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Ask HN: What are the most timeless development tools, etc., and why?
Curious to see what people think are the most “timeless” tools, languages, frameworks. How old something needs to be to be “timeless” is subjective. Would be interesting to see if there’s convergence on particular areas. Might provide a nice overview of tools (or even processes, methodologies) for a younger developer to focus on.
- ThePhysicist 7y agoI recently picked up game development again as a hobby and was pleasantly surprised that SDL still is around and hasn’t changed much in 10 years (which is a long time in game development). Browser-based JavaScript is also very stable if you stay away from the frameworks in the sense that stuff which worked 20 years ago mostly still works today (although much stuff has been added of course). Frameworks like Flask are also an anchor of stability and thankfully haven’t changed much, at least in terms of API stability.
- mattmanser 7y agoI programmed javascript 15 years ago, while you're technically correct, practically speaking today's JavaScript looks nothing like that written even 10 years ago. Like Crockford's "Javascript: The good parts", which is when people really started using it without utterly despising it, was published in 2008. Also, before V8 came out, JavaScript performance was a joke, a loop of 100 items could hang your page for a second. Think that was around 2008/9 too.
- tmaly 7y agoI still have javascript running on an internal app that was written in 2006. It is still working on current browsers.
- mattmanser 7y agoThat's not what I was saying though, if you rewrote it for some reason, it probably wouldn't look the same at all. The easiest example is that you used to have to create and add every single node of a table, for example, modify all the properties line by line, create a tbody, add that to the table, create a tr element, add that to the body, add a td element, etc., etc. I can do all that in one line now. And 20 years ago, XMLHttpRequest had only just been released and you were more likely to be doing dynamic updating with crazy stuff in iframes. Let's not even get started on divs vs tables for layout...
- s1t5 7y agoBoth C and SQL are ancient on a tech-time scale and are still widely used.
- joezydeco 7y agoAll project management eventually ends up in Excel. So I'll say Excel.
- Someone 7y agoPencils, keyboards, magnetic tape, System/360. I’m not sure those are things for a younger developer to focus on, though.
- itronitron 7y agowhiteboards date back to at least the 1980's
- textread 7y agoEmacs was first released 44 years back
- tmaly 7y agoI am going to have to say the vi editor. I was using it over a vt100 terminal in 2001. I am still using it as vim for my dev work in WFH over vpn.