7 ms·

I do find it truly sad how anti-intellectualism is pervading our industry and causing good products to die. Nowadays, a significant number of the hottest new te

I do find it truly sad how anti-intellectualism is pervading our industry and causing good products to die. Nowadays, a significant number of the hottest new technologies offer literally nothing of value beyond "low learning curve". It's my current belief that tech culture has lost nearly everything that once made us great. Think about some examples. MongoDB is nothing but the object databases of the 80's, rebranded. It's main selling point is "you don't need to learn SQL". Object databases failed and people at the time were willing to learn something new (SQL). Nowadays, who will do that? Go's entire selling point is "faster than python, no need to learn anything new". In terms of language features it's again living in the 80's - Java got generics in 2004 and Java was way behind the times. In terms of speed it's worse than Java and Rust, maybe comparable to Haskell. And NodeJS is nothing but "write server code, no need to learn a new language". Isomorphism simply didn't work. People think Node is fast because it can do async, but Java has been able to do threaded async for 15 years. I wonder how much the industry could advance if we could simply persuade every developer to learn Java Postgres.

davidw 10y ago
Interesting idea, but perhaps it's also possible to look at it as the industry broadening. 40 years ago, you had to be pretty knowledgeable to get anything at all done with computers. These days, it's possible for more people to do things, and yet there's still a market for people who are deeply knowledgeable. A lot of people don't care much about the tech, and just want to build something. If easier (for them) tech lets them, that's a win, no? Of course... that's easy to say but harder to swallow when they end up building something, making some money, and then hiring a developer to clean up their hideous mess. I've been there too.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
lelandbatey 10y ago
I'm going to fundamentally disagree with at least the target of Go. Go introduced a series of concurrency primitives with syntax that's made writing and reasoning about concurrent code a joy, something that's not the case in Java/C++/C/Python (maybe up till the late 3.X in the case of Python), and it did that with a language paradigm (interface driven) that's vastly different from Python's mixture of OOP and duck-typing. And sorry, but "I wonder how much the industry could advance if we could simply persuade every developer to learn Java Postgres."? Plenty of other people would say "I wonder how far along the industry would be if you people would actually learn how to manage your memory and write C". Plenty of other people would say "I wonder how far the industry would have progressed if we let go of the harmful and outdated concept of imperative programming and embraced functional paradigms." ... and on it goes. ----------------- Additionally, you say "I do find it truly sad how anti-intellectualism is pervading our industry" only to end your post with "why can't we abandon all our experimenting and learning and just stick to good old Java which obviously would solve all our problems", which is itself MASSIVELY anti-intellectual.
- flukus 10y ago
  > "why can't we abandon all our experimenting and learning and just stick to good old Java which obviously would solve all our problems", which is itself MASSIVELY anti-intellectual. That's a mis-characterization. There is a difference between experimenting and learning and pushing all sorts of questionable fashion trends into production.
  - lelandbatey 10y ago
    While true, the "pushing" being done is a very small compared to only the "development" of said technologies. The exact words of the parent where: > I wonder how much the industry could advance if we could simply persuade every developer to learn Java Postgres. And that is preceded by what I can only described as a bunch of undue mischaracterization of several languages and technologies, all of which definitely seems to imply that "yeah, all that other stuff is just a bunch of fads, why don't we stick to the real deal and all write Java." Now, I don't want to be unkind to Java here. It's true that Java is an incredibly powerful language and there are a wide variety of technologies and tools that are absolutely incredible that you can only get via the Java ecosystem. But that can be said of many languages, e.g. C++/C. I think what the GP may have meant, and which I do agree with, is that our industry would progress if we as developers spent a bit more time learning about the context and history of current and past solutions. We'd probably re-invent the wheel a bit less often. But I don't want to limit that recommendation to "learn Java Postgres". I think Java developers might benefit from examining the benefits of a language like Haskell, Python programmers may benefit from a language with strong typing, such as C++/Rust/Go, that Unix lovers might learn a lot from examining the Windows NT kernel API's, and so on. If we examine the things that aren't close to us, the things with which we're the least familiar, that's when I believe the most fruitful learning can occur.
    - flukus 10y ago
