3 ms·

This is pretty much spot on. People usually missing the point of 'boring' because they would think of unpleasant and ancient stuff. The key value is indeed to

This is pretty much spot on. People usually missing the point of 'boring' because they would think of unpleasant and ancient stuff. The key value is indeed to avoid surprises. When I read WhatsApp used Erlang back in the day, I was pretty impressed. Not only the obvious things like Erlang was the forgotten secret weapon for massive concurrent apps, but also details like they used FreeBSD back in the day when there was no preemptive scheduling but Erlang has preemptive scheduling so it was okay. Those details reflect they were very confident and they know perfectly what they were doing.

qznc 6y ago
Yes, "boring" as unpleasant associations and this is why it works much better as a title. Consider these two titles: * Choose boring technology * Choose well-known technology More people will click on the first one because it comes with a paradox suggestion. Why should I intentionally choose something unpleasant? That poses an interesting question. The second title sounds boring (how ironic). Why would I click that?
pydry 6y ago
Whenever I hear "exciting tech" I tend to think "hyped to kingdom come". I think of node, docker, mongo, golang, etc. - tech that was pushed with marketing $$$ or big names. I have an inbuilt bias against that stuff - not that it's necessarily worse than alternatives but that the marketing budget or big name backer instantly makes me more suspicious. For most developers it seems to work the other way around - big names and marketed heavily => it has buzz => it must be good. Under boring there are two types - PHP and postgres. Boring tedious and annoying and boring reliable workhorse. The 2nd type is my favorite type of tech.
- w7 6y ago
  I'd honestly consider Golang "excitingly boring". Simple C-ish syntax that's relatively familiar to most programmers, write once and compile to/from anywhere without arcane flags, easy to understand and use concurrency model with message passing, reference development tooling that can enforce standards out of the box. I don't think there is much new here other than removal of cruft.
  - pydry 6y ago
    In the beginning it's selling point was small binaries and neat concurrency. The tech was "exciting" because Google released it. Pretty much anything Google releases is coated in magic pixie fairy dust (perhaps slightly less so these days). Tech like postgres doesn't get that kind of hype.
    - dumdaar 6y ago
      >Pretty much anything Google releases is coated in magic pixie fairy dust Dart didn't make any impact till flutter was launched.
  - nine_k 6y ago
    Well, the makers of Go took Modula-2 (which, funnily, already had coroutines), removed a number of "too complex" features like ranges, changed "begin-end" to curly braces, then added the object system from Oberon (a great move). They bolted on two principal new features: channels and garbage collection. They also added a few hacks, like the two-value return. And lo, we have a winner based on tech form 1970s and 1980s, with only a small bit of pixie dust from 21st century proper, the advanced GC. Anybody can become productive in a weekend. (Then the productivty ceiling is hit soon, and copy-paste programming ensues, but the initial high is strong.)
ma2rten 6y ago
I mentioned in a comment below that a startup I worked for previously used Erlang. It was a giant headache. They initially used Mnesia as a database but it had issues (which I don't recall because it was before I joined). Then they switched to Riak which is written in Erlang, but was unstable at the time. They then used decided to use MySQL and Cassandra, but ran into issues because database drivers were contributed by the community and not updated. Also, It's basically impossible to hire someone who is an erlang expert, meaning everyone has new to erlang. Because of these and similar issues the company constantly had outages, despite using Erlang which is supposedly highly reliable.
- namelosw 6y ago
  I agree with you that Erlang usually is not in the category of 'boring' technology. It's pretty risky for most teams. Despite Erlang was old, those ideas are both alien and novel to most people. The idioms, the patterns, and the architectures are not well explored as mainstream languages. In my personal experiences, there are also many rough edges. With that being said, the example I raised just to illustrate that the WhatsApp founders had deep understandings of Erlang despite it was a niche technology. The same applies to FreeBSD. Those are the so-called 'boring' technologies for them.

qznc 6y ago

Yes, "boring" as unpleasant associations and this is why it works much better as a title. Consider these two titles: * Choose boring technology * Choose well-known technology More people will click on the first one because it comes with a paradox suggestion. Why should I intentionally choose something unpleasant? That poses an interesting question. The second title sounds boring (how ironic). Why would I click that?

pydry 6y ago

Whenever I hear "exciting tech" I tend to think "hyped to kingdom come". I think of node, docker, mongo, golang, etc. - tech that was pushed with marketing $$$ or big names. I have an inbuilt bias against that stuff - not that it's necessarily worse than alternatives but that the marketing budget or big name backer instantly makes me more suspicious. For most developers it seems to work the other way around - big names and marketed heavily => it has buzz => it must be good. Under boring there are two types - PHP and postgres. Boring tedious and annoying and boring reliable workhorse. The 2nd type is my favorite type of tech.

w7 6y ago
I'd honestly consider Golang "excitingly boring". Simple C-ish syntax that's relatively familiar to most programmers, write once and compile to/from anywhere without arcane flags, easy to understand and use concurrency model with message passing, reference development tooling that can enforce standards out of the box. I don't think there is much new here other than removal of cruft.
- pydry 6y ago
  In the beginning it's selling point was small binaries and neat concurrency. The tech was "exciting" because Google released it. Pretty much anything Google releases is coated in magic pixie fairy dust (perhaps slightly less so these days). Tech like postgres doesn't get that kind of hype.
  - dumdaar 6y ago
    >Pretty much anything Google releases is coated in magic pixie fairy dust Dart didn't make any impact till flutter was launched.
- nine_k 6y ago
  Well, the makers of Go took Modula-2 (which, funnily, already had coroutines), removed a number of "too complex" features like ranges, changed "begin-end" to curly braces, then added the object system from Oberon (a great move). They bolted on two principal new features: channels and garbage collection. They also added a few hacks, like the two-value return. And lo, we have a winner based on tech form 1970s and 1980s, with only a small bit of pixie dust from 21st century proper, the advanced GC. Anybody can become productive in a weekend. (Then the productivty ceiling is hit soon, and copy-paste programming ensues, but the initial high is strong.)

ma2rten 6y ago

I mentioned in a comment below that a startup I worked for previously used Erlang. It was a giant headache. They initially used Mnesia as a database but it had issues (which I don't recall because it was before I joined). Then they switched to Riak which is written in Erlang, but was unstable at the time. They then used decided to use MySQL and Cassandra, but ran into issues because database drivers were contributed by the community and not updated. Also, It's basically impossible to hire someone who is an erlang expert, meaning everyone has new to erlang. Because of these and similar issues the company constantly had outages, despite using Erlang which is supposedly highly reliable.

namelosw 6y ago
I agree with you that Erlang usually is not in the category of 'boring' technology. It's pretty risky for most teams. Despite Erlang was old, those ideas are both alien and novel to most people. The idioms, the patterns, and the architectures are not well explored as mainstream languages. In my personal experiences, there are also many rough edges. With that being said, the example I raised just to illustrate that the WhatsApp founders had deep understandings of Erlang despite it was a niche technology. The same applies to FreeBSD. Those are the so-called 'boring' technologies for them.