LLM is able to accomplish, it's in the direction you give it.
One company I worked at had heavy SQL Server stored procs. I was pretty dismissive initially ("don't put business logic in the database layer!") but grew to understand that really those were the gold. The first versions were written in 1997 and by the time I arrived that code was bulletproof. There were about 4 UI technologies over 20+ years (VB, ASP, Forms + asp.net), but the procs were the same shape with thousands…
sometimes you don't need fancy new stuff. Just learn the things very well at your disposal. Heck sed, awk and bunch of simple cli tools still work well on Big data sets :)
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…
Sqlite intends to keep their cathedral intact until 2050. https://sqlite.org/lts.html
> "Recommended storage formats are formats which, in the opinion of the preservationists at the Library of Congress, maximizes the chance of survival and continued accessibility of digital content.