      I took the GP in a very figurative way as well. A lot of the learning being done at the moment though is simply framework churn, there are developers out their familiar with a million web and client side frameworks that would have been much better served learning SQL. Our apps would be better if we focused more and learning about usability and our users than on CSS compilers. As an industry I think we're under serving everyone right now, people have machines a thousand times more powerful than a couple of decades ago but what they can do with them is almost identical.
flukus 10y ago
Don't forget the proliferation of electron so no one has to learn a new language and desktop toolsets. Just for kicks I wrote a desktop todo list in GTK and C, not tools I had extensive knowledge of ever and nothing recently. It was a breath of fresh air how simple it was compared to doing the same in modern frameworks. A single ~30 line function to create the gui and the rest held together with a couple of function pointers. It was faster (to write and run) and simpler than anything I'd written in years. More responsive than the most responsive web framework too.
- niftich 10y ago
  But is it cross-platform (Win32, Windows UWP, OS X, multiple linuxes, iOS, Android) and most of that same code works on the web? It's okay to bemoan Electron for being bloated but multiple balls have been dropped by OS and platform makers, GUI toolkit makers, language runtime makers, and that giant amount of missing glue inbetween, to get to where we are. It's rather sad that Electron, out of all things, is the first thing to fulfill the holy grail of write-once, run anywhere, in a way that's good enough and palatable to the plurality of users' and devs' satisfaction.
  - zigzigzag 10y ago
    Electron certainly isn't the first thing to give "write once, run anywhere", let alone good enough to satisfy users. I groan every time I download an app only to discover it's Electron based. Java beat Electron to write-once-run-anywhere by a couple of decades, and still does in the sense that Electron requires you to make platform-specific builds of your app even if the core code is the same (Java gives you that option but doesn't require it, you can still distribute a jar or web start file). Meanwhile, Electron has managed the feat of being even bloatier than Java is. The DOM was never designed for GUIs and the terrible performance of web and Electron based apps is a testament to that. At least Java apps tend to have meaningful menu bars and context menus. Electron satisfies web devs who have either never written desktop apps in other frameworks, or did decades ago and think nothing improved there. They "satisfy" users in the sense that users are rarely offered any alternative so have to suck it up and tend to judge web apps against each other vs a well coded, tightly written desktop app (office suites being a notable exception).
kazagistar 10y ago
Intellectual is the wrong target, just as much as easy. Humans have a limited capacity to understand complex systems, and once they grow to a certan point, your ability to integrate and innovate on them is limited due to overhead of the layers of incedental complexity. Easy is just shoving complexity under the rug. Simplicity, and building systems meant for our meager human intelligences is better. I am not terribly fond of Go, but it has a decent answer in auto-implemented interfaces and duck typing. It's not about dumbing down, it's just different, and easier on the compiler, which is a significant advantage. And as for async in java... ugh, how awful. We finally got something like promises and lambdas, but most APIs are still trapped in synchronous calls and using the JPA is a disaster of hidden thread-local state. What kind of stack are you using to make java async work? Maybe I'm just missing something.
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  The thing is, the modern systems are often less complex. SQL databases are generally far simpler than MongoDB - you just need to learn relational algebra rather than blindly shoveling whatever JSON you got into the DB. As for Java + async + threads, I use Akka and it's basically seamless. But Netty + core Java Executors is fine too, just more verbose.
  - raverbashing 10y ago
    > you just need to learn relational algebra rather than blindly shoveling whatever JSON you got into the DB. No SQL per se is not hard. But the whole data modeling, creating tables, picking types is just needless bureaucracy Yes, I want to save a json snippet and be done with it. I don't want to create another table because I have a 1-N relationship. And while ORMs make this easier it is still not painless
    - niftich 10y ago
      Schema-less data always sounds good in the beginning until you actually try to use that data. Then you end up encoding all the validation and data munging logic into whatever process reads from it. An internally-schema'd database just recognizes that this is absurd and lets you put the bottom three layers of validation logic inside the database, where you only have to do it once.
l1ambda 10y ago
