9 ms·

Kinda a Big Announcement

221 points by nathggns 5y ago

Etheryte 5y ago
Also discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27370026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27370026
bfrog 5y ago
Is it just me or is the intro relating to COM a bit off the mark?
- ghshephard 5y ago
  The intro is about how some things change slowly. His transition paragraph is how things don't seem to get better. He then does his real topic launch by then identifying something that did change quickly, and did get better. I've been reading Spolsky essays for 20 years, he really is incredibly talented. So much so that even today, you can reference some of his early essays on "commoditizing your complement" in the tech industry - and there is a better than average chance that the person you are speaking to will be familiar with Joel's essay on this topic.
- khazhoux 5y ago
  It resonated for me because 10 years ago I worked on a COM project (browser extension that had to support IE) and the total lack of information for that "pre-internet" technology meant I had to rely on very hard to find books. There was one book in particular that without it, the project would have failed. And that's what everything used to be like (well, more like before Internet, not necessarily before Stack Overflow).
  - BeefWellington 5y ago
    Having stopped writing COM components in the early 2000s, back then there were very good resources at Microsoft's site (MSDN) as well as within the Visual Studio help. It's interesting to hear it got worse just ten years later but kind of doesn't surprise me that they wouldn't upkeep that kind of documentation.
    - HWR_14 5y ago
      I did a COM project around the same time. It took a little bit of searching, but I found an excellent tutorial on a random site. Something that could not have existed at StackOverflow because it didn't answer a specific question, any question it answered would have been downvoted, and it would have been difficult to find there.
- thorwasdfasdf 5y ago
  not to us old farts, who get a great feeling of nostalgia when we read about those win32 APIesque topics.
  - drewcoo 5y ago
    That's not nostalgia. Look behind you!!! My primary use of Win32 APIs now is to scare people away from making anything that byzantine. If the APIs don't do the trick, I start telling back compat stories. [shudder]
  - squarefoot 5y ago
    Win32? ...Ha! That's modern stuff. My first thought was "who the heck would need to maintain .COM DOS executables in 2021?":)
garettmd 5y ago
Does it seem like "GRAND" in that last paragraph was a hint at what they're building for the data issues he mentioned in the second to last paragraph?
draw_down 5y ago
Always liked Joel as a writer. I do not foresee this being a good thing though, except perhaps for owners/shareholders. I’m expecting revenue extraction, product stagnation (or worse), communities declining. Some of this seems like it has begun already, I would say I don’t use SO as a resource as often as earlier in its lifetime. Seems like these days the answer is as likely to come from a GitHub issue. Anyway, congrats to the owners and shareholders I suppose.
fennecfoxen 5y ago
Stack Overflow destroyed a lot of its social capital and pissed off its own community in the wake of the Monica Cellio affair a little under 2 years ago. (This one was touched off by the Judaism Stack Exchange moderators asking questions about pronoun policy, but ended up with basically every community involved up in arms, including many in their LGBTQ+ community.) One hopes the new owners will do a better job of managing community relations. It will be difficult for them to do worse.
- kbelder 5y ago
  This is very true. It sidetracked nearly all the communities for a full year, triggered resignations, and caused lawyers to get involved. They've done other things to cause various 'controversies' with their base... changing the license answers are under, hiding controversial questions, etc... but their amazingly unprofessional treatement of Cellio caused more lasting damage than any of that.
  - exhilaration 5y ago
    It's interesting, I'm on Hacker News almost every day and have benefited enormously from Stack Overflow yet I have no idea what you're talking about or who Monica Cellio is. My guess is that the vast majority of their users haven't either. I only mention this because seemingly major events in online communities don't always have the impact that people involved or following closely think they do.
    - AlexandrB 5y ago
      As with Wikipedia, there's a community of volunteers curating and moderating SO. Drama in that community doesn't necessarily bubble up in obvious ways like the site going down, but I'm sure it has an overall effect on content moderation and quality over time.
    - OJFord 5y ago
      The only way I'm aware of it is prominent users/moderators having changed their display name to things like '<original name> - Reinstate Monica'. Or maybe I also saw an HN thread about it, but mainly that. (I still see them.)
phorkyas82 5y ago
Still love that guy and his writing. Went with my current company mostly because they dropped his name in the job description. (Also: Went so heavily into table tennis that it always seems to me he's holding that table tennis racket a bit awkwardly or like a hobby player in that picture. But great hobby.)
0xbadcafebee 5y ago
> Where are the flying cars? Understanding why we don't have flying cars will tell you how the entire world works. It turns out that "progress" has nothing to do with "want", and more to do with need, availability, and timing. > They lack the structure to make the data they contain readily accessed programatically, so step one is miserable screen scraping and data cleanup. That’s where a lot of people give up. > We think we have an interesting way to fix this. RDF? OWL? SKOS?
