5 ms·

I think technology (proprietary or not) moves rapidly enough that any developer over the course of their career will have to learn new technologies and abandon

I think technology (proprietary or not) moves rapidly enough that any developer over the course of their career will have to learn new technologies and abandon dying ones. Good developers will be able to adapt quickly.

hello_moto 15y ago
Most solid projects with good cosebase that I have seen so far comprises individuals with deep knowledge of the technology stack. I am talking about those programmers who have been using tech X for at least 5 years or more. Doug Lea, Josh Bloch, Linus Torvalds, kernel hackers, John Resig, etc. So I would say that decent developers can adapt, but quality won't be high up there yet.
- joelthelion 15y ago
  They just usually chose their technological platform well, instead of betting their work on yet another proprietary gadget backed by a single company.
  - mattmanser 15y ago
    Personally I think it's just a matter of luck. I mean, even right now, do you choose django or rails? Flex was pretty compelling when it came out, it was before the iPhone had obviously killed off flash. I seriously thought about doing it myself until it became really obvious that Apple would never support flash. Balsamiq showed what you could do, online or offline years before HTML5.
    - arthur_debert 15y ago
      It's not that much luck. I've decided to go with Django in 2006. Still going strong, five years later. You'll do fine going with Django or Rails, but the time when this decision would be more rewarding was 5 years ago. I've done mostly flash for a living since 2001, in 2007 I decided to move on. It was obvious it wasn't going anywhere. Balsamic is probably the only application written in Flash that I use regularly. A platform that has so few applications after so many years in development is clearly struggling.
    - bad_user 15y ago
      I mean, even right now, do you choose django or rails? Not the right analogy. A more relevant comparison would be with: Do you choose Linux, with Nginx and Django/Rails or Windows / IIS / ASP.NET ? Well, let me see. Windows / IIS / ASP.NET can simply vanish tomorrow, while Rails (including 1.0) will still be there, still running fine on the latest Linux distribution, with the latest Nginx and the whole stack will still be free as in freedom. Not much of a choice to make, really ;)
      - mattmanser 15y ago
        And if they'd have stopped developing nginx 6 months after release? Or in a parallel universe where Basecamp flopped and DHH moved onto something else? Would there still be a rails? Yes they're open source but some projects transition, some don't, it's luck. The world is littered with abandoned open source projects. And even now I get the feeling that Django is steadily being edged out by Rails. My analogy wasn't great I admit, better would be looking at all the PHP MVC frameworks that never took off. Mootools & Prototype are another two excellent examples. 3 or 4 years ago you wouldn't have looked a bit crazy for picking either over jQuery. What about coffeescript? Is it here to stay? No-one knows yet. In a years time all the browsers could suddenly be supporting in browser Python or in browser Ruby and it'd be dead in the water.
        jiggy2011 15y ago
        Twitter heavily uses rails, as I'm sure many other big sites do. The best bet is to pick something that is used by enough large organizations that there is a good bet that if a major contributor disappeared there will be others able to take their place. Also with open source systems there are generally more discrete parts that can in theory be interchanged with others. If microsoft did something drastic like announce the end of the Windows Server line (or even just IIS) for example then your entire MVC.Net/SQL Server stack for your app is now defunct. If Linux was to become no more if would be significantly easier to move your app and it's supporting ecosystem to BSD.
        macspoofing 15y ago

hello_moto 15y ago

Most solid projects with good cosebase that I have seen so far comprises individuals with deep knowledge of the technology stack. I am talking about those programmers who have been using tech X for at least 5 years or more. Doug Lea, Josh Bloch, Linus Torvalds, kernel hackers, John Resig, etc. So I would say that decent developers can adapt, but quality won't be high up there yet.

joelthelion 15y ago
They just usually chose their technological platform well, instead of betting their work on yet another proprietary gadget backed by a single company.
- mattmanser 15y ago
  Personally I think it's just a matter of luck. I mean, even right now, do you choose django or rails? Flex was pretty compelling when it came out, it was before the iPhone had obviously killed off flash. I seriously thought about doing it myself until it became really obvious that Apple would never support flash. Balsamiq showed what you could do, online or offline years before HTML5.
  - arthur_debert 15y ago
    It's not that much luck. I've decided to go with Django in 2006. Still going strong, five years later. You'll do fine going with Django or Rails, but the time when this decision would be more rewarding was 5 years ago. I've done mostly flash for a living since 2001, in 2007 I decided to move on. It was obvious it wasn't going anywhere. Balsamic is probably the only application written in Flash that I use regularly. A platform that has so few applications after so many years in development is clearly struggling.
  - bad_user 15y ago
    I mean, even right now, do you choose django or rails? Not the right analogy. A more relevant comparison would be with: Do you choose Linux, with Nginx and Django/Rails or Windows / IIS / ASP.NET ? Well, let me see. Windows / IIS / ASP.NET can simply vanish tomorrow, while Rails (including 1.0) will still be there, still running fine on the latest Linux distribution, with the latest Nginx and the whole stack will still be free as in freedom. Not much of a choice to make, really ;)
    - mattmanser 15y ago
      And if they'd have stopped developing nginx 6 months after release? Or in a parallel universe where Basecamp flopped and DHH moved onto something else? Would there still be a rails? Yes they're open source but some projects transition, some don't, it's luck. The world is littered with abandoned open source projects. And even now I get the feeling that Django is steadily being edged out by Rails. My analogy wasn't great I admit, better would be looking at all the PHP MVC frameworks that never took off. Mootools & Prototype are another two excellent examples. 3 or 4 years ago you wouldn't have looked a bit crazy for picking either over jQuery. What about coffeescript? Is it here to stay? No-one knows yet. In a years time all the browsers could suddenly be supporting in browser Python or in browser Ruby and it'd be dead in the water.
      - jiggy2011 15y ago
        Twitter heavily uses rails, as I'm sure many other big sites do. The best bet is to pick something that is used by enough large organizations that there is a good bet that if a major contributor disappeared there will be others able to take their place. Also with open source systems there are generally more discrete parts that can in theory be interchanged with others. If microsoft did something drastic like announce the end of the Windows Server line (or even just IIS) for example then your entire MVC.Net/SQL Server stack for your app is now defunct. If Linux was to become no more if would be significantly easier to move your app and it's supporting ecosystem to BSD.
        macspoofing 15y ago