I just want to nitpick about Node a little bit--as a Java developer and Postgres user myself--because there is more to Node than just async JavaScript and I think it gets a bad rap a little bit because of that. Async is one good quality of Node, but it also has this really great debugging integration with Chrome DevTools. And even really huge Node programs start fast--usually in less than a second--so you get this really tight development feedback loop. So you have this overall pleasant experience of a great module system where mostly everything out there is already going to be async (less likely in Java), a REPL, a fantastic debugger and profiler via the Chrome DevTools, and extremely quick process restarts. I think for some people these qualities outweigh the lack of static typing and JavaScript language quirks (which a lot have been ironed out in ES6 and ES7 anyway).
smhg 10y ago
> Isomorphism simply didn't work. Care to elaborate? I'd really like to know your opinion as this is an important aspect of my developer-life.
niftich 10y ago
It's not anti-intellectualism -- it's complete and utter lack of knowledge transfer, coupled with young people's spirit being dampened by established practices that are 50% reasonable, 50% bullshit. This, piled on with subtle ageism, ensures that any useful lessons learned will only be learned by the time it's too late, and there's a new group of can-do people who feel stifled by the combined wisdom of the ages, so they break off and do their own thing. I wrote about this here [1] with nicer language. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13022926 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13022926
Chyzwar 10y ago
I agree for most part but what is important is productivity. Java ecosystem is just toxic waste full of abandoned projects, over engineering everything, crashing build because everyone use arbitrary versioning schemes, ring-fences code with licenses/patents and developers with C++ mindset. Node.js is maybe build on top hack on top of hack. With some ugly code, lack of any abstraction, lack of sensible std library, debugging capabilities, minimal editors support and finally with package manager that cannot be trusted. But I can build CRUD API working with any database under 1h in node.js. Where In Java I need to start with learning all maven quirks, write pointless JSON mappers and learn stupid annotations that every library introduce.
EdiX 10y ago
Go's entire selling point is "faster than python, no need to learn anything new". In terms of language features it's again living in the 80's - Java got generics in 2004 and Java was way behind the times. In terms of speed it's worse than Java and Rust, maybe comparable to Haskell. This is not true, go is generally slightly faster than java (while using less memory_ and slightly slower than rust. The garbage collector is slower than java's default collector but has better latency but java's gc can be tuned and go gives you better tools to bypass gc partially or entirelly.
geoka9 10y ago
> Go's entire selling point is "faster than python, no need to learn anything new". To me, Go's selling points have been numerous: - Faster than python - Statically typed/no runtime bundling requirements - Easy access to concurrency/multicore scaling - Excellent tooling and integration with programming text editors - Great documentation - Excellent standard library which you can treat as a continuation of your own program - Great design with pragmatic choices (this one is subjective, I agree) In short, there's nothing else like that out there. Without Go, I'd have been stuck with JVM, Haskell or Erlang for most of my projects. And I dislike all of them, so Go has been a godsend. Incindentally, I also happen to enjoy working with Postgres and prefer it to any other database I've worked with (SQL or not).
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  You haven't laid out any concrete selling points for Go over Haskell or Java beyond "I dislike all of them". Can you come up with any intellectual rather than emotional reason for preferring Go?
  - geoka9 10y ago
    I can open a standard library definition and quickly understand what it does. If I try to do that with Scala or Java, my eyes just glaze over. With Go I often don't notice when I venture outside of my own program and into 3rd party library code.
    - yummyfajitas 10y ago
      It sounds like you just didn't out in the work to learn Haskell. The docs are fantastic, but they do assume you are willing to get over the learning curve. I don't think you are really disagreeing with me - go does nothing new, just lower learning curve.
      - geoka9 10y ago
        That's the problem, there's no getting over the learning curve when it comes to languages like Scala or Haskell. While you do get more proficient with time, you never get to the state where the language gets out of the way and becomes your friend instead of something you have to wrestle most of the time to enjoy the benefits it offers (which are also offered by Go, BTW). I was disagreeing with your original statement, Go is not just a faster python.
HodGreeley 10y ago
NoSQL's only selling point is you don't need to learn SQL? Hardly true. Major Oracle shops aren't dumping them for Mongo/Couchbase/... because they're trying to avoid SQL. They do it for scalability, availability, performance, flexibility and more. I don't see that the facts in the real world back you up here. Not claiming NoSQL is a panacea. You're definitely making some trade-offs, and in many cases it's just the wrong tech. But it's absurd to say it's happening to avoid a learning curve.
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  I didn't say that was NoSQL's only selling point. I said that was MongoDB's only selling point.