- bena 5y ago
  All of those address the issue from the other side. If I'm aware of the Semantic Web, agree with their conclusions, and wish to do so, I can make my site Semantic. That's true. And if I wanted to publish data and make sure others could access it, I would. It's not required however. And if I want to make my data only accessible through my portal, I have a vested interest in making my site as anti-Semantic as possible. Like I don't think Multiple Listing Service (MLS) companies would ever make their sites Semantic. Nor would any company that consumes their data (like Zillow or Realtor). It's the data itself that has value, so they want to put hoops in front of it. But it's technically publically available data that they're publishing for free. Technically, if you acquire the facts themselves, it doesn't matter how, they can't do anything to you if you redistribute that data. The only thing they can do is make their site as difficult as possible to scrape. Then there are the sites that don't care either way and making their site Semantic is only additional work. For example: Lego's storefront. All of that information is from their databases. They already have the information and don't care whether or not someone else has access to it. The information provides little to no value. So they have no incentive to invest resources in making that data more easily available to others. So to get the information from these sites, you have to scrape. It's unfortunate, it's miserable, but those are the facts.
  - 0xbadcafebee 5y ago
    That's quite a fatalistic point of view for a non-technical problem. But who cares if scraping is involved? You can still use all the technologies I listed. Looking at Hash.ai's product roadmap, it looks like they're building a "Splunk for simulations". And probably their big value-add, besides just a flashy tool, is going to be collecting and curating data. But they probably realize how much time and money it takes to constantly curate all that data. So probably what they are doing is building the tools so that individuals can curate their own data, by using a scraping tool, a transform tool, a load tool, etc. And if they want that data to be more useful within their own ecosystem, it would make sense to make all that data semantic, so that data from one customer is composeable for another customer. The more taxonomies and semantic relationships that are built over time would just make the whole dataset more intelligent over time. Enabling customers to build graphs of graphs would turn them into the world's premier crowd-sourced and curated data warehouse, netting them a trillion dollar valuation in 10 years, without ever charging a single person for access, or paying for anything but infrastructure and a couple devs. Or maybe it's something else, I dunno.
tdeck 5y ago
> almost anyone I talk to is too young to imagine The Days Before Stack Overflow, when the bookstore had an entire wall of Java and the way you picked a Rich Text Editor was going to Barnes and Noble and browsing through printed books for an hour, in the Rich Text Editor Component shelf. I remember the "Days Before Stack Overflow" and Joel is giving himself a bit too much credit here. Before SO, when I googled a problem I would often find a solution on a blog, personal website, or some community's PHPBB/vBulletin forum. Remember, this was 2008 we're talking about. The UX was undoubtedly less consistent, but it's not like we were rushing off to the library to look up PHP functions and CSS 3-column layouts.
- quercusa 5y ago
  I still miss browsing at Computer Literacy in Sunnyvale and San Jose. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Literacy_Bookshops https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Literacy_Bookshops
- bosswipe 5y ago
  I definitely used to buy and read more books back then, and documentation in general. Maybe that was a good thing.
  - johnfn 5y ago
    I feel like this argument is akin to "back before cars, I used to walk all the time, and I was in much better shape." There's nothing to stop you from going and doing it again!
    - iainmerrick 5y ago
      Well, yes and no... As an Apple developer, I used to be able to rely entirely on Inside Macintosh books because Apple’s docs were the best in the business, probably the best ever. Nowadays, even if I wanted to rely on Apple’s own documentation, I can’t, because the docs are just no good any more. (Their header files are still very informative! But much less so in the Swift era, sadly...) To use your analogy, I’d really like to walk as much as I used to, but they ripped up all the walkable districts to build highways! I don’t think things are bad across the board, at least. For example, you can get a very long way in Javascript purely from MDN rather than needing SO.
mikewarot 5y ago
The days before Stack Overflow were far better. A search used to return a blog post in which a person described a bug, how they got there, and the resolution. The net effect of stack overflow was to spam the search engines with non-answers like "you asked in the wrong forum", "you didn't ask nicely", etc. Long ago I learned to route around it.
- ilaksh 5y ago
  Really?? I remember frequently running into a site that was strangely named ExpertSexchange and having to fight through ads to get information.
  - bitwize 5y ago
    It was supposed to be Experts Exchange and... yeah, bad choice of domain name, especially since "sex change" is an outdated term now considered a slur, on par with "Eskimo".
