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> The dream of programming language design is to bring about orders-of-magnitude productivity improvements in software development tasks. I can understand why

> The dream of programming language design is to bring about orders-of-magnitude productivity improvements in software development tasks. I can understand why there is such a focus on productivity, but I think it's awful for the industry when it's our number 1 priority. Productivity is meaningless if the thing that you are producing is of poor quality. It's why we make web apps out of 500 npm dependencies when a native app would be faster and preferred by the user. It's why we use languages where we don't have to "fight against the type system" because we prefer writing code faster to writing correct code. Again, I understand perfectly why this is the case. It just kinda makes me sad that we treat ourselves as garden hoses spewing out as much code as possible without as much thought into making a better product.

deleted 8y ago
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cageface 8y ago
Unfortunately users just don't care in most cases. The app stores have taught a generation of users that software should be free so the pressure is on developers to build things in the cheapest way possible. In most cases that takes real native apps off the table. I particularly blame Apple here for being so successful at commoditizing software in order to sell their hardware. This might come back to bite them now that their hardware sales are slowing though. In markets where users are still willing to pay a premium you still see high quality native apps. Ableton Live is $750, but plenty of users are happy to pay that because you can't build Live with javascript and html.
- dTal 8y ago
  It's not clear to me that this is actually a bad thing. Computer time is less valuable than human time, and that goes for both developers and users. For most one-off computing tasks, far better to fumble with something shoddy but free that someone dashed off in a few hours, than invest a day's wages into a product with man-years worth of polishing. There's free food everywhere and we're complaining it's not gourmet.
- mr__y 8y ago
  >Unfortunately users just don't care in most cases. Users almost universaly don't care. This also applies to businesses, C-levels and managers. However, while they don't care it affects them indirectly as they end up using bloated sub-optimal software possibly with bugs and sometimes significantly slower than in could be. It then affects their productivity as well. My point is that one could at least try educating the non-IT decision makers why it's important. My team has successfuly convinced the CEO that 2 month long refactoring project is really important and that while it won't directly affect the functionality it will increase productivity of the our team in future by making the team more productive and allowing for faster implementation of new features in the future. From my experience the "technical debt" metaphor is great for explaining such things to business oriented people. That metaphor is usefull because it is compatible with other debt related metaphors, like interest rate or refinancing. We could explain extra time needed to implement stuff in non-refactored bloated codebase as an interest-rate. Also, the use of car-related analogies is quite effective. My point is that while users don't care about the technological intricacies, the effects can be explained by the use of metaphors and concepts that they know well.
throwaway55554 8y ago
It has always been interesting to me that developers hate LoC metrics but brag about writing a Twitter "clone" in a weekend.
- tluyben2 8y ago
  > developers Developers meaning in some circles; I know many corporate / enterprise devs that really pride themselves on committing (if they have version management.....) and producing as many lines of code as possible. Usually Java or C# or VB#.
- collyw 8y ago
  More code is usually a greater liability. Less developer time is usually cheaper.
tluyben2 8y ago
So then the idea should be to make a language (or environment) that allows building higher quality with the speed of JS... But really no-one but a handful of people (like some people here and myself) cares enough (to do something about it) about this; companies or end users. People are used to very shitty software; non-tech people are just swearing at their screen but in a way like 'we cannot do anything about it anyway'. Almost all sites and apps are broken in many ways without even looking at usability/UX (a lot of time seems to be put in frontend and blingbling while the backend/logic is horribly broken in many ways).

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

cageface 8y ago

Unfortunately users just don't care in most cases. The app stores have taught a generation of users that software should be free so the pressure is on developers to build things in the cheapest way possible. In most cases that takes real native apps off the table. I particularly blame Apple here for being so successful at commoditizing software in order to sell their hardware. This might come back to bite them now that their hardware sales are slowing though. In markets where users are still willing to pay a premium you still see high quality native apps. Ableton Live is $750, but plenty of users are happy to pay that because you can't build Live with javascript and html.

dTal 8y ago
It's not clear to me that this is actually a bad thing. Computer time is less valuable than human time, and that goes for both developers and users. For most one-off computing tasks, far better to fumble with something shoddy but free that someone dashed off in a few hours, than invest a day's wages into a product with man-years worth of polishing. There's free food everywhere and we're complaining it's not gourmet.
mr__y 8y ago
>Unfortunately users just don't care in most cases. Users almost universaly don't care. This also applies to businesses, C-levels and managers. However, while they don't care it affects them indirectly as they end up using bloated sub-optimal software possibly with bugs and sometimes significantly slower than in could be. It then affects their productivity as well. My point is that one could at least try educating the non-IT decision makers why it's important. My team has successfuly convinced the CEO that 2 month long refactoring project is really important and that while it won't directly affect the functionality it will increase productivity of the our team in future by making the team more productive and allowing for faster implementation of new features in the future. From my experience the "technical debt" metaphor is great for explaining such things to business oriented people. That metaphor is usefull because it is compatible with other debt related metaphors, like interest rate or refinancing. We could explain extra time needed to implement stuff in non-refactored bloated codebase as an interest-rate. Also, the use of car-related analogies is quite effective. My point is that while users don't care about the technological intricacies, the effects can be explained by the use of metaphors and concepts that they know well.

throwaway55554 8y ago

It has always been interesting to me that developers hate LoC metrics but brag about writing a Twitter "clone" in a weekend.

tluyben2 8y ago
> developers Developers meaning in some circles; I know many corporate / enterprise devs that really pride themselves on committing (if they have version management.....) and producing as many lines of code as possible. Usually Java or C# or VB#.
collyw 8y ago
More code is usually a greater liability. Less developer time is usually cheaper.

tluyben2 8y ago

So then the idea should be to make a language (or environment) that allows building higher quality with the speed of JS... But really no-one but a handful of people (like some people here and myself) cares enough (to do something about it) about this; companies or end users. People are used to very shitty software; non-tech people are just swearing at their screen but in a way like 'we cannot do anything about it anyway'. Almost all sites and apps are broken in many ways without even looking at usability/UX (a lot of time seems to be put in frontend and blingbling while the backend/logic is horribly broken in many ways).