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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

#91

Post by throwaway71271 »

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…

what exactly is 10x better than 5 years ago? the technology gets better but the outcome gets worse somehow.

most of the programs i use (besides the browser) are 20-50 years old (paste, cut, xterm, grep, emacs etc), almost any new thing i try is horribly slow (slack, whatsapp etc, the mac terminal app, even the mail app is slow compared to mutt)

open a web page on a computer without adblock and look at what we have built

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pq7NLMwynYg (funny video demonstrating the state of the modern web)

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#92

Post by bboygravity »

QuadrupleA wrote: post #87

https://phrasegenerator.com/ , one of my first web projects, has survived since 1996 (almost 30 years, wow). It's definitely required a few "tech debt collections" - the original was in ColdFusion, the hot stuff of the time. Then an asp.net / xml phase when that was cool. Now hopefully a boundless future of stability and modernity with python and JavaScript. At least until the world sunsets any pre-4 python versions,…

This is what blows my mind about web stuff.

You needed to completely change framework and even languages 3 times in not even 30 years?! Just to keep things maintainable?

I don't feel that it's the same for other area's of programming: desktop apps, embedded stuff. Maybe I'm wrong...

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#93

Post by riffraff »

asdfman123 wrote: post #79
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.

As the adage goes, things that are new when you're a kid are the norm, things that are new when you're a young person are exciting, things that are new when you're older are unnecessary, confusing, or scary.

It's true for everyone in every subject I'm afraid:)

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#94

Post by QuadrupleA »

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.

I wonder where python will fall in history - it seems one of the few common languages that gained usage because people like it.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#95

Post by spease »

sgtnoodle wrote: post #22
imoverclocked wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Queue rust apologists… I think C and its direct descendants will slowly fade away over the next 20 years as new developers want to get away from the legacy of language specifications that span existing codebases. There are so many sharp edges in C that have automatic fixes/detections/etc in newer languages and don’t get me started about multiprocessing complexity in C.

My coworker and I were pair programming some Rust today. We were working on a convenience wrapper whose whole purpose is to reduce boilerplate. So, by its nature there's a lot of internal generic traits, thread safety, etc. He knows Rust well but software design not so much. I know software design well but Rust not so much. My experience can be summed up with: let &mut writer = Writer ::writer::new( connection.clone(…

I’m not sure why the API wouldn’t implement Write for connection so you could do:

    connection.write_all(data)
Where data could be an argument that impls ToOwned or Into so that it would either use the object you pass in (if by value) or implicitly clone it (if by reference).

Basically this looks more like an API design problem than a limitation of the language.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#96

Post by emodendroket »

I will say that the core idea of SOAP/WCF services is honestly pretty sound. There is no sensible reason (imo, anyway) that everyone needs to be using stringly-typed data and manually parsing REST responses when the underlying code all has type definitions. I get that it came with headaches (and I suppose people wanted to work in untyped languages) but jettisoning the entire idea of generating the client feels like it was throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#97

Post by senko »

rr808 wrote: post #30
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.

They're all faster, more productive and richer environments than modern web apps?

VB6 and FoxPro, yes. Others, not so much.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#99

Post by emodendroket »

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…

> If there’s a software equivalent of a Cathedral then I still haven’t found it.

Probably like, some parts of Windows or Linux, or GNU tools, or some thing like that that, while still being updated, also has ancient components hanging around.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#100

Post by edejong »

As I think about all the technologies that have come and gone, it's good to find some sturdy rocks as well. Here are some techs that withstood the test of time in my personal journey:

* Simple, but reliable file formats: My old photos collection is 25 years old (jpeg) and I still look at them occasionally.

* My influxdb/grafana/openhab setup is now 8 years old and has been operational with only minimal hickups.

* Some home automation scripts I wrote have endured for 8 years now.

* My Linux/Unix knowledge is 26 years old (although much has changed since Slackware).

* My C and C++ programming language knowledge is 28 years old (although I rarely use it anymore, because of Rust). Occasionally it is useful during debugging performance problems in kernels.

* My knowledge of distributed systems (stuff like leader election, distributed and centralised algorithms) is 15 years old. It is still very relevant to understand both existing systems and to evaluate new systems.

It is crucial to distinguish the knowledge that stands the test of time from the fleeting trends. And finally then there are the non-technical skills, which pay off even more. Effective communication, negotiation skills, organisational finesse, inspirational leadership, adept management... These are the true constants that support us during our professional life.

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