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Is it "being hostile to beginners" to encourage them to learn simple universal tools to build any software in any environment? When i was a beginner, trying a

by rixed 5y ago

Is it "being hostile to beginners" to encourage them to learn simple universal tools to build any software in any environment? When i was a beginner, trying a new language was actually easier: you just installed a compiler. Now you need a "platform", for some even a special dedicated machine. I wonder who is benefiting this sillo-ing, but I doubt that's the beginners.

jolux 5y ago
I'm not talking about beginning programmers, I'm talking about people who are new to your language community. You can still just install and use ocamlc/ocamlopt, or rustc, or ghc, but the bar has been raised. People picking up a new language today for production use expect it to have a cohesive story for builds, packaging, tooling, and testing out of the box. >I wonder who is benefiting this sillo-ing, but I doubt that's the beginners. Everyone benefits from the better tooling we have now. The siloing is a problem that still has not seen a satisfactory solution. Regression in user experience is not acceptable.
- rwmj 5y ago
  These language-specific toolchains are often not better. They're complex, opaque, stuff things in places in my home directory, don't work together, and don't work with system packages -- golang is actively hostile to being properly packaged, making it difficult to keep track of what's installed and security updates.
  - baby 5y ago
    Golang and cargo have the best dev stories out there. Period.
- rixed 5y ago
  It baffles me how much younger devs seam to be unable or unwilling to consider anything else than "communities". I guess the latest 20 years of research in web marketing did that to us. Being part of a "language community" is not the only way to be a programmer. Not knowing your way outside of the opinionated built tool black box is indeed quite frankly the hallmark of being a beginner, if not a tech illiterate, in my book. When I originally asked what was the point of Dune, the answer I received from the people pushing that project at that time was that I shouldn't worry, it was just a tool to speed up getting a workable workflow when teaching 1st grade students. It made sense then, I though at some point beginners would naturally outgrow that walking aid. But look at what happened instead! Mind you, today's experience with ocamlc/ocamlopt for the seasoned programmer is not unchanged either. Because of that new "community first" principle, all the tools tend to work only withing the ecosystem at the expense of cooperating with the larger distribution. Again, younger devs or devs used to "lesser operating systems" never experienced life under a proper system-wide software distribution so they have no idea what they are missing. Of course opam looks great once Debian is broken (and until, let's hope, guix or nix takes over). An exemple of such a regression: querying the type of an ocaml expression from any editor used to be trivial from the easily parsable annotation file producer by the compiler. It's now been replaced by a memory dump that's easier for merlin. And merlin will not even be able to answer that simple query unless you provide it with a full blown configuration. Good luck setting that up without the assistance of the dune built tool. Good luck setting that up if your project involves anything else than plain and simple ocaml. Ach, I probably start to sound unfair. Indeed this tendency toward infantilism is in no way specific to ocaml, probably ocaml has been resisting it for longer even. And it's not specific to programming languages either, nor even to technology. Pardon my rant, grumpy old man can still feel passionate about computers at times; rest assured he is being transferred to another trade :)
  - jolux 5y ago
    You’re just assuming a lot of stuff I didn’t say. I have a lot of respect for your perspective on software and always love hearing from more experienced programmers. I think universal tools are great for a lot of stuff, but they’re just not as productive as cargo and stack are. Have you tried really getting into one of these? Having package management, toolchain management, builds, testing, formatting, linting, and IDE support out of the box with one tool is really cool, and it’s not something that the distribution-centric tools ever provided. I will say that adapting to change is part of the human experience and especially part of the programmer experience. I’m 22, but I’m almost entirely self taught as a developer and have only a year of college. I’ve been reading older programmers (and older people) lamenting the new way of things for at least ten years already, it seems to be a constant. What you now call infantilism will be the old way 30 years from now, and the kids writing software then will be doing stuff that confuses me, I’m sure. But this is how progress happens, and change is okay.
    - rixed 5y ago
      > You’re just assuming a lot of stuff I didn’t say. That's because I took that opportunity to rant more largely about the whole industry. I frequently ask myself what's the likelihood that this perception that the computing industry is regressing, and that is shared by many of the older devs who were passionate about it, would be just caused by normal grumpiness and confirmation bias. Eventually, I believe tech evolution is more dynamic than progress/regress. I've witnessed the creation and then the demise of personal computing, unrestricted computer networks, free and open software distributions, unbiased search engines; I hope I will not be around when the Linux kernel momentum is lost and personal general purpose computers become once again inaccessible. There were of course already a lot of deficiencies when I started my career ; the big "Software Crisis" was already well documented, some big corporations were slowing down innovation as hard as they could, and surely many established programmers routinely wrote miles of buggy software on inefficient hardware. But there was a growing, vivid shiny trend, easy to spot, in all this gloominess: a Unix revival on micro computers led by young engineers who just wanted to do the right things. Ok, that momentum is gone now and I'm looking for the next big wave that would push us forward. Meanwhile: business, politics, conventions, ignorance and laziness are eroding that culture. This is how I picture things, at least; in this picture progress is not automatic, nor is regress. Please do not believe progress is automatic, or you won't fight for it. At worse, if that is wrong and progress is indeed automatic, what's the loss?