lliamander 5y ago
Talking with developers who started their career in the early 90's, it seems to me the two biggest changes in software development over the past 30 years are: - the rise of easily shared open source libraries and applications (supported by infrastructure like CPAN, Maven, and Github) - crowd-sourced documentation (blogs, forums, and Stack Overflow) It changed not just the way an individual programmer interacts with the code, but the way programmers work together.
- CodeGlitch 5y ago
  What I love about stack overflow is that you don't just get the answer to your question (usually) but the top rated answers also include the "whys". Meaning you get to expand your understanding of the domain in question. People who write stack overflow answers really are the unsung heroes of the open source world.
  - shadowgovt 5y ago
    This highlights something I believe to be a deeper truth about programming in general: the whys matter, sometimes more than the hows. So much of programming is patterns that exist for extremely arbitrary reasons (note: not acausal reasons, just reasons that are unimportant to the immediate problem domain one is trying to solve, or perhaps important in a way one doesn't yet know). Knowing those reasons can give you some mental hooks to hang the arbitrariness off of. COM, which Joel mentions anecdotally at the top of the article, is a great example of that. I think the biggest challenge people have remembering why COM works the way it does is it's there to solve a problem that primarily the Microsoft software ecosystem had, which didn't show up in other software ecosystems as strongly: Microsoft had a vested financial interest in enabling developers to create closed-source binary blobs that could interact with each other via exposed objects. Though COM is language-agnostic, most examples from textbooks of the mid-'90s era reveal the big problem it's solving: C++ was the hot language at the time, but C++ doesn't standardize name-mangling, so two arbitrary binary blobs of C++ code from two different compilers weren't guaranteed to be able to use the objects in each other's libraries. This isn't a problem Apple's software stack saw so often (Apple had fewer toolchains, so compiler incompatibility was less frequent a problem) and it was rarely a problem in the open-source OS ecosystems (if you're passing around source code instead of closed-source binary blobs, you don't care about name-mangling issues because you're building the source as a lump under the watchful eye of one compiler). But in the Windows world, with a pile of choices for compiler and a business need to support closed-source binary blobs that could expose objects, it was hell. It's helpful in understanding COM to understand why Microsoft's ecosystem needed a way for closed-source libraries to expose objects in a language-agnostic way.
austincheney 5y ago
> The biggest problem is that developers of programming tools love to add things and hate to take things away. So things get harder and harder and more and more complex because there are more and more ways to do the same thing Kind of, but not exactly. As a given software platform evolves rarely do the defining foundations significantly change. This means there becomes many ways to solve a problem down the line, but the original few solutions typically still work and apply just the same as they did in the early days. I cannot emphasize enough just how important that is. The implications of grasping this allow a developer to solve almost any problem like magic. The mythical 10x developer sprinkling their pixie dust like dropping blow at a night club. That is because the developer knows the durable solutions to most problems already and optionally may consider newer approaches when beneficial. They know what works and have the freedom to deviate at their convenience. The implications of missing this produces infantile developers dependent upon the flavor of the moment. The developer reliant upon a late stage convention or supplemental tool has less flexibility than the developer more experienced with the foundational concepts of the given platform. This is vaguely related to the Law of Leaky Abstractions[1], but that law just describes reactive scenarios. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/11/11/the-law-of-leaky-abstractions/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/11/11/the-law-of-leaky-a...
arduinomancer 5y ago
> some things (like handing a file upload, or centering) that were, shockingly, still just as randomly difficult as they were in VBScript twenty years ago. I don't get why the "centering is hard" trope is still being repeated in 2021. I'm a recent new grad front end dev and have never had issues with this. Hasn't it been years at this point since flex-box became standard?
- davnicwil 5y ago
  You're not wrong, but you may be reading it in the wrong tone. There is a certain type of joke where the punchline is something that was true for so long, it's acceptable to repeat it ironically as a sort of inside joke, knowing it is obviously not true any more. Best pulled off if you were actually there, of course. I think that's what's going on here.
- svachalek 5y ago
  Standard? I'd be happy if 10% of my interview candidates could do a flex layout.
  - soulofmischief 5y ago
    Hiring? :)
- dsjoerg 5y ago
  Google doesn't seem to think it's standard: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=how+to+center+html+element https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=how+to+... Do you accept this as relevant evidence about what is standard? (Or would a different search be better?)
  - xdennis 5y ago
