10 ms·

Programming peaked

218 points by Antibabelic 11mo ago

skrebbel 11mo ago
This article in different forms keeps making the rounds and it's just so tiring. Yeah, let's remember everything that was great about 25 years ago and forget everything that sucked. Juxtapose it with everything that sucks about today but omit everything that's great. Come on man. If you think things suck now, just make it better! The world is your playground. Nobody makes you use YAML and Docker and VS Code or whatever your beef is. Eclipse is still around! There's still a data center around your corner! Walk over and hang a server in the rack, put your hardly-typechecked Java 1.4 code on there and off you go!
- dkdcio 11mo ago
  old man claims society collapsing; back in his day…
  - sybercecurity 11mo ago
    Old man yells at cloud native...
  - titzer 11mo ago
    You'll get old too one day and it will look a whole lot different watching the younguns stumble through completely avoidable mistakes and forget the long lessons of your life that weren't properly taught or were just ignored. We have records from many periods in history of old men crowing about how society is collapsing because of the weak new generations. Thing is, maybe they were always right, and the new generations just had to grow up and take responsibility? And then again, maybe sometimes they were little too right and society did in fact collapse, but locally. “Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.” ― G. Michael Hopf, Those Who Remain
    - mexicocitinluez 11mo ago
      The quote at the end has absolutely nothing to do with old people not liking change.
      - jabbywocker 11mo ago
        It kind of does, no one repeating it ever thinks they’re the weak men creating hard times
        deleted 11mo ago
        [deleted]
      - Gormo 11mo ago
        That's because the thesis it's expounding on isn't "old people don't like change", but rather "experienced people often see their juniors unknowingly making avoidable mistakes".
    - dkdcio 11mo ago
      they were not right and I promise when I’m old, I will not have this attitude. it’s one of my least favorite types of people; and that’s precisely my point, old men have been saying society is collapsing since ancient times, yet here we are, with things better than ever
      - Gormo 11mo ago
        > they were not right If you don't think they were at least sometimes right, to what do you instead attribute the various cases of socio-economic collapse documented throughout history?
        dkdcio 11mo ago
        if I predict a recession every year I’ll be right eventually
  - hackthemack 11mo ago
    I wish people were not so inclined to reply with "Ad Hominem Ridicule" one liners. I like a good joke, but such replies lack a certain level of content that addresses the point and feel "low effort". I do agree that comparing the past with the present if fraught with complicated nuances, and people do tend to see the past with rose tinted glasses. But, I read Talwar's blog post more as a personal reflection on their experiences they are facing and not some kind of scientific treatise on what went wrong.
    - dkdcio 11mo ago
      fair criticism; didn’t mean this as an ad hominem but rather a summarization of (as the comment I replied to points out) this genre of article that keeps coming up (and not just for programming); it’s exhausting mindset to see repeatedly and breaking it down into the core argument (“I liked things better when I was younger”) does have some value IMO if this were titled “Java/JavaScript peaked” or “my reflections on XYZ” and written like that, I wouldn’t have given it a second thought. but claiming programming peaked 15 years ago leads me to not feel bad about my summarization
- fainpul 11mo ago
  Sure, you can do that for your hobby projects. But "at work" you generally have these decisions made for you. And these decisions have changed over time for the wrong reasons. As an aside: if we say k8s, we should also say j8t.
  - skrebbel 11mo ago
    > But "at work" you generally have these decisions made for you. The idea that most employers make terrible decisions now, and amazing decisions back in the day, is plainly false. The author vividly recollects working at a decent Java shop. Even there I strongly doubt everything was amazing as they describe, but it sounds decent indeed. But plenty businesses at the time used C++, for no good reason other than inertia, usually in Windows-only Visual C++ 6-specific dialects. Their "build server" ran overnight, you'd check in your code in the late afternoon and get your compile errors back in the morning. The "source control" worked with company-wide file locks, and you'd get phoned your ass back to the office if you forgot to check in a file before leaving. Meanwhile, half the web was written in epic spaghetti plates of Perl. PHP was a joy to deploy, as it is now, but it was also a pain to debug. If you care deeply about this stuff, find an employer who cares too. They existed back then and they exist now.
    - vdupras 11mo ago
      The "terrible decisions" of yore hold no comparison to today's "terrible decisions". It's not the same ballpark, it's not the same sport.
      - deleted 11mo ago
        [deleted]
    - mexicocitinluez 11mo ago
      Amen. We love the idea that we don't have any agency in this field and we're constantly being pushed by the mean baddies at the top.
