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It's the thing with every tech ever, first you need to know (way to many) intricacies, and then the tools evolve and you don't need anymore... I remember having

It's the thing with every tech ever, first you need to know (way to many) intricacies, and then the tools evolve and you don't need anymore... I remember having to fight sound cards and modems on linux once, or (slightly more recent) days of having to manually install and set up every single service for local dev environment, which basically required a linux administrator level of skills from a developer, plus a lot of time and patience - and nowadays you just type a single command and drivers work, docker is up with your project ready, you're done in minutes... it's the normal path of evolution for these things...

lelanthran 4y ago
> It's the thing with every tech ever, first you need to know (way to many) intricacies, and then the tools evolve and you don't need anymore In an ideal world, sure. In the world of software dev tools, not always. We've regressed from Delphi and Visual Basic that allowed anyone with some data to pop up an application quickly to use that data, to the current state, which every popular language in industry (and even some unpopular ones like Rust or Haskell) make it well-nigh impossible to do very simple things. We've gone from empowered computer users writing programs to solve their own problems to helpless computer users who cannot write programs to solve their own problems. Sure, you may point to Excel and derivatives, but those existed back in the 90s too, and VB/Delphi existed as an intermediate point between problems that are simple enough to solve in a spreadsheet and problems that need less than a tech expert. Maybe this is why salaries are sky-rocketing: we've collectively made everything so much harder to get into that fewer people are able to solve their own problems.
- ivanhoe 4y ago
  That's not how I feel, to me honestly the things got significantly easier and quicker in last 10 or so years (I primarily work in js and php now) Sure it's not the same as it was with Delphi or VB that would install (and in case of VB also build into exe) everything you might ever need, but e.g. it's still a lot simpler than VC++ used to be back then - just figuring out all headers you need to include to compile an empty app was a horror - so it was definitely not like everything was "simple stuff" friendly back then. And doing web dev in those early days was far more complicated to setup... Nowadays IME once you figure out how to setup the tool chain - and there's a plenty of boilerplates and starter kits for that - you more or less just rinse and repeat that every nest time. Sure sometimes package managers go berserk on you, but otherwise my experience is that - once you've figured it out - it all just magically works... but it does take some initial effort and time to figure it out properly. And if it's really simple stuff that I need to finish quickly, I just skip the whole package managers/ build tools deal, and write a script, include and link what I need manually and run it from CLI/browser just like it's 1998 :P

lelanthran 4y ago

> It's the thing with every tech ever, first you need to know (way to many) intricacies, and then the tools evolve and you don't need anymore In an ideal world, sure. In the world of software dev tools, not always. We've regressed from Delphi and Visual Basic that allowed anyone with some data to pop up an application quickly to use that data, to the current state, which every popular language in industry (and even some unpopular ones like Rust or Haskell) make it well-nigh impossible to do very simple things. We've gone from empowered computer users writing programs to solve their own problems to helpless computer users who cannot write programs to solve their own problems. Sure, you may point to Excel and derivatives, but those existed back in the 90s too, and VB/Delphi existed as an intermediate point between problems that are simple enough to solve in a spreadsheet and problems that need less than a tech expert. Maybe this is why salaries are sky-rocketing: we've collectively made everything so much harder to get into that fewer people are able to solve their own problems.

ivanhoe 4y ago
That's not how I feel, to me honestly the things got significantly easier and quicker in last 10 or so years (I primarily work in js and php now) Sure it's not the same as it was with Delphi or VB that would install (and in case of VB also build into exe) everything you might ever need, but e.g. it's still a lot simpler than VC++ used to be back then - just figuring out all headers you need to include to compile an empty app was a horror - so it was definitely not like everything was "simple stuff" friendly back then. And doing web dev in those early days was far more complicated to setup... Nowadays IME once you figure out how to setup the tool chain - and there's a plenty of boilerplates and starter kits for that - you more or less just rinse and repeat that every nest time. Sure sometimes package managers go berserk on you, but otherwise my experience is that - once you've figured it out - it all just magically works... but it does take some initial effort and time to figure it out properly. And if it's really simple stuff that I need to finish quickly, I just skip the whole package managers/ build tools deal, and write a script, include and link what I need manually and run it from CLI/browser just like it's 1998 :P