    I don't understand why this is downvoted. It doesn't look like top results for "how to center html element" show the flexbox method. My example of "center vertically css" also doesn't show the flexbox method. The first result recommends the ol' "top:50%; transform:translateY(-50%)". [1] The second result shows the padding method, the line-height method and the translateY method again. [2] The third result is a complete guide asking you questions three layers deep about what you want to do and gives you the personalised answer for the scenario. [3] I gave up afterwards. But the point is people are still learning old ways of doing it. Should they read a guide to modern CSS? Yes, but we all know searching and clicking on the first result is easier. [1] https://www.w3schools.com/howto/howto_css_center-vertical.asp https://www.w3schools.com/howto/howto_css_center-vertical.as... [2] https://www.w3schools.com/css/css_align.asp https://www.w3schools.com/css/css_align.asp [3]: https://css-tricks.com/centering-css-complete-guide/ https://css-tricks.com/centering-css-complete-guide/
mattlondon 5y ago
Is stack overflow even useful anymore? I guess it must be for some. Personally for me it feels like the content is pretty "stale". E.g. an answer from 5 years ago that uses a deprecated feature in a library that was abandoned 3 years ago etc, a reference to something only working in Chrome v12(we are on v90 now IIRC) etc etc. It seems like a lot of what I come across on there is just so out of date that I personally do not put value on it. As such I personally avoid it now like I used to avoid experts exchange that was the stack-overflow-before-stack-overflow. I wonder if I am alone...?
- quietbritishjim 5y ago
  Given you mention Chrome, maybe you are a JS dev, and maybe things move a bit faster for that language/ecosystem than for others (to put it mildly).
- ravedave5 5y ago
  I had to figure out how to do something with videoJS and all I could find were answers for the old version of the lib, there were new answers but they were buried and hard to find.
ChrisArchitect 5y ago
Yeah, what is this all about SO changing things overnight. Exaggering by far. It took years and years before SO became a more useful resource and for a long time (maybe even still I'd argue) was a joke that it was a haven for lame Q's and dangerous A's. Everyone was referencing blogs and google groups (usenet before) and searches.. hitting sites like ExpertsExchange etc. What code languages/scenes were active around then too -- Ruby/Rails stuff = blogs/groups. PHP? = forums, even the comment sections of the PHP docs. Alot of what changed gradually around then was the rise in better documentation out there. So much better/more emphasis on writing proper docs etc
deleted 5y ago
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master_yoda_1 5y ago
he sell his soul for only $1.8B
- ilaksh 5y ago
  What is that supposed to mean? Seems like a pretty good price for a soul. I would "sell my soul" for a measley $10 million.
devit 5y ago
The article writer is quite ignorant. COM is not obsolete at all, it's the main way Windows APIs have been and are provided from the release of DirectX until now, where it underlies the current WinRT API.
- bitwize 5y ago
  Indeed. COM provided and provides integration that Unix nerds can only dream of. Windows in the 90s, in general, was technology indistinguishable from magic, compared to the state of the art from the Unix realm. That's why it would have killed Unix entirely but for Linux.
- chiph 5y ago
  The writer is the person who added VBA to Excel + the MS Office suite. Where you used COM to make use of external libraries/programs. I assure you, he's not ignorant. Is COM obsolete today? For new development, yes. But Microsoft still supports it and you can still write .net code that gets exposed as COM objects.
asadlionpk 5y ago
> (Bill Gates, 1990: “How many f*cking programmers in this company are working on rich text editors?!” Where is this quote from? I haven't read this one before.
deleted 5y ago
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asimpletune 5y ago
Does anyone know anything about this hash thing that he’s making?
deeblering4 5y ago
Kinda a huge ego on this guy. The truth is you got lucky with the timing and capitalized a tech help forum.
jmspring 5y ago
"They lack the structure to make the data they contain readily accessed programatically, so step one is miserable screen scraping and data cleanup. That’s where a lot of people give up." I've been contemplating the idea of curated data and data provenance. Some data sources are easy to use but some as mentioned need clean up and thus you run into the question of original source vs. "cleaned up". Curated data where the original source is linked, any tools/scripts used to clean it up (harder when manual intervention is needed), are also included. Maybe even a pipeline setup where original + tools = cleaned outcome is a thought. It's a pipe dream and many data sources are still too unstructured for such automation.
boublepop 5y ago
There is something that irks me the wrong way about this post. The structure is “remember our past” “we got bought” “This is actually the best thing for everyone (TM)” and ends on a “Anyways, I’m off to do something completely unrelated for completely unrelated reasons and will not have any part in that” Reading between the lines it sounds like that “this is for the best of everyone” is a contractual requirement or half hearted at best.
vort3 5y ago
The title is a clickbait. For anyone interested, the article is about StackOverflow being sold.
aliasEli 5y ago
This will likely put more pressure on Stack Overflow to monetize their content.

