4 ms·

computing was easier back then; why the trend has been reversed? very nice to have VB6 again.

by kome 4y ago

sph 4y ago
It was so much easier being a teenager back in the day and learning to code a desktop app from scratch in a few weekends. Then you open FrontPage and make a simple website for it. Now it's black magic only approachable to $100/hr engineers.
- pishpash 4y ago
  Because $100/hr engineers want to justify their existence.
  - eckza 4y ago
    Do you not think your own time is worth that much, if not more, given the mind-blowing amount of business value added by even the most horrible and unmaintainable pieces of software? Or are you saying that only midwits charge $100/hr, and that real engineers can and should charge much more, so anyone charging $100/hr is probably a hack? In the case of the former, here's an anecdote: when I was a baby junior, I was working on an in-house enterprise Windows Forms CRM application. We had a pricing manager that had taught himself enough C# to be dangerous. The code that the guy wrote was such a disaster that it conjured unspeakable horrors from the void. But because he understood the business domain at a level far deeper than anyone on the dev team, he could crank out forms and custom reports that turned misaligned curly-braces into cold, hard cash faster than any of us could say "DAMMIT MARK, YOU BROKE THE BUILD AGAIN". The lesson I took from that: turning ideas into code that creates business value isn't the hard part. The hard part is doing it in such a way that you don't create an unmaintainable mess that makes it impossible for the business to adapt to change so that it can continue to make money. In the case of the latter: I think I need to charge more.
    - pishpash 4y ago
      There are different use cases that demand different tools. For personal projects the simpler tools from before were totally fine but now they are longer accessible. I think that's a loss.
  - petra 4y ago
    Sure, but what about the management side, don't they naturally want to find cheaper programmers? So how did it all got so unnecessarily complicated?
    - pishpash 4y ago
      Management is aligned because this makes money. Programmers do deserve $100/hr for what they do, the problem is whether it's what's needed. It's the same situation with tax software. You never needed one before but the parasitic co-evolution of tax software and tax complexity pushing each other means now you need to pay and Intuit can be a blood sucker year after year.
- anthk 4y ago
  To me Front Page, VB and Win32 were the black magic and pure HTML and an editor among GNU/Linux and Perl/TCL and later C was the Enlightenment.
- mmcgaha 4y ago
  I feel like the problem now is the overwhelming number of choices we have. If a new programmer wanted to write a desktop app for windows he would be directed to VB, web app Perl, or games Turbo Pascal. Sure there were plenty of other languages but the zeitgeist of the time made these decisions pretty easy. Even in small town libraries, there were books available on these environments and the book stores had tons of books.

computing was easier back then; why the trend has been reversed? very nice to have VB6 again.

by kome 4y ago

computing was easier back then; why the trend has been reversed? very nice to have VB6 again.

sph 4y ago

It was so much easier being a teenager back in the day and learning to code a desktop app from scratch in a few weekends. Then you open FrontPage and make a simple website for it. Now it's black magic only approachable to $100/hr engineers.

pishpash 4y ago
Because $100/hr engineers want to justify their existence.
- eckza 4y ago
  Do you not think your own time is worth that much, if not more, given the mind-blowing amount of business value added by even the most horrible and unmaintainable pieces of software? Or are you saying that only midwits charge $100/hr, and that real engineers can and should charge much more, so anyone charging $100/hr is probably a hack? In the case of the former, here's an anecdote: when I was a baby junior, I was working on an in-house enterprise Windows Forms CRM application. We had a pricing manager that had taught himself enough C# to be dangerous. The code that the guy wrote was such a disaster that it conjured unspeakable horrors from the void. But because he understood the business domain at a level far deeper than anyone on the dev team, he could crank out forms and custom reports that turned misaligned curly-braces into cold, hard cash faster than any of us could say "DAMMIT MARK, YOU BROKE THE BUILD AGAIN". The lesson I took from that: turning ideas into code that creates business value isn't the hard part. The hard part is doing it in such a way that you don't create an unmaintainable mess that makes it impossible for the business to adapt to change so that it can continue to make money. In the case of the latter: I think I need to charge more.
  - pishpash 4y ago
    There are different use cases that demand different tools. For personal projects the simpler tools from before were totally fine but now they are longer accessible. I think that's a loss.
- petra 4y ago
  Sure, but what about the management side, don't they naturally want to find cheaper programmers? So how did it all got so unnecessarily complicated?
  - pishpash 4y ago
    Management is aligned because this makes money. Programmers do deserve $100/hr for what they do, the problem is whether it's what's needed. It's the same situation with tax software. You never needed one before but the parasitic co-evolution of tax software and tax complexity pushing each other means now you need to pay and Intuit can be a blood sucker year after year.
anthk 4y ago
To me Front Page, VB and Win32 were the black magic and pure HTML and an editor among GNU/Linux and Perl/TCL and later C was the Enlightenment.
mmcgaha 4y ago
I feel like the problem now is the overwhelming number of choices we have. If a new programmer wanted to write a desktop app for windows he would be directed to VB, web app Perl, or games Turbo Pascal. Sure there were plenty of other languages but the zeitgeist of the time made these decisions pretty easy. Even in small town libraries, there were books available on these environments and the book stores had tons of books.