    - CyberDildonics 11mo ago
- vdupras 11mo ago
  The better tools are already there. It's not about making it better. It's about most programmers today choosing mediocrity. Sometimes, you can avoid contact with this mediocrity, but often you don't and you're forced to play in this swamp.
  - andyferris 11mo ago
    > choosing Sometimes the programmer doesn't get to choose. I do find the business drive toward mediocrity quite maddening.
    - vdupras 11mo ago
      Yes, sometimes it's that, but what I've observed in the field is self-inflicted by programmers. It's the impostor syndrome. They don't know, but they don't want to show that they don't know. They look around for clues of what to choose. Monkey see, monkey do. And then, like monkeys, they bash their keyboard until it seems to work.
- ToucanLoucan 11mo ago
  I both agree and disagree with you. On the one hand: yes, this dev has clearly chosen a career/language specialization that puts him knee-deep in the absolute worst tooling imaginable.. I cannot fathom a workflow this fucking miserable and if this was my day to day, I would be far, far more depressed than I already am. AND, the fact that so very very much of our industry does run, perhaps not all of, but a significant amount of a workflow not awfully different from this is IMO, an indictment of our trade. To invoke the immortal sentiment of the hockey coach from Letterkenny, this shit is FUCKING embarrassing. So much major software that ships in a web browser because writing for Windows, Mac and Linux is just too hard you guys, it's simply too much for a sweet little bean like Microsoft ($3.62 trillion) to manage as they burn billions on AI garbage, is FUCKING embarrassing. Half the apps on my phone are written this way which is why they can barely manage 30hz on their animations, die entirely when S3 goes down, and when they are working, make my phone hot. To run an app that lets me control my thermostat from my desk. That's FUCKING embarrassing. And my desktop is only saved by virtue of being magnitudes more powerful than my original one back in the 90's, yet it only seems a scant more capable. In the early 00's I was sitting on Empire Earth and chatting with people over TeamSpeak. My computer can still do this, and with the added benefit of Discord can stream my game so my friends can all watch each other, and that's cool, apart from I lose about 10 fps just by virtue of having Discord open, and when I'm traveling? Oh god forget it, Discord flounders to death on hotel wifi despite it being perfectly cromulent DSL speeds. Not BLAZING, surely, but TeamSpeak handled VOIP over an actual DSL connection, with DSL latency, in the 00's. That's FUCKING embarrassing. All our software now updates automatically by default, and it's notable when that's a GOOD thing. Usually what it actually means is the layout of known features changes for seemingly arbitrary reasons. Other times more dark patterns are injected. And Discord, not to pick on them, but they're the absolute fucking worst for this. I swear they push an "update" every time one of their devs sneezes, I usually have to install 18 such updates on each launch, and I run it very regularly! And for all that churn, I couldn't tell you one goddamn thing they actually added recently. FUCKING embarrassing. And people will say "oh they could be better," "we know we can do it better," "these aren't the best companies or apps" okay but they are BIG ones. If the mean average car in America got awful fuel economy, needed constant service, was ill-designed for it's purpose and cost insane amounts of money... Oh, that happened too. I think I just made my metaphor more embarrassing for another industry.
- ben_w 11mo ago
  > The world is your playground. Nobody makes you use YAML and Docker and VS Code or whatever your beef is Nobody, except your future employment prospects. There's good reasons and bad reasons for a lot of technical options; "can I hire people to do it?" is a very good reason, but it does directly lead to CV-driven-development, where we all chase whatever tech stack the people writing the job adverts have decided is good. The same people who capitalise "MAC" in "MAC & PC", the same people who conflate Java with JavaScript, the same people who want 10 years experience in things only released 3 years ago.
  - stuartjohnson12 11mo ago
    Right, and there's the rub, and what's behind all these changes - coordination. We containerized to coordinate our ability to use lots of different runtime environments. We typescript'd and python'd the web stack so that our frontend and our data friends could feel at home in the backend. We created ever-more-elaborate package repositories to make layering increasingly complex software projects simpler. I think what people who write essays like this wish for is the smaller scale of things. Industrial steel production is objectively better than old-timey blacksmithing, but hammering out sets of cutlery certainly feels a lot more personal. Steelmaking wasn't better before all these fancy mechanisms and danger and pollutants and logistics, but when it was craft, it was more satisfying to work on.
    - djmips 11mo ago
      That was very well said - that's how I really feel.
    - RealityVoid 11mo ago
      It sounds fun hammering out a set of cutlery but after the... Like... First two... You go screw this, give me a metal stamping press.