221 points by nathggns 5y ago

Etheryte 5y ago

Also discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27370026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27370026

bfrog 5y ago

Is it just me or is the intro relating to COM a bit off the mark?

ghshephard 5y ago
The intro is about how some things change slowly. His transition paragraph is how things don't seem to get better. He then does his real topic launch by then identifying something that did change quickly, and did get better. I've been reading Spolsky essays for 20 years, he really is incredibly talented. So much so that even today, you can reference some of his early essays on "commoditizing your complement" in the tech industry - and there is a better than average chance that the person you are speaking to will be familiar with Joel's essay on this topic.
khazhoux 5y ago
It resonated for me because 10 years ago I worked on a COM project (browser extension that had to support IE) and the total lack of information for that "pre-internet" technology meant I had to rely on very hard to find books. There was one book in particular that without it, the project would have failed. And that's what everything used to be like (well, more like before Internet, not necessarily before Stack Overflow).
- BeefWellington 5y ago
  Having stopped writing COM components in the early 2000s, back then there were very good resources at Microsoft's site (MSDN) as well as within the Visual Studio help. It's interesting to hear it got worse just ten years later but kind of doesn't surprise me that they wouldn't upkeep that kind of documentation.
  - HWR_14 5y ago
    I did a COM project around the same time. It took a little bit of searching, but I found an excellent tutorial on a random site. Something that could not have existed at StackOverflow because it didn't answer a specific question, any question it answered would have been downvoted, and it would have been difficult to find there.
thorwasdfasdf 5y ago
not to us old farts, who get a great feeling of nostalgia when we read about those win32 APIesque topics.
- drewcoo 5y ago
  That's not nostalgia. Look behind you!!! My primary use of Win32 APIs now is to scare people away from making anything that byzantine. If the APIs don't do the trick, I start telling back compat stories. [shudder]
- squarefoot 5y ago
  Win32? ...Ha! That's modern stuff. My first thought was "who the heck would need to maintain .COM DOS executables in 2021?":)

garettmd 5y ago

Does it seem like "GRAND" in that last paragraph was a hint at what they're building for the data issues he mentioned in the second to last paragraph?

draw_down 5y ago

Always liked Joel as a writer. I do not foresee this being a good thing though, except perhaps for owners/shareholders. I’m expecting revenue extraction, product stagnation (or worse), communities declining. Some of this seems like it has begun already, I would say I don’t use SO as a resource as often as earlier in its lifetime. Seems like these days the answer is as likely to come from a GitHub issue. Anyway, congrats to the owners and shareholders I suppose.

fennecfoxen 5y ago

Stack Overflow destroyed a lot of its social capital and pissed off its own community in the wake of the Monica Cellio affair a little under 2 years ago. (This one was touched off by the Judaism Stack Exchange moderators asking questions about pronoun policy, but ended up with basically every community involved up in arms, including many in their LGBTQ+ community.) One hopes the new owners will do a better job of managing community relations. It will be difficult for them to do worse.

kbelder 5y ago
This is very true. It sidetracked nearly all the communities for a full year, triggered resignations, and caused lawyers to get involved. They've done other things to cause various 'controversies' with their base... changing the license answers are under, hiding controversial questions, etc... but their amazingly unprofessional treatement of Cellio caused more lasting damage than any of that.
- exhilaration 5y ago
  It's interesting, I'm on Hacker News almost every day and have benefited enormously from Stack Overflow yet I have no idea what you're talking about or who Monica Cellio is. My guess is that the vast majority of their users haven't either. I only mention this because seemingly major events in online communities don't always have the impact that people involved or following closely think they do.
  - AlexandrB 5y ago
    As with Wikipedia, there's a community of volunteers curating and moderating SO. Drama in that community doesn't necessarily bubble up in obvious ways like the site going down, but I'm sure it has an overall effect on content moderation and quality over time.
  - OJFord 5y ago
    The only way I'm aware of it is prominent users/moderators having changed their display name to things like '<original name> - Reinstate Monica'. Or maybe I also saw an HN thread about it, but mainly that. (I still see them.)

phorkyas82 5y ago

Still love that guy and his writing. Went with my current company mostly because they dropped his name in the job description. (Also: Went so heavily into table tennis that it always seems to me he's holding that table tennis racket a bit awkwardly or like a hobby player in that picture. But great hobby.)

