The state of modern development vent

stn1986,

Thank you for your perspective. I'm not an IT professional like you are; I'm a tinkerer and a hobbyist. I enjoyed reading your point of view. As this topic is in the off topic forum it is completely appropriate.
 
You make things so easy that any idiot can use them, you end up with idiots using it. *surprised picatchu face*
Want proof? Look at the traffic at rush hour.
This is so true. When it actually took some skill to get on the internet, the technology itself acted as an idiot filter. Even the trolls were more genteel and sophisticated back then. A troll was someone with a fascinating backstory that was just bizarre enough to get people's backs up, but not so bizarre that a consensus would arise that they were a troll. Nowadays a troll is just someone who wants you dead and wants you to know it. :D
I have to say I'm caught off-guard by this spam issue. I rarely interact online so I can be naïve about these things. Shortly after I signed up "life" happened, which distracted me for a good while. To make matters worse, I actually am a tad weird which may explain why I didn't introduce myself in a more conventional manner. It just wasn't on my radar. Sorry for setting off your firewalls, guys.
I'm extremely socially awkward too. In fact I probably qualify as autistic. But since most doctors I've ever had wouldn't have clocked if i had the bubonic plague, unsurprisingly they haven't picked up on the autism.
What I've discovered that most people are willing and able to tolerate quite a high degree of weirdness, and the ones who aren't don't really matter.
It is frustrating however because I know I sometimes come across as rude, blunt, distant, excessively formal, or having a surreal and sometimes dark sense of humour, and people sadly are quick to assume malice rather than neurodiversity. (I don't like to use such a leftist term but sometimes they're slightly better than the alternatives).
Going back on topic, a lot of these new development frameworks and APIs and methodologies completely bewilder me. Oftentimes I can't understand the problem they're solving, let alone how they go about solving it, because it's such an abstract problem and usually a problem I've never actually had. In short, I'm glad I don't have your job. I like FreeBSD and C programming and the "beaten track" precisely because they're predictable and changes are rare, incremental and carefully considered.
 
This is so true. When it actually took some skill to get on the internet, the technology itself acted as an idiot filter. Even the trolls were more genteel and sophisticated back then. A troll was someone with a fascinating backstory that was just bizarre enough to get people's backs up, but not so bizarre that a consensus would arise that they were a troll. Nowadays a troll is just someone who wants you dead and wants you to know it. :D

I'm extremely socially awkward too. In fact I probably qualify as autistic. But since most doctors I've ever had wouldn't have clocked if i had the bubonic plague, unsurprisingly they haven't picked up on the autism.
What I've discovered that most people are willing and able to tolerate quite a high degree of weirdness, and the ones who aren't don't really matter.
It is frustrating however because I know I sometimes come across as rude, blunt, distant, excessively formal, or having a surreal and sometimes dark sense of humour, and people sadly are quick to assume malice rather than neurodiversity. (I don't like to use such a leftist term but sometimes they're slightly better than the alternatives).
Going back on topic, a lot of these new development frameworks and APIs and methodologies completely bewilder me. Oftentimes I can't understand the problem they're solving, let alone how they go about solving it, because it's such an abstract problem and usually a problem I've never actually had. In short, I'm glad I don't have your job. I like FreeBSD and C programming and the "beaten track" precisely because they're predictable and changes are rare, incremental and carefully considered.
Thanks for your thoughtful reply and please don’t change. Keep the culture of simplicity alive.
 
Another example is modern C++. It is so large and complex that keeping up-to-date with just the language takes away too much from other things you also need to learn. Every 3 years you get an avalanche of new mechanisms with puzzle-like syntax, most of which "only" fixes problems with the then-previous state of C++.
C++ - the language you never stop learning...
 
People are now understood as consumers of science, which is supplied by authorities.
This is a very interesting description. Thanks.

This same scheme was most prominently developed by the roman church, who decided that people shall not be allowed to talk to God directly, but instead consult a priest who then talks to God on -presumably- their behalf.
Are we conflating two issues here? 1) the cost/benefits of a hierarchy 2) the influence that the related business titles carry. From my perspective this kind of thing happens when a problem and solution isn't agreed upon by the participants.

I'm working as a software architect, we're fighting a constant battle regarding this topic, and we had some success.
I'm curious what these conversations sound like. Does this have anything to do with migrating to newer solutions or is it something else?

[1] New acronyms appearing in continuous innovation. Often the discussion then circles around these acronyms mostly. Sitting in a meeting, I then usually raise my voice -as a business consultant- and ask "scusi, explain 'SPA' please". And it is rather easy to figure that lots of the other participants didn't know either (they just didn't dare to ask). So, people were sitting there for two hours, stating their opinions on things they didn't understand a word of (and obviousely collecting their money). And that's why nothing results out of these meetings (and, btw, that's what business consultants are there for: to terminate the crap).
There are limitations that cannot be worked around when one chooses to restrict themselves to the supported languages themselves.

