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>>It's the goal of software to provide more and more features. That's the goal. The key question is: are we writing features that users find valuable or are we

>>It's the goal of software to provide more and more features. That's the goal. The key question is: are we writing features that users find valuable or are we writing features that developers find valuable? They're two different things. What's happened is that the community has become incestuous. Instead of focusing on value to the user we're focusing on selling frameworks to one another. >>Software development severely lacks any objective metrics of performance and quality. Agreed here as well. But this is related to my first point. Nobody wants to focus on the users. It's far too easy to focus on the technology (or other developers). You write a feature for a user, you can instrument it and see whether users use it or not. You write a feature for a developer, even if nobody uses it you can argue that somewhere, somehow, that feature is going to be critical. It's an abstract value argument -- which is intractable. >>As a result, we are fundamentally unable to reuse already written code on scale, crumbling development and putting the whole industry in constant early-stage. It's a sad state of affairs. I suggest that your conclusion continues the broken thinking I'm describing above. We shouldn't be striving for reusable code at scale. We should be striving for people who have strong basic programming skills and are experts in some business domain. Then we would shoot for the minimum amount of technological abstraction necessary for these programmers to solve problems in that particular domain. Because that's really what the whole point is, not creating large codebases that last twenty years, creating tiny bits of code almost instantly that solve business problems for twenty years. We've got our head stuck in the wrong bucket.

mercer 9y ago
> That's the goal. The key question is: are we writing features that users find valuable or are we writing features that developers find valuable? They're two different things. What's happened is that the community has become incestuous. Instead of focusing on value to the user we're focusing on selling frameworks to one another. I think a deeper problem is that we're not really doing such a great job writing features for developers either. I'm amazed at how much of what I do is still done in the terminal or a bare-bones REPL, not so different from how they worked a few decades ago, when there's so much that could actually improve my day-to-day in small but very noticeable ways. For example, I make almost constant use of the autocomplete feature when I work with the BEAM REPL (Elixir). I was amazed to find out that this was a relatively new feature. I can't count how many keystrokes it saves me throughout the day. Of course, I still can't use VIM-style keybindings, and I'm being forced to write my REPL-code line by line instead of a Chrome Devtools style snippets. But, as you say, I do have tons of frameworks to choose from that all do mostly the same thing, and yet none of them do the relatively common thing that I need, so each of them requires me to read documentation and figure out how to configure it 'just-so'...

mercer 9y ago

> That's the goal. The key question is: are we writing features that users find valuable or are we writing features that developers find valuable? They're two different things. What's happened is that the community has become incestuous. Instead of focusing on value to the user we're focusing on selling frameworks to one another. I think a deeper problem is that we're not really doing such a great job writing features for developers either. I'm amazed at how much of what I do is still done in the terminal or a bare-bones REPL, not so different from how they worked a few decades ago, when there's so much that could actually improve my day-to-day in small but very noticeable ways. For example, I make almost constant use of the autocomplete feature when I work with the BEAM REPL (Elixir). I was amazed to find out that this was a relatively new feature. I can't count how many keystrokes it saves me throughout the day. Of course, I still can't use VIM-style keybindings, and I'm being forced to write my REPL-code line by line instead of a Chrome Devtools style snippets. But, as you say, I do have tons of frameworks to choose from that all do mostly the same thing, and yet none of them do the relatively common thing that I need, so each of them requires me to read documentation and figure out how to configure it 'just-so'...