0xbadcafebee 5y ago

> Where are the flying cars? Understanding why we don't have flying cars will tell you how the entire world works. It turns out that "progress" has nothing to do with "want", and more to do with need, availability, and timing. > They lack the structure to make the data they contain readily accessed programatically, so step one is miserable screen scraping and data cleanup. That’s where a lot of people give up. > We think we have an interesting way to fix this. RDF? OWL? SKOS?

bena 5y ago
All of those address the issue from the other side. If I'm aware of the Semantic Web, agree with their conclusions, and wish to do so, I can make my site Semantic. That's true. And if I wanted to publish data and make sure others could access it, I would. It's not required however. And if I want to make my data only accessible through my portal, I have a vested interest in making my site as anti-Semantic as possible. Like I don't think Multiple Listing Service (MLS) companies would ever make their sites Semantic. Nor would any company that consumes their data (like Zillow or Realtor). It's the data itself that has value, so they want to put hoops in front of it. But it's technically publically available data that they're publishing for free. Technically, if you acquire the facts themselves, it doesn't matter how, they can't do anything to you if you redistribute that data. The only thing they can do is make their site as difficult as possible to scrape. Then there are the sites that don't care either way and making their site Semantic is only additional work. For example: Lego's storefront. All of that information is from their databases. They already have the information and don't care whether or not someone else has access to it. The information provides little to no value. So they have no incentive to invest resources in making that data more easily available to others. So to get the information from these sites, you have to scrape. It's unfortunate, it's miserable, but those are the facts.
- 0xbadcafebee 5y ago
  That's quite a fatalistic point of view for a non-technical problem. But who cares if scraping is involved? You can still use all the technologies I listed. Looking at Hash.ai's product roadmap, it looks like they're building a "Splunk for simulations". And probably their big value-add, besides just a flashy tool, is going to be collecting and curating data. But they probably realize how much time and money it takes to constantly curate all that data. So probably what they are doing is building the tools so that individuals can curate their own data, by using a scraping tool, a transform tool, a load tool, etc. And if they want that data to be more useful within their own ecosystem, it would make sense to make all that data semantic, so that data from one customer is composeable for another customer. The more taxonomies and semantic relationships that are built over time would just make the whole dataset more intelligent over time. Enabling customers to build graphs of graphs would turn them into the world's premier crowd-sourced and curated data warehouse, netting them a trillion dollar valuation in 10 years, without ever charging a single person for access, or paying for anything but infrastructure and a couple devs. Or maybe it's something else, I dunno.

tdeck 5y ago

> almost anyone I talk to is too young to imagine The Days Before Stack Overflow, when the bookstore had an entire wall of Java and the way you picked a Rich Text Editor was going to Barnes and Noble and browsing through printed books for an hour, in the Rich Text Editor Component shelf. I remember the "Days Before Stack Overflow" and Joel is giving himself a bit too much credit here. Before SO, when I googled a problem I would often find a solution on a blog, personal website, or some community's PHPBB/vBulletin forum. Remember, this was 2008 we're talking about. The UX was undoubtedly less consistent, but it's not like we were rushing off to the library to look up PHP functions and CSS 3-column layouts.

quercusa 5y ago
I still miss browsing at Computer Literacy in Sunnyvale and San Jose. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Literacy_Bookshops https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Literacy_Bookshops
bosswipe 5y ago
I definitely used to buy and read more books back then, and documentation in general. Maybe that was a good thing.
- johnfn 5y ago
  I feel like this argument is akin to "back before cars, I used to walk all the time, and I was in much better shape." There's nothing to stop you from going and doing it again!
  - iainmerrick 5y ago
    Well, yes and no... As an Apple developer, I used to be able to rely entirely on Inside Macintosh books because Apple’s docs were the best in the business, probably the best ever. Nowadays, even if I wanted to rely on Apple’s own documentation, I can’t, because the docs are just no good any more. (Their header files are still very informative! But much less so in the Swift era, sadly...) To use your analogy, I’d really like to walk as much as I used to, but they ripped up all the walkable districts to build highways! I don’t think things are bad across the board, at least. For example, you can get a very long way in Javascript purely from MDN rather than needing SO.

mikewarot 5y ago

The days before Stack Overflow were far better. A search used to return a blog post in which a person described a bug, how they got there, and the resolution. The net effect of stack overflow was to spam the search engines with non-answers like "you asked in the wrong forum", "you didn't ask nicely", etc. Long ago I learned to route around it.

ilaksh 5y ago
Really?? I remember frequently running into a site that was strangely named ExpertSexchange and having to fight through ads to get information.
- bitwize 5y ago
  It was supposed to be Experts Exchange and... yeah, bad choice of domain name, especially since "sex change" is an outdated term now considered a slur, on par with "Eskimo".

lliamander 5y ago

Talking with developers who started their career in the early 90's, it seems to me the two biggest changes in software development over the past 30 years are: - the rise of easily shared open source libraries and applications (supported by infrastructure like CPAN, Maven, and Github) - crowd-sourced documentation (blogs, forums, and Stack Overflow) It changed not just the way an individual programmer interacts with the code, but the way programmers work together.