davidw 10y ago

Interesting idea, but perhaps it's also possible to look at it as the industry broadening. 40 years ago, you had to be pretty knowledgeable to get anything at all done with computers. These days, it's possible for more people to do things, and yet there's still a market for people who are deeply knowledgeable. A lot of people don't care much about the tech, and just want to build something. If easier (for them) tech lets them, that's a win, no? Of course... that's easy to say but harder to swallow when they end up building something, making some money, and then hiring a developer to clean up their hideous mess. I've been there too.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

lelandbatey 10y ago

I'm going to fundamentally disagree with at least the target of Go. Go introduced a series of concurrency primitives with syntax that's made writing and reasoning about concurrent code a joy, something that's not the case in Java/C++/C/Python (maybe up till the late 3.X in the case of Python), and it did that with a language paradigm (interface driven) that's vastly different from Python's mixture of OOP and duck-typing. And sorry, but "I wonder how much the industry could advance if we could simply persuade every developer to learn Java Postgres."? Plenty of other people would say "I wonder how far along the industry would be if you people would actually learn how to manage your memory and write C". Plenty of other people would say "I wonder how far the industry would have progressed if we let go of the harmful and outdated concept of imperative programming and embraced functional paradigms." ... and on it goes. ----------------- Additionally, you say "I do find it truly sad how anti-intellectualism is pervading our industry" only to end your post with "why can't we abandon all our experimenting and learning and just stick to good old Java which obviously would solve all our problems", which is itself MASSIVELY anti-intellectual.

flukus 10y ago
> "why can't we abandon all our experimenting and learning and just stick to good old Java which obviously would solve all our problems", which is itself MASSIVELY anti-intellectual. That's a mis-characterization. There is a difference between experimenting and learning and pushing all sorts of questionable fashion trends into production.
- lelandbatey 10y ago
  While true, the "pushing" being done is a very small compared to only the "development" of said technologies. The exact words of the parent where: > I wonder how much the industry could advance if we could simply persuade every developer to learn Java Postgres. And that is preceded by what I can only described as a bunch of undue mischaracterization of several languages and technologies, all of which definitely seems to imply that "yeah, all that other stuff is just a bunch of fads, why don't we stick to the real deal and all write Java." Now, I don't want to be unkind to Java here. It's true that Java is an incredibly powerful language and there are a wide variety of technologies and tools that are absolutely incredible that you can only get via the Java ecosystem. But that can be said of many languages, e.g. C++/C. I think what the GP may have meant, and which I do agree with, is that our industry would progress if we as developers spent a bit more time learning about the context and history of current and past solutions. We'd probably re-invent the wheel a bit less often. But I don't want to limit that recommendation to "learn Java Postgres". I think Java developers might benefit from examining the benefits of a language like Haskell, Python programmers may benefit from a language with strong typing, such as C++/Rust/Go, that Unix lovers might learn a lot from examining the Windows NT kernel API's, and so on. If we examine the things that aren't close to us, the things with which we're the least familiar, that's when I believe the most fruitful learning can occur.
  - flukus 10y ago
    I took the GP in a very figurative way as well. A lot of the learning being done at the moment though is simply framework churn, there are developers out their familiar with a million web and client side frameworks that would have been much better served learning SQL. Our apps would be better if we focused more and learning about usability and our users than on CSS compilers. As an industry I think we're under serving everyone right now, people have machines a thousand times more powerful than a couple of decades ago but what they can do with them is almost identical.