All the time I find React developers--and others--asking questions about how to do something in, say, CSS like "How do I change the color of X using React" and it turns out it's the simplest of things to do using basic CSS but a React dev needs to programmatically do it somehow with a dozen lines of code.
Yes, but does your solution scale?
 
I find it disturbing how someone takes a word wide term that is even kept in a dictionary so everyone will have a good understanding of said term or terms then completely removes definition of same said term or terms which puts that one out of sync with the rest of the world and blames the rest of the world for being at fault for misusing the term and not them and the ones that follow such abnormalities.
 
I find it disturbing how someone takes a word wide term that is even kept in a dictionary so everyone will have a good understanding of said term or terms then completely removes definition of same said term or terms which puts that one out of sync with the rest of the world and blames the rest of the world for being at fault for misusing the term and not them and the ones that follow such abnormalities.
You have to be one of my favorite people on this forum. Could you please provide the class with an example of said term(s) being added and/or removed? What are their perceived changes?
 
I'm curious what these conversations sound like. Does this have anything to do with migrating to newer solutions or is it something else?
No, it was more about not throwing some fancy and fat SPA-framework onto every single "frontend problem", but instead design a sane "classic" web application if that's what's actually needed ... see context in my earlier post ?
 
How did everyone do it before React came along? React just, eventually, boils down to basic, fundamental CSS so, yes, it scaled into the largest online restaurant ordering systems in the country (that we built).
I appreciate your appreciation of the presentation layer, friend. Composing an application and composing the HTML are both very lovely and shit. However, don't you think that you're ignoring the significance of the cute logio-layer?
 
No, it was more about not throwing some fancy and fat SPA-framework onto every single "frontend problem", but instead design a sane "classic" web application if that's what's actually needed ... see context in my earlier post ?
Oh. Whoops! I think you confused what I mean't by "what they sound like". I meant, quite literally, I would have loved to secretly listen to those business meetings for business purposes and such. ;)
 
No, it was more about not throwing some fancy and fat SPA-framework onto every single "frontend problem", but instead design a sane "classic" web application if that's what's actually needed ... see context in my earlier post ?
I think you're probably right about this for some projects. Though, it may be more future-proof if something like React were used, no?
 
How did everyone do it before React came along? React just, eventually, boils down to basic, fundamental CSS so, yes, it scaled into the largest online restaurant ordering systems in the country (that we built).
I read your posts and I totally agree with you, but we're not the decision-makers, technologies are chosen by the industry and employers and we are forced to accept them. For example Python is not my main favorite language, but I usually work with it and the reason is obvious because it's very popular and many companies and people use it and there are many job opportunities. Docker is a cancer and every time I tried to encourage others not to use it, they strongly disagreed with me. So React, JavaScript, PHP, Python and many other things are only compulsions that imposed on us not the main choice of many of us.
 
Though, it may be more future-proof if something like React were used, no?
Exactly the opposite. It's the path into dependency hell, with breaking changes all over that huge tree.

There's a simple and effective model of a web application with a resource-oriented interface to the business logic residing server-side, that's actually what HTTP was designed for. And if that's what you actually need, then by all means, keep the monsters out and you are future-proof.

SPAs (and the frameworks they're typically built upon) have their place when and only when you want to bring an application to the web that isn't a web application by design.
 
I felt there was a sudden push to consolidate all sovereign IT infrastructure into these dumb "Cloud/Big Data" providers. It started with Amazon I believe... Rackspace, or someone. There has to be some force behind all of this push-to-market fast, get-rich-quick nonsense over the past decade. You get the mess that is NodeJS (which is a bad idea, IMO).

I haven't used Windows Server in years, but just recently I learned they're pushing all of their server products to Azure. Dumb shit like this is why I'm so grateful FreeBSD exists.
 
but we're not the decision-makers, technologies are chosen by the industry and employers and we are forced to accept them.
Yes but the industry and employers are technologists themselves who should know better. Some are learning from these mistakes and taking a step back.
 
It started with Amazon I believe... Rackspace, or someone. There has to be some force behind all of this push-to-market fast, get-rich-quick nonsense over the past decade. You get the mess that is NodeJS (which is a bad idea, IMO).
Well, Amazon did end up with something useful... by forcing every brand like Sony, Asus, etc. to cooperate and use a single template, that's what makes it possible to efficiently search for stuff to buy. Without Amazon doing that kind of thing (forcing everyone into a template), it would take forever to look for stuff. If you think bigger than the problem (i.e. put the problem into a larger context), you just might decide that a little pain is worth the payout at the end.

Compare shopping at Amazon to shopping at individual manufacturer websites. Yeah, Amazon's shop did take a lot of effort to put together. But convenience of the programmer/engineer is not the only thing to consider when building an infrastructure to bring in the money. Yeah, sometimes, bad decisions are made, we all learn, and move on.
 
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