- fullstackchris 11mo ago
  Agreed. If folks want to write java in elipse they are more than welcome to do so... dont understand these yelling at clouds posts really
  - zeroc8 11mo ago
    Only if they found their own companies. Usually those decisions were already made for you.
- hnthrow0287345 11mo ago
  >Nobody makes you use YAML and Docker and VS Code or whatever your beef is. Not VS Code, but maybe YAML and Docker if your company is trying to align what tools it uses. C# places might still force you to use Visual Studio proper. Everyone says use the right tool for the job, but for bog standard CRUD web development, we do have a shitload of tools that work and there's multiple ways to get to a fast, working product. I still chuckle that my laptop is 3 times as fast as the cloud thing that serves our CRUD app and we pay many more times for it, but also knowing full well I do not ever want to be RDP'ing into a production box again and pouring through IIS or Windows logs. What I definitely do see is a degradation in making choices about when to adopt a more complicated technology because of the incentives of the hiring market. People have loudly beaten the drum to keep your skills up to date and so people choose stuff that's popular because it benefits them personally, even when the product doesn't need it. This in turn leads companies to only select people who know that stack, and the more that companies do that, the more people make technical choices to get them the best job that they can handle. We absolutely, very much 100% see that happening now with LLM AI if you ever needed a bigger piece of proof. Pretty much everything that is happening now has just been a louder example of every bad practice since the run up to the dotcom bust. Because of that, I'd frankly never suggest running on-prem or building a local-only app unless there was a much bigger reason (legal, security, whatever) especially if the other products in the company have chosen the cloud. Why? Because convincing the next job that that would have been the right choice is too hard. Edit: and to someone else's point, I made the choice to be in the Microsoft/Azure/Windows hell hole but digging myself out and moving to something else is practically working a second full-time job and holding 2 ecosystems in my head at once
- rglover 11mo ago
  They don't want a cure, they want something they can bitch about.
  - soganess 11mo ago
    Speak for yourself. The pathologies/neuroses on display here... 'cure'... 'bitch'... seriously, are we still talking about software?
    - rglover 11mo ago
      Is that so, doctor?
      - deleted 11mo ago
        [deleted]
      - soganess 11mo ago
        Yes, good of you to ask. But don’t you worry your little head, now! You aren’t the first patient that developed a thin skin from their own medicine, and you won’t be the last.
  - xtracto 11mo ago
    I think it is a great exercise of self awareness to take a step back and see how things are done now. I started my first prpgramming job in 2003. Some things where better, others were worse. But the only way we can improve the "craft" of software development is by having introspection. It's kindnofnwhat happen during the "software crisis" of the 80s, and why "waterfal" was rrplaced by "iterative" software development. Now, with such an impactful change like AI aided coding, it is a great opportunity to see if we can evolve anything in the building process.
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
- drob518 11mo ago
  Yea, my immediate reaction was, “Okay. Stop doing all the stupid stuff.” If you want to program like it’s 1999, go for it. I generally don’t use AI, for instance. I just haven’t found it to be a net-positive yet.
- ramon156 11mo ago
  > If you think things suck now, just make it better This completely ignores the fact we're doing this for our boss, not for ourselves
- mrweasel 11mo ago
  Just yesterday a friend and I was talking about writing a clone of a popular website, using the technologies of yesteryear. There's absolutely no reason why we wouldn't be able to make a credible competitor using mod_perl and db2. From a technological view, we're a point where your development stack doesn't matter all that much.
- zahlman 11mo ago
  > Yeah, let's remember everything that was great about 25 years ago and forget everything that sucked. Juxtapose it with everything that sucks about today but omit everything that's great. Come on man. That's fair. When I see bad code today, and try to explain to myself what's bad about it, I realize that people totally did the same things 25 years ago. Nowadays there is just so much more code, and we stand on taller piles of "architecture" trying to scale higher heaps of expectations. The thing is, the effect of the bad stuff seems to compound more readily than the effect of the good stuff. And meeting the demand for more code involves broadening the base of people doing the coding. > If you think things suck now, just make it better! The world is your playground. I agree with this. A lot of the modern expectation is artificial, emphasizing form over function. Even where it isn't, a lot of the modern technique is unnecessary cargo-culting. You can do a lot locally if you believe in your machine (https://thundergolfer.com/computers-are-fast https://thundergolfer.com/computers-are-fast ; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucWdfZoxsYo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucWdfZoxsYo). For PAPER I'm targeting Python 3.6+ (where they added `pathlib.Path` and f-strings, and upgraded the SSL version) with the intent to support it indefinitely (which involves forking certain dependencies).