flukus 10y ago

Don't forget the proliferation of electron so no one has to learn a new language and desktop toolsets. Just for kicks I wrote a desktop todo list in GTK and C, not tools I had extensive knowledge of ever and nothing recently. It was a breath of fresh air how simple it was compared to doing the same in modern frameworks. A single ~30 line function to create the gui and the rest held together with a couple of function pointers. It was faster (to write and run) and simpler than anything I'd written in years. More responsive than the most responsive web framework too.

niftich 10y ago
But is it cross-platform (Win32, Windows UWP, OS X, multiple linuxes, iOS, Android) and most of that same code works on the web? It's okay to bemoan Electron for being bloated but multiple balls have been dropped by OS and platform makers, GUI toolkit makers, language runtime makers, and that giant amount of missing glue inbetween, to get to where we are. It's rather sad that Electron, out of all things, is the first thing to fulfill the holy grail of write-once, run anywhere, in a way that's good enough and palatable to the plurality of users' and devs' satisfaction.
- zigzigzag 10y ago
  Electron certainly isn't the first thing to give "write once, run anywhere", let alone good enough to satisfy users. I groan every time I download an app only to discover it's Electron based. Java beat Electron to write-once-run-anywhere by a couple of decades, and still does in the sense that Electron requires you to make platform-specific builds of your app even if the core code is the same (Java gives you that option but doesn't require it, you can still distribute a jar or web start file). Meanwhile, Electron has managed the feat of being even bloatier than Java is. The DOM was never designed for GUIs and the terrible performance of web and Electron based apps is a testament to that. At least Java apps tend to have meaningful menu bars and context menus. Electron satisfies web devs who have either never written desktop apps in other frameworks, or did decades ago and think nothing improved there. They "satisfy" users in the sense that users are rarely offered any alternative so have to suck it up and tend to judge web apps against each other vs a well coded, tightly written desktop app (office suites being a notable exception).

kazagistar 10y ago

Intellectual is the wrong target, just as much as easy. Humans have a limited capacity to understand complex systems, and once they grow to a certan point, your ability to integrate and innovate on them is limited due to overhead of the layers of incedental complexity. Easy is just shoving complexity under the rug. Simplicity, and building systems meant for our meager human intelligences is better. I am not terribly fond of Go, but it has a decent answer in auto-implemented interfaces and duck typing. It's not about dumbing down, it's just different, and easier on the compiler, which is a significant advantage. And as for async in java... ugh, how awful. We finally got something like promises and lambdas, but most APIs are still trapped in synchronous calls and using the JPA is a disaster of hidden thread-local state. What kind of stack are you using to make java async work? Maybe I'm just missing something.

yummyfajitas 10y ago
The thing is, the modern systems are often less complex. SQL databases are generally far simpler than MongoDB - you just need to learn relational algebra rather than blindly shoveling whatever JSON you got into the DB. As for Java + async + threads, I use Akka and it's basically seamless. But Netty + core Java Executors is fine too, just more verbose.
- raverbashing 10y ago
  > you just need to learn relational algebra rather than blindly shoveling whatever JSON you got into the DB. No SQL per se is not hard. But the whole data modeling, creating tables, picking types is just needless bureaucracy Yes, I want to save a json snippet and be done with it. I don't want to create another table because I have a 1-N relationship. And while ORMs make this easier it is still not painless
  - niftich 10y ago
    Schema-less data always sounds good in the beginning until you actually try to use that data. Then you end up encoding all the validation and data munging logic into whatever process reads from it. An internally-schema'd database just recognizes that this is absurd and lets you put the bottom three layers of validation logic inside the database, where you only have to do it once.

l1ambda 10y ago

I just want to nitpick about Node a little bit--as a Java developer and Postgres user myself--because there is more to Node than just async JavaScript and I think it gets a bad rap a little bit because of that. Async is one good quality of Node, but it also has this really great debugging integration with Chrome DevTools. And even really huge Node programs start fast--usually in less than a second--so you get this really tight development feedback loop. So you have this overall pleasant experience of a great module system where mostly everything out there is already going to be async (less likely in Java), a REPL, a fantastic debugger and profiler via the Chrome DevTools, and extremely quick process restarts. I think for some people these qualities outweigh the lack of static typing and JavaScript language quirks (which a lot have been ironed out in ES6 and ES7 anyway).