CodeGlitch 5y ago
What I love about stack overflow is that you don't just get the answer to your question (usually) but the top rated answers also include the "whys". Meaning you get to expand your understanding of the domain in question. People who write stack overflow answers really are the unsung heroes of the open source world.
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  This highlights something I believe to be a deeper truth about programming in general: the whys matter, sometimes more than the hows. So much of programming is patterns that exist for extremely arbitrary reasons (note: not acausal reasons, just reasons that are unimportant to the immediate problem domain one is trying to solve, or perhaps important in a way one doesn't yet know). Knowing those reasons can give you some mental hooks to hang the arbitrariness off of. COM, which Joel mentions anecdotally at the top of the article, is a great example of that. I think the biggest challenge people have remembering why COM works the way it does is it's there to solve a problem that primarily the Microsoft software ecosystem had, which didn't show up in other software ecosystems as strongly: Microsoft had a vested financial interest in enabling developers to create closed-source binary blobs that could interact with each other via exposed objects. Though COM is language-agnostic, most examples from textbooks of the mid-'90s era reveal the big problem it's solving: C++ was the hot language at the time, but C++ doesn't standardize name-mangling, so two arbitrary binary blobs of C++ code from two different compilers weren't guaranteed to be able to use the objects in each other's libraries. This isn't a problem Apple's software stack saw so often (Apple had fewer toolchains, so compiler incompatibility was less frequent a problem) and it was rarely a problem in the open-source OS ecosystems (if you're passing around source code instead of closed-source binary blobs, you don't care about name-mangling issues because you're building the source as a lump under the watchful eye of one compiler). But in the Windows world, with a pile of choices for compiler and a business need to support closed-source binary blobs that could expose objects, it was hell. It's helpful in understanding COM to understand why Microsoft's ecosystem needed a way for closed-source libraries to expose objects in a language-agnostic way.

austincheney 5y ago

> The biggest problem is that developers of programming tools love to add things and hate to take things away. So things get harder and harder and more and more complex because there are more and more ways to do the same thing Kind of, but not exactly. As a given software platform evolves rarely do the defining foundations significantly change. This means there becomes many ways to solve a problem down the line, but the original few solutions typically still work and apply just the same as they did in the early days. I cannot emphasize enough just how important that is. The implications of grasping this allow a developer to solve almost any problem like magic. The mythical 10x developer sprinkling their pixie dust like dropping blow at a night club. That is because the developer knows the durable solutions to most problems already and optionally may consider newer approaches when beneficial. They know what works and have the freedom to deviate at their convenience. The implications of missing this produces infantile developers dependent upon the flavor of the moment. The developer reliant upon a late stage convention or supplemental tool has less flexibility than the developer more experienced with the foundational concepts of the given platform. This is vaguely related to the Law of Leaky Abstractions[1], but that law just describes reactive scenarios. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/11/11/the-law-of-leaky-abstractions/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/11/11/the-law-of-leaky-a...

arduinomancer 5y ago

> some things (like handing a file upload, or centering) that were, shockingly, still just as randomly difficult as they were in VBScript twenty years ago. I don't get why the "centering is hard" trope is still being repeated in 2021. I'm a recent new grad front end dev and have never had issues with this. Hasn't it been years at this point since flex-box became standard?

davnicwil 5y ago
You're not wrong, but you may be reading it in the wrong tone. There is a certain type of joke where the punchline is something that was true for so long, it's acceptable to repeat it ironically as a sort of inside joke, knowing it is obviously not true any more. Best pulled off if you were actually there, of course. I think that's what's going on here.
svachalek 5y ago
Standard? I'd be happy if 10% of my interview candidates could do a flex layout.
- soulofmischief 5y ago
  Hiring? :)
dsjoerg 5y ago
Google doesn't seem to think it's standard: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=how+to+center+html+element https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=how+to+... Do you accept this as relevant evidence about what is standard? (Or would a different search be better?)
- xdennis 5y ago
  I don't understand why this is downvoted. It doesn't look like top results for "how to center html element" show the flexbox method. My example of "center vertically css" also doesn't show the flexbox method. The first result recommends the ol' "top:50%; transform:translateY(-50%)". [1] The second result shows the padding method, the line-height method and the translateY method again. [2] The third result is a complete guide asking you questions three layers deep about what you want to do and gives you the personalised answer for the scenario. [3] I gave up afterwards. But the point is people are still learning old ways of doing it. Should they read a guide to modern CSS? Yes, but we all know searching and clicking on the first result is easier. [1] https://www.w3schools.com/howto/howto_css_center-vertical.asp https://www.w3schools.com/howto/howto_css_center-vertical.as... [2] https://www.w3schools.com/css/css_align.asp https://www.w3schools.com/css/css_align.asp [3]: https://css-tricks.com/centering-css-complete-guide/ https://css-tricks.com/centering-css-complete-guide/