- wduquette 11mo ago
  And in fact, professionally, I still live in the good old days. I code in Java 21, I minimize dependencies, and I use an IDE that can do the heavy lifting when I want to refactor something…which is often. I produce a .jar that gets installed with a loader script rather than in the cloud. And it all works, and it’s *stable*.
canto 11mo ago
MY GOD THIS IS GOLD. Nothing but the truth here.
spiderfarmer 11mo ago
Programming was so much better 15 years ago, except for all the parts that sucked.
analogears 11mo ago
There's something to this. I recently shipped a music curation site and deliberately avoided React/Next/etc - just HTML, CSS, vanilla JS. The cognitive load difference is stark. The 'peak' might be less about capability and more about us rediscovering that simpler tools often suffice.
- ToucanLoucan 11mo ago
  Same. I build stuff for local businesses in my area with nothing but boring old HTML, PHP, CSS and JS. I guess my shit isn't "web scale" but it works, and it works consistently, with minimal downtime, and it worked during both Amazon and Cloudflare's latest outages. I don't need my software to eat the world, I'm perfectly content with it just solving someone's problems.
- mcntsh 11mo ago
  It's all about picking the right tools for the job. The "cognitive load" might be larger in a vanilla project compared to React when your interface is more complex and interactive.
gary_0 11mo ago
> Funnily enough, everything ran at about the same speed as it does now. Actually, where I was sitting on a decent PC with broadband Internet at the time, everything was much, much faster. I remember seeing a video on here where someone actually booted up a computer from the 2000's and showed how snappy everything was, including Visual Studio, but when I search YouTube for it, it ignores most of my keywords and returns a bunch of "how to speed up your computer" spam. And I can't find it in my bookmarks. Oh well.
- titzer 11mo ago
  YouTube has become enshittified at a record clip. Search is useless and shorts have turned it into just another TikTok brain dopamine machine.
  - zahlman 11mo ago
    > just another TikTok brain dopamine machine. You can fight this machine. You can view shorts on desktop. In a browser on desktop, when you see one on your subscriptions tab (or the front page if you still use that), you can right-click and open in new tab. You can replace "shorts/" with "watch?v=" in the URL and load the same video in the regular UI. You don't have to scroll down.
- codelikeawolf 11mo ago
  > I remember seeing a video on here where someone actually booted up a computer from the 2000's and showed how snappy everything was... Was this what you were referring to?: https://jmmv.dev/2023/06/fast-machines-slow-machines.html https://jmmv.dev/2023/06/fast-machines-slow-machines.html
  - kwertyoowiyop 11mo ago
    Notice also how you can clearly see which window is selected, and which item within that window is selected. Microsoft has just lost the plot.
  - D13Fd 11mo ago
mattlondon 11mo ago
This feels very much like the tired "the modern internet sucks - the old web with old websites was better!" trope that appears on here regularly. You can still code the old way just like you can still put up your old website. No one is forcing you to use AI or VS Code or even JavaScript. Of course you.might not getting those choices at work, but that is entirely different since your paid to do a job that benefits your employer, not paid to do something you enjoy. Have fun.
maxsilver 11mo ago
I get it. I agree with most of this article. But also like, nothing went away. If you pine for the days of Java and Maven, you can still do that. It’s all still there (Eclipse and NetBeans, too!) If you don’t like using Node and NPM, that’s totally valid, don’t use them. You can spin up a new mobile app, desktop app, and even a SaaS-style web app without touching NPM. (Even on fancy modern latest-version web frameworks like Hanami or Phoenix) If you don’t want everyone to use JS and NPM and React without thinking, be the pushback on a project at work, to not start there.
mcntsh 11mo ago
If the author doesn't want to work with NPM and the JavaScript ecosystem he could just get a job writing Spring/Boot, which makes up probably 90% of the jobs at large enterprise companies. I don't agree that this world has disappeared...
noident 11mo ago
The author is writing like Java was outlawed or something. There are tons of shitty enterprise Java jobs out there for those who want them. Personally, I worked one of those jobs a decade ago, and the article's description of the "golden age" didn't bring back good memories. It's easy enough to avoid the NPM circus as well. Just don't put JavaScript on your resume and don't get anywhere near frontend development.
BenGosub 11mo ago
Javascript wins by keeping the costs down. Companies today want to do more with less, which is how it should be and you are still free to choose from a myriad of technologies. When you pair this setup with LLMs, it's actually the best it has ever been IMO.
orwin 11mo ago
Java is usable now, but in 2013 it was the worst debugging experience one could have. I would rather work with PHP5 than with Java (unless I started a project from scratch). Also auto-refactoring was clearly worse, because well, Java. It was around that time that I tried Scala then Clojure, and even if debugging the JVM was still an experience (to avoid as much as possible), at least limited side effects reduced the issues. If programming peaked, it certainly wasn't in 2010.