smhg 10y ago

> Isomorphism simply didn't work. Care to elaborate? I'd really like to know your opinion as this is an important aspect of my developer-life.

niftich 10y ago

It's not anti-intellectualism -- it's complete and utter lack of knowledge transfer, coupled with young people's spirit being dampened by established practices that are 50% reasonable, 50% bullshit. This, piled on with subtle ageism, ensures that any useful lessons learned will only be learned by the time it's too late, and there's a new group of can-do people who feel stifled by the combined wisdom of the ages, so they break off and do their own thing. I wrote about this here [1] with nicer language. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13022926 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13022926

Chyzwar 10y ago

I agree for most part but what is important is productivity. Java ecosystem is just toxic waste full of abandoned projects, over engineering everything, crashing build because everyone use arbitrary versioning schemes, ring-fences code with licenses/patents and developers with C++ mindset. Node.js is maybe build on top hack on top of hack. With some ugly code, lack of any abstraction, lack of sensible std library, debugging capabilities, minimal editors support and finally with package manager that cannot be trusted. But I can build CRUD API working with any database under 1h in node.js. Where In Java I need to start with learning all maven quirks, write pointless JSON mappers and learn stupid annotations that every library introduce.

EdiX 10y ago

Go's entire selling point is "faster than python, no need to learn anything new". In terms of language features it's again living in the 80's - Java got generics in 2004 and Java was way behind the times. In terms of speed it's worse than Java and Rust, maybe comparable to Haskell. This is not true, go is generally slightly faster than java (while using less memory_ and slightly slower than rust. The garbage collector is slower than java's default collector but has better latency but java's gc can be tuned and go gives you better tools to bypass gc partially or entirelly.

geoka9 10y ago

> Go's entire selling point is "faster than python, no need to learn anything new". To me, Go's selling points have been numerous: - Faster than python - Statically typed/no runtime bundling requirements - Easy access to concurrency/multicore scaling - Excellent tooling and integration with programming text editors - Great documentation - Excellent standard library which you can treat as a continuation of your own program - Great design with pragmatic choices (this one is subjective, I agree) In short, there's nothing else like that out there. Without Go, I'd have been stuck with JVM, Haskell or Erlang for most of my projects. And I dislike all of them, so Go has been a godsend. Incindentally, I also happen to enjoy working with Postgres and prefer it to any other database I've worked with (SQL or not).

yummyfajitas 10y ago
You haven't laid out any concrete selling points for Go over Haskell or Java beyond "I dislike all of them". Can you come up with any intellectual rather than emotional reason for preferring Go?
- geoka9 10y ago
  I can open a standard library definition and quickly understand what it does. If I try to do that with Scala or Java, my eyes just glaze over. With Go I often don't notice when I venture outside of my own program and into 3rd party library code.
  - yummyfajitas 10y ago
    It sounds like you just didn't out in the work to learn Haskell. The docs are fantastic, but they do assume you are willing to get over the learning curve. I don't think you are really disagreeing with me - go does nothing new, just lower learning curve.
    - geoka9 10y ago
      That's the problem, there's no getting over the learning curve when it comes to languages like Scala or Haskell. While you do get more proficient with time, you never get to the state where the language gets out of the way and becomes your friend instead of something you have to wrestle most of the time to enjoy the benefits it offers (which are also offered by Go, BTW). I was disagreeing with your original statement, Go is not just a faster python.

HodGreeley 10y ago

NoSQL's only selling point is you don't need to learn SQL? Hardly true. Major Oracle shops aren't dumping them for Mongo/Couchbase/... because they're trying to avoid SQL. They do it for scalability, availability, performance, flexibility and more. I don't see that the facts in the real world back you up here. Not claiming NoSQL is a panacea. You're definitely making some trade-offs, and in many cases it's just the wrong tech. But it's absurd to say it's happening to avoid a learning curve.

yummyfajitas 10y ago
I didn't say that was NoSQL's only selling point. I said that was MongoDB's only selling point.