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I love this comment. The sarcasm is so thick. It turns out, in my opinion, we solved most problems in software engineering decades ago. All this high flying no

I love this comment. The sarcasm is so thick. It turns out, in my opinion, we solved most problems in software engineering decades ago. All this high flying non-sense, web3 petabyte scale cloud powered type safe microservices, is pointless navel gazing. Agile is pointless navel gazing at least in it's current incarnation. Our entire industry has been mired in bullshit that hamstrings us. There's also a tremendous difference in developers. Developers even two decades ago were near top of their game because they had to be. They didn't have kubernetes-docker-CI/CD-SRE-devops to protect them. The result? Far better, far more reliable code. Any idiot can write software. Changing languages won't save you. A good programmer can make any language into a good language - and as it turns out 30 years ago we did it right. If they're only encountering scaling issues now that isn't a knock against them. It goes to show just how well they took "primitive" tools and made a system that simply works. Asking a modern dev team to produce a system that simply works often requires several months of planning, two full time product managers, a tech lead, several weeks of architecting, and approval (in blood) from the CTO who somehow has to involve themselves in literally anything and everything. Let's not forget we have to get it spun up with terraform so it's in the cloud and that'll take a request to SRE and possibly even dev-ops to get done. By the time the developers even get to write code, the deadline already arrived! We are comical facsimiles of our fore-developers and frankly should feel ashamed.

jboy55 4y ago
You have a lot of survivorship bias in your post here. Having lived, albeit briefly in the software industry of the 90s, the world was full of massively overbudgeted, multi-million dollar messes. 22 years ago, I was working on software to run a single state's fish and game licensing. We had 4 product managers (backend, admin, retail-front-end, consumer-web), 6-8 architects, at least 10 project managers and probably 70+ engineers, 30+ QA engineers. It had its specs written by a separate group for 6 months, that was then thrown away, and then rebuilt using Rational Unified Process. It was 10x over budget money-wise and 3x time wise. It took around 3 years to release to the public. Those four products, back-end team wrote in pure Oracle stored procedures. the retail-front-end team wrote in 95% JSPs, with a small library of java functions. When logic needed to split amoungst 4 types of licenses, they copied pasted an entire 2000 line JSP over and changed minor code, then just forwarded to the right JSP depending on the type. The consumer-web code was written in Perl, which needed to call functions in the retail-front-end, so the solution was to wrap the JSP code, call them with, what we would call now, mocked request/response objects. The PERL software called this mess using SOAP. So care had to be strip down every interface to use primitive objects so PERL and Java could talk. The admin-code, my team, wrote in our own Java MVC framework, Struts was just created. What started as a web-project turned into a 'recreate the mainframe interface using html' though. So yeah, 30 years ago, we did things right, or perhaps you meant 50 years ago?
- wrycoder 4y ago
  You are both right.

jboy55 4y ago

You have a lot of survivorship bias in your post here. Having lived, albeit briefly in the software industry of the 90s, the world was full of massively overbudgeted, multi-million dollar messes. 22 years ago, I was working on software to run a single state's fish and game licensing. We had 4 product managers (backend, admin, retail-front-end, consumer-web), 6-8 architects, at least 10 project managers and probably 70+ engineers, 30+ QA engineers. It had its specs written by a separate group for 6 months, that was then thrown away, and then rebuilt using Rational Unified Process. It was 10x over budget money-wise and 3x time wise. It took around 3 years to release to the public. Those four products, back-end team wrote in pure Oracle stored procedures. the retail-front-end team wrote in 95% JSPs, with a small library of java functions. When logic needed to split amoungst 4 types of licenses, they copied pasted an entire 2000 line JSP over and changed minor code, then just forwarded to the right JSP depending on the type. The consumer-web code was written in Perl, which needed to call functions in the retail-front-end, so the solution was to wrap the JSP code, call them with, what we would call now, mocked request/response objects. The PERL software called this mess using SOAP. So care had to be strip down every interface to use primitive objects so PERL and Java could talk. The admin-code, my team, wrote in our own Java MVC framework, Struts was just created. What started as a web-project turned into a 'recreate the mainframe interface using html' though. So yeah, 30 years ago, we did things right, or perhaps you meant 50 years ago?

wrycoder 4y ago
You are both right.