mattlondon 5y ago

Is stack overflow even useful anymore? I guess it must be for some. Personally for me it feels like the content is pretty "stale". E.g. an answer from 5 years ago that uses a deprecated feature in a library that was abandoned 3 years ago etc, a reference to something only working in Chrome v12(we are on v90 now IIRC) etc etc. It seems like a lot of what I come across on there is just so out of date that I personally do not put value on it. As such I personally avoid it now like I used to avoid experts exchange that was the stack-overflow-before-stack-overflow. I wonder if I am alone...?

quietbritishjim 5y ago
Given you mention Chrome, maybe you are a JS dev, and maybe things move a bit faster for that language/ecosystem than for others (to put it mildly).
ravedave5 5y ago
I had to figure out how to do something with videoJS and all I could find were answers for the old version of the lib, there were new answers but they were buried and hard to find.

ChrisArchitect 5y ago

Yeah, what is this all about SO changing things overnight. Exaggering by far. It took years and years before SO became a more useful resource and for a long time (maybe even still I'd argue) was a joke that it was a haven for lame Q's and dangerous A's. Everyone was referencing blogs and google groups (usenet before) and searches.. hitting sites like ExpertsExchange etc. What code languages/scenes were active around then too -- Ruby/Rails stuff = blogs/groups. PHP? = forums, even the comment sections of the PHP docs. Alot of what changed gradually around then was the rise in better documentation out there. So much better/more emphasis on writing proper docs etc

deleted 5y ago

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master_yoda_1 5y ago

he sell his soul for only $1.8B

ilaksh 5y ago
What is that supposed to mean? Seems like a pretty good price for a soul. I would "sell my soul" for a measley $10 million.

devit 5y ago

The article writer is quite ignorant. COM is not obsolete at all, it's the main way Windows APIs have been and are provided from the release of DirectX until now, where it underlies the current WinRT API.

bitwize 5y ago
Indeed. COM provided and provides integration that Unix nerds can only dream of. Windows in the 90s, in general, was technology indistinguishable from magic, compared to the state of the art from the Unix realm. That's why it would have killed Unix entirely but for Linux.
chiph 5y ago
The writer is the person who added VBA to Excel + the MS Office suite. Where you used COM to make use of external libraries/programs. I assure you, he's not ignorant. Is COM obsolete today? For new development, yes. But Microsoft still supports it and you can still write .net code that gets exposed as COM objects.

asadlionpk 5y ago

> (Bill Gates, 1990: “How many f*cking programmers in this company are working on rich text editors?!” Where is this quote from? I haven't read this one before.

deleted 5y ago

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asimpletune 5y ago

Does anyone know anything about this hash thing that he’s making?

deeblering4 5y ago

Kinda a huge ego on this guy. The truth is you got lucky with the timing and capitalized a tech help forum.

jmspring 5y ago

"They lack the structure to make the data they contain readily accessed programatically, so step one is miserable screen scraping and data cleanup. That’s where a lot of people give up." I've been contemplating the idea of curated data and data provenance. Some data sources are easy to use but some as mentioned need clean up and thus you run into the question of original source vs. "cleaned up". Curated data where the original source is linked, any tools/scripts used to clean it up (harder when manual intervention is needed), are also included. Maybe even a pipeline setup where original + tools = cleaned outcome is a thought. It's a pipe dream and many data sources are still too unstructured for such automation.

boublepop 5y ago

There is something that irks me the wrong way about this post. The structure is “remember our past” “we got bought” “This is actually the best thing for everyone (TM)” and ends on a “Anyways, I’m off to do something completely unrelated for completely unrelated reasons and will not have any part in that” Reading between the lines it sounds like that “this is for the best of everyone” is a contractual requirement or half hearted at best.

vort3 5y ago

The title is a clickbait. For anyone interested, the article is about StackOverflow being sold.

aliasEli 5y ago

This will likely put more pressure on Stack Overflow to monetize their content.