by rixed 5y ago

jolux 5y ago

I'm not talking about beginning programmers, I'm talking about people who are new to your language community. You can still just install and use ocamlc/ocamlopt, or rustc, or ghc, but the bar has been raised. People picking up a new language today for production use expect it to have a cohesive story for builds, packaging, tooling, and testing out of the box. >I wonder who is benefiting this sillo-ing, but I doubt that's the beginners. Everyone benefits from the better tooling we have now. The siloing is a problem that still has not seen a satisfactory solution. Regression in user experience is not acceptable.

rwmj 5y ago
These language-specific toolchains are often not better. They're complex, opaque, stuff things in places in my home directory, don't work together, and don't work with system packages -- golang is actively hostile to being properly packaged, making it difficult to keep track of what's installed and security updates.
- baby 5y ago
  Golang and cargo have the best dev stories out there. Period.
rixed 5y ago
It baffles me how much younger devs seam to be unable or unwilling to consider anything else than "communities". I guess the latest 20 years of research in web marketing did that to us. Being part of a "language community" is not the only way to be a programmer. Not knowing your way outside of the opinionated built tool black box is indeed quite frankly the hallmark of being a beginner, if not a tech illiterate, in my book. When I originally asked what was the point of Dune, the answer I received from the people pushing that project at that time was that I shouldn't worry, it was just a tool to speed up getting a workable workflow when teaching 1st grade students. It made sense then, I though at some point beginners would naturally outgrow that walking aid. But look at what happened instead! Mind you, today's experience with ocamlc/ocamlopt for the seasoned programmer is not unchanged either. Because of that new "community first" principle, all the tools tend to work only withing the ecosystem at the expense of cooperating with the larger distribution. Again, younger devs or devs used to "lesser operating systems" never experienced life under a proper system-wide software distribution so they have no idea what they are missing. Of course opam looks great once Debian is broken (and until, let's hope, guix or nix takes over). An exemple of such a regression: querying the type of an ocaml expression from any editor used to be trivial from the easily parsable annotation file producer by the compiler. It's now been replaced by a memory dump that's easier for merlin. And merlin will not even be able to answer that simple query unless you provide it with a full blown configuration. Good luck setting that up without the assistance of the dune built tool. Good luck setting that up if your project involves anything else than plain and simple ocaml. Ach, I probably start to sound unfair. Indeed this tendency toward infantilism is in no way specific to ocaml, probably ocaml has been resisting it for longer even. And it's not specific to programming languages either, nor even to technology. Pardon my rant, grumpy old man can still feel passionate about computers at times; rest assured he is being transferred to another trade :)
- jolux 5y ago
  You’re just assuming a lot of stuff I didn’t say. I have a lot of respect for your perspective on software and always love hearing from more experienced programmers. I think universal tools are great for a lot of stuff, but they’re just not as productive as cargo and stack are. Have you tried really getting into one of these? Having package management, toolchain management, builds, testing, formatting, linting, and IDE support out of the box with one tool is really cool, and it’s not something that the distribution-centric tools ever provided. I will say that adapting to change is part of the human experience and especially part of the programmer experience. I’m 22, but I’m almost entirely self taught as a developer and have only a year of college. I’ve been reading older programmers (and older people) lamenting the new way of things for at least ten years already, it seems to be a constant. What you now call infantilism will be the old way 30 years from now, and the kids writing software then will be doing stuff that confuses me, I’m sure. But this is how progress happens, and change is okay.
  - rixed 5y ago
    > You’re just assuming a lot of stuff I didn’t say. That's because I took that opportunity to rant more largely about the whole industry. I frequently ask myself what's the likelihood that this perception that the computing industry is regressing, and that is shared by many of the older devs who were passionate about it, would be just caused by normal grumpiness and confirmation bias. Eventually, I believe tech evolution is more dynamic than progress/regress. I've witnessed the creation and then the demise of personal computing, unrestricted computer networks, free and open software distributions, unbiased search engines; I hope I will not be around when the Linux kernel momentum is lost and personal general purpose computers become once again inaccessible. There were of course already a lot of deficiencies when I started my career ; the big "Software Crisis" was already well documented, some big corporations were slowing down innovation as hard as they could, and surely many established programmers routinely wrote miles of buggy software on inefficient hardware. But there was a growing, vivid shiny trend, easy to spot, in all this gloominess: a Unix revival on micro computers led by young engineers who just wanted to do the right things. Ok, that momentum is gone now and I'm looking for the next big wave that would push us forward. Meanwhile: business, politics, conventions, ignorance and laziness are eroding that culture. This is how I picture things, at least; in this picture progress is not automatic, nor is regress. Please do not believe progress is automatic, or you won't fight for it. At worse, if that is wrong and progress is indeed automatic, what's the loss?