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Reading stories like this makes me very sad about the state of my profession. Something that is supposed to be a simple stupid logging library is on the front p

Reading stories like this makes me very sad about the state of my profession. Something that is supposed to be a simple stupid logging library is on the front pages of the mainstream media due to all the havoc it's causing. We really have a long way to grow up as a profession.

sirwhinesalot 5y ago
Hardware is a mess, operating systems are a mess, programming languages are full of poor design decisions, foundational libraries are a mess and maintained by unpaid volunteers. Our field is royally screwed, whole thing needs to be rethought.
- allendoerfer 5y ago
  And yet here we are taking over the world.
  - sirwhinesalot 5y ago
    Indeed, how scary is that? ;)
- goblin89 5y ago
  Software architecture is a non-pure field where other fields, sciences and art routinely intersect to meet human factor and impact real world (ideally, improve it and solve problems). Any such field is in varying degrees of messiness (medicine, agriculture, architecture, you name it). Mistakes are made constantly, have real consequences (people die), and hopefully are discovered and admitted sooner rather than later. All we can is (cliché warning) do our best, keep growing, act responsibly and be humble.
fulafel 5y ago
I agree but the supposing part seems a bigger problem... log4j is not small or simple or understandable and this is easy to discover if you glance at it, I think the problem is more in underappreciating simplicity (aka overtolerating complexity).
- christophilus 5y ago
  This is the root issue. There are so many libraries that do way more than they should. I get it, too. It’s really hard to say no over and over and over. It gets tiring, but it’s the only way to rein in these kinds of things.
- foxfluff 5y ago
  And if you advocate for avoiding complex deps, you'll get hordes of people defending them. Someone needs all these features, they are there for a reason! The authors of the library must be experts on the subject matter and anything you'd write yourself would inevitably suck. Why reinvent the wheel badly. Why make what you can take. Etcetra. It's quite depressing.
  - vbezhenar 5y ago
    The question is not about presence of complex tools. The question is about lack of very simple tools. I'm the person who likes simple tools. I need just a little bit more than simple System.out.println from logging. But I'm expected to use commonly accepted libraries and frameworks, nobody will be excited if I'd replace logback with my 200-lines "library". And every commonly used library in Java is complex and feature-ridden. Sometimes I wish I had more time to rewrite all Java stack, from logging to http server with dumb simple inefficient but understandable code. May be I should just move to Go. It seems to better reflect that approach. But I like Java language...

sirwhinesalot 5y ago

Hardware is a mess, operating systems are a mess, programming languages are full of poor design decisions, foundational libraries are a mess and maintained by unpaid volunteers. Our field is royally screwed, whole thing needs to be rethought.

allendoerfer 5y ago
And yet here we are taking over the world.
- sirwhinesalot 5y ago
  Indeed, how scary is that? ;)
goblin89 5y ago
Software architecture is a non-pure field where other fields, sciences and art routinely intersect to meet human factor and impact real world (ideally, improve it and solve problems). Any such field is in varying degrees of messiness (medicine, agriculture, architecture, you name it). Mistakes are made constantly, have real consequences (people die), and hopefully are discovered and admitted sooner rather than later. All we can is (cliché warning) do our best, keep growing, act responsibly and be humble.

fulafel 5y ago

I agree but the supposing part seems a bigger problem... log4j is not small or simple or understandable and this is easy to discover if you glance at it, I think the problem is more in underappreciating simplicity (aka overtolerating complexity).

christophilus 5y ago
This is the root issue. There are so many libraries that do way more than they should. I get it, too. It’s really hard to say no over and over and over. It gets tiring, but it’s the only way to rein in these kinds of things.
foxfluff 5y ago
And if you advocate for avoiding complex deps, you'll get hordes of people defending them. Someone needs all these features, they are there for a reason! The authors of the library must be experts on the subject matter and anything you'd write yourself would inevitably suck. Why reinvent the wheel badly. Why make what you can take. Etcetra. It's quite depressing.
- vbezhenar 5y ago
  The question is not about presence of complex tools. The question is about lack of very simple tools. I'm the person who likes simple tools. I need just a little bit more than simple System.out.println from logging. But I'm expected to use commonly accepted libraries and frameworks, nobody will be excited if I'd replace logback with my 200-lines "library". And every commonly used library in Java is complex and feature-ridden. Sometimes I wish I had more time to rewrite all Java stack, from logging to http server with dumb simple inefficient but understandable code. May be I should just move to Go. It seems to better reflect that approach. But I like Java language...