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Some software does become "yesterday's software." I'm looking at you Cold Fusion, Flash, COBOL, the Abacus. I don't think Rails belongs in this group. I recogni

by n0us 10y ago

Some software does become "yesterday's software." I'm looking at you Cold Fusion, Flash, COBOL, the Abacus. I don't think Rails belongs in this group. I recognize that it's a good framework even if I don't personally like.

adventured 10y ago
It's the same empty argument that started being thrown at PHP six or seven years ago. Because it's not the hot new thing, it's yesterday's software, regardless of whether it's still fully up to the task. Rails will still be going strong ten years from now without question, and there will be frequent articles proclaiming that it's terrible that whole time.
estrabd 10y ago
Interesting comment; I believe if you are going to implicate Cold Fusion, you also need to rope in PHP. My first exposure to web programming was HTMLScript at my university in the mid 90s (now called MivaScript and is the language used to build the MivaMerchant product). Soon after, I switched to PHP 3, but I found that I preferred Miva. I have not touched Miva in years after spending some time as a freelancer in the late 90s, but because it is tied to a successful niche e-commerce platform, the language survives. It is very similar to Cold Fusion minus the enterprise level database support. I worked with CF for a time in the late 90s/00s (when it was still a product of Allaire) along side of ASP (pre .net), and I actually preferred it to both ASP and PHP - mainly because the mixing of mark up and DSL blocks seemed really unscalable. PHP may have been seen as an evolution in web programming since it abstracted the mixing of logic and presentation a bit more than Miva or CF, but in retrospect I believe PHP was not an improvement. It made general web programming easier, but software maintenance is easier in languages like CF and Miva that embrace embedded mark up/logic. The frameworks provided by Ruby, Python, Perl, and even TCL (among others) seem to have reached a point where only blurring the lines between client and server seem like the only logical paradigm change - and that's not to say it's an improvement.
- jsmith0295 10y ago
  This isn't really the case. There are modern web frameworks for PHP -- https://laravel.com/ https://laravel.com/ is the best example
  - tim333 10y ago
    Also PHP still powers much of the web and has taken a step forward with PHP 7 which seems to run a good bit faster than Ruby and the like.
    - discordance 10y ago
      Mostly because of one application (Wordpress).
      - spdionis 10y ago
        It runs a bit faster because of wordpress? :) Assuming you were answering to your GP, modern PHP is a totally fine language to program in with a lot of upsides (that would take too muh to enumerate here).
stevetrewick 10y ago
Some transaction you perform today will touch a system running on COBOL. I've come across finance and retail systems that have been running for almost as long as I've been alive, some of it on original hardware [0]. The reason we don't develop anything new in it isn't because it's awful (though it is awful), it's because most of the important things we wrote in it are still working. [0] Sometimes this is better than the 'N layers of crufty consultant supplied virtualisation' model. Sometimes it is not.

by n0us 10y ago

adventured 10y ago

It's the same empty argument that started being thrown at PHP six or seven years ago. Because it's not the hot new thing, it's yesterday's software, regardless of whether it's still fully up to the task. Rails will still be going strong ten years from now without question, and there will be frequent articles proclaiming that it's terrible that whole time.

estrabd 10y ago

Interesting comment; I believe if you are going to implicate Cold Fusion, you also need to rope in PHP. My first exposure to web programming was HTMLScript at my university in the mid 90s (now called MivaScript and is the language used to build the MivaMerchant product). Soon after, I switched to PHP 3, but I found that I preferred Miva. I have not touched Miva in years after spending some time as a freelancer in the late 90s, but because it is tied to a successful niche e-commerce platform, the language survives. It is very similar to Cold Fusion minus the enterprise level database support. I worked with CF for a time in the late 90s/00s (when it was still a product of Allaire) along side of ASP (pre .net), and I actually preferred it to both ASP and PHP - mainly because the mixing of mark up and DSL blocks seemed really unscalable. PHP may have been seen as an evolution in web programming since it abstracted the mixing of logic and presentation a bit more than Miva or CF, but in retrospect I believe PHP was not an improvement. It made general web programming easier, but software maintenance is easier in languages like CF and Miva that embrace embedded mark up/logic. The frameworks provided by Ruby, Python, Perl, and even TCL (among others) seem to have reached a point where only blurring the lines between client and server seem like the only logical paradigm change - and that's not to say it's an improvement.

jsmith0295 10y ago
This isn't really the case. There are modern web frameworks for PHP -- https://laravel.com/ https://laravel.com/ is the best example
- tim333 10y ago
  Also PHP still powers much of the web and has taken a step forward with PHP 7 which seems to run a good bit faster than Ruby and the like.
  - discordance 10y ago
    Mostly because of one application (Wordpress).
    - spdionis 10y ago
      It runs a bit faster because of wordpress? :) Assuming you were answering to your GP, modern PHP is a totally fine language to program in with a lot of upsides (that would take too muh to enumerate here).

stevetrewick 10y ago

Some transaction you perform today will touch a system running on COBOL. I've come across finance and retail systems that have been running for almost as long as I've been alive, some of it on original hardware [0]. The reason we don't develop anything new in it isn't because it's awful (though it is awful), it's because most of the important things we wrote in it are still working. [0] Sometimes this is better than the 'N layers of crufty consultant supplied virtualisation' model. Sometimes it is not.