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This is going to be a thing across tech in the near future. You can see across games, web apps, whatever, there's a trend of more libraries, more frameworks, mo

This is going to be a thing across tech in the near future. You can see across games, web apps, whatever, there's a trend of more libraries, more frameworks, more guard rails, less fundamentals, less innovation. The fad these days is to skip learning how to program and instead just learn how to subsist in an ecosystem 'real' programmers have built for you. You don't need to know how to write a game engine, you just have to download the right assets from the Unity Store. What does 'state' mean? That's that thing in React right? Tree? Graph? Never heard of them, do you mean a component? Difference between a class and a struct? Well I've never heard of a struct but classes are the best thing since sliced bread because you can use them to do a ObservableFactoryControllerFactory and I read in a Medium article that those are good. The net result of all this is that the code that actually drives everything is being written by older people that got the chance to actually learn, while all the learning opportunities are being stolen from the next generation in the name of getting people "productive" on day 1 (at the expense of the rest of the days of their career). Those anecdotes you find 10 of in every thread on HN where someone copied a BASIC script out of a book or whatever you boomers did, the modern equivalent of that is npm installing some shit, building 10x the amount of stuff and learning 0.1x as much.

nanidin 3y ago
I can't help but think this is how assembly programmers viewed people using compiled languages, or how punched card programmers viewed people using interactive terminals.
- BigJono 3y ago
  It's different. All the layers below are still there, and those abstractions are WAY more solid than the abstraction from React to NextJS. Most good developers can build apps faster without an ORM or a framework on top of a framework. Nobody is building apps faster with assembly.
  - ffhhttt 3y ago
    > Most good developers can build apps faster without an ORM or a framework Can they though? Especially if there are several developers working on it. Or are you saying that once they start using frameworks they are no longer ‘good’ developers?
    - BigJono 3y ago
      "Framework on top of a framework" I meant, not just one. Something like React or Django is absolutely a big speedup once you fully understand the abstractions they provide, but the ad hoc mishmash of 80 libraries and mountains of tooling (or actual 3rd party framework in lieu of those things) on top of them that you see at the typical web dev shop these days isn't. Most shops are just building and building and building with no end in sight, constantly looking for the next thing to chuck on the pile, and IME having taught plenty of grads in my career they learn basically nothing in these environments. This would actually be a benefit for younger developers that could bypass it except that once the problem gets bad enough it seeps through to training materials across the web and self-taught people cop it as collateral. If you try and google up some advice for how to get started with a web app these days you're going to get all sorts of opinions on what sort of "stack" you should start with to the point that people make it a part of their ideology, like you get some sort of fucking street cred for using ts-pattern or whatever this week's designated architectural microfad is.
michaelt 3y ago
> You can see across games, web apps, whatever, there's a trend of more libraries, more frameworks, more guard rails, less fundamentals, less innovation. Eh, way back in 1991 we had things like Visual Basic with drag-and-drop GUI creation. You could easily do things like display bitmaps on screen without ever having created an array or used variable types other than 'variant'.
- ido 3y ago
  As someone who learned programming with these old early-90s Visual Basic versions as my introduction to programming, it was also extremely slow - you couldn't make commander keen with early VB on win 3.x - it wouldn't be fast enough for scrolling, I'm not sure it would even smoothly move more than a couple sprites at a time. The tool to use for hobby game dev back then was Turbo Pascal on DOS.
TheRoque 3y ago
It reminds me a conversation I had with a friend that recently started programming, through javascript and various online tutorial. He introduced me to "PM" for node, to spawn several processes of the same node program. I asked him "And is there shared memory between them ?" He said "What ? What do you mean ?" I insisted to ask with different wording, and he ended up saying "Oh, you mean 'state' ? Nah there is nothing shared". So he doesn't know about the fundamentals of what's memory, processes etc. and uses this nebulous "state" word that could frankly mean anything. But hey, he actually has a better salary than me now. So that's fair, why bother learning fundamentals if it doesn't pay more ? Why go through this struggle ? You could argue "innovation", but this is way harder to innovate now than before

nanidin 3y ago

I can't help but think this is how assembly programmers viewed people using compiled languages, or how punched card programmers viewed people using interactive terminals.

BigJono 3y ago
It's different. All the layers below are still there, and those abstractions are WAY more solid than the abstraction from React to NextJS. Most good developers can build apps faster without an ORM or a framework on top of a framework. Nobody is building apps faster with assembly.
- ffhhttt 3y ago
  > Most good developers can build apps faster without an ORM or a framework Can they though? Especially if there are several developers working on it. Or are you saying that once they start using frameworks they are no longer ‘good’ developers?
  - BigJono 3y ago
    "Framework on top of a framework" I meant, not just one. Something like React or Django is absolutely a big speedup once you fully understand the abstractions they provide, but the ad hoc mishmash of 80 libraries and mountains of tooling (or actual 3rd party framework in lieu of those things) on top of them that you see at the typical web dev shop these days isn't. Most shops are just building and building and building with no end in sight, constantly looking for the next thing to chuck on the pile, and IME having taught plenty of grads in my career they learn basically nothing in these environments. This would actually be a benefit for younger developers that could bypass it except that once the problem gets bad enough it seeps through to training materials across the web and self-taught people cop it as collateral. If you try and google up some advice for how to get started with a web app these days you're going to get all sorts of opinions on what sort of "stack" you should start with to the point that people make it a part of their ideology, like you get some sort of fucking street cred for using ts-pattern or whatever this week's designated architectural microfad is.

michaelt 3y ago

> You can see across games, web apps, whatever, there's a trend of more libraries, more frameworks, more guard rails, less fundamentals, less innovation. Eh, way back in 1991 we had things like Visual Basic with drag-and-drop GUI creation. You could easily do things like display bitmaps on screen without ever having created an array or used variable types other than 'variant'.

ido 3y ago
As someone who learned programming with these old early-90s Visual Basic versions as my introduction to programming, it was also extremely slow - you couldn't make commander keen with early VB on win 3.x - it wouldn't be fast enough for scrolling, I'm not sure it would even smoothly move more than a couple sprites at a time. The tool to use for hobby game dev back then was Turbo Pascal on DOS.

TheRoque 3y ago

It reminds me a conversation I had with a friend that recently started programming, through javascript and various online tutorial. He introduced me to "PM" for node, to spawn several processes of the same node program. I asked him "And is there shared memory between them ?" He said "What ? What do you mean ?" I insisted to ask with different wording, and he ended up saying "Oh, you mean 'state' ? Nah there is nothing shared". So he doesn't know about the fundamentals of what's memory, processes etc. and uses this nebulous "state" word that could frankly mean anything. But hey, he actually has a better salary than me now. So that's fair, why bother learning fundamentals if it doesn't pay more ? Why go through this struggle ? You could argue "innovation", but this is way harder to innovate now than before