- throwaway_2494 11mo ago
  > it was the worst debugging experience one could have. Hard disagree. I'm not going to argue that Java debugging was the best, however: 1. You could remote debug your code as it ran on the server. 2. You could debug code which wouldn't even compile, as long as your execution path stayed within the clean code. 3. You could then fix a section of the broken code and continue, and the debugger would backtrack and execute the code you just patched in during your debugging session.† This is what I remember as someone who spent decades (since Java 1.0) working as a contract consultant, mainly on server side Java. Of course this will not convince anyone who is determined to remain skeptical, but I think those are compelling capabilities. † Now I code in Rust a lot, and I really enjoy it, but the long compile times and the inability to run broken code are two things which I really miss from those Java days. And often the modern 2025 debugger for it is unable to inspect some for the variables for some reason, a bug which I never encountered with Java.
  - nextaccountic 11mo ago
    > 2. You could debug code which wouldn't even compile, as long as your execution path stayed within the clean code. In Java? How?
  - nextaccountic 11mo ago
    About your †, I think that new Rust tooling like dx will eventually enable hot patching code during debugging https://lib.rs/crates/subsecond https://lib.rs/crates/subsecond (Note, it was created by Dioxus, but it's usable in any Rust project)
Glemkloksdjf 11mo ago
Honestly, the person should spend their time of fixing their shit instead of writing blog posts. I find intellij a great IDE, modern frameworks are fun to use, ai helps me doing things i don't want to do or things i just need (like generate a good README.md for the other people). Containers are great and mine build fast. My Startup has a ha setup with self healing tx to k8s and everything is in code so i don't need to worry to backup some random config files. Hardware has never been that cheap. NVMs, RAM and Compute. A modern laptop today has a brilliant display, quite, can run everything, long batterytime. Traffic? No brainer. Websphere was a monster with shitty features. I remember when finally all the JEE Servers had a startup time of just a few seconds instead of minutes. RAM got finally cheap enough that you were able to run eclipse, webserver etc. locally. Java was verbose, a lot more verbose than today. JQuery was everywere.
- webdevver 11mo ago
  truthnuke
- howdyhowdy123 11mo ago
  Ew
Kuyawa 11mo ago
I am still a happy programmer after all these years using only node, express, postgres and sublime. I try not to listen to the sirens singing on the rocky shores...
- efields 11mo ago
  Postgres and Sublime user here. Life is pretty good!
coolThingsFirst 11mo ago
In other words you have competitive advantage because your cloud costs will be 10x less. This is exactly what 10 years of experience did for you. Why complain?
wiz21c 11mo ago
I've been coding since 40 years old and professioannly since about 30. And let's set this straight: it is much (much, like really much) better nowadays. We have super powerful editors, powerful languages, a gazillion of libraries ready for download. I use to write video games and it took months (yeah, months of hobby-time) to put a sprite on a screen. And for Java, yeah, things have improved so much too: the language of today is better, the tooling is better, the whole security is more complex but better, the JVM keeps rocking... And now we've got Claude. I'm really happy to be now.
- NooneAtAll3 11mo ago
  were you trying to say you've been coding *for* 40 years? that "old" in "40 years old" confuses me a lot or are you 60 years of age now, starting at 40 and have been coding long enough to see editors progress?
  - sgc 11mo ago
    I'm pretty sure they are not a native English speaker. Many languages use 'since 40 years' to mean what we say as 'for 40 years'.
    - apprentice7 11mo ago
      Or maybe "since <<I was>> 40 years old"?
      - dkdcio 11mo ago
        I think it’s an unfortunate typo…”old” => “ago”?
        wiz21c 11mo ago
        yeah, typed too fast. I was talking about 40 years ago. Apple 2+ to be specific.
  - wiz21c 11mo ago
mexicocitinluez 11mo ago
> The most popular is “VS Code”, which needs only a few gigabytes of RAM to render the text. > We used Eclipse, which was a bit like VS Code. This made me laugh. You can't possibly be a serious person if you think Eclipse was better in any way shape or form than VS Code. I don't have a great memory, but one thing I can absolutely still remember with 100% clarity is how bloated and memory hungry Eclipse was. It was almost unusable.
tumdum_ 11mo ago
I think I’m lucky, because for me it’s the other way. In 2009 I started my first real programming job writing c++ in vim. For the last 5 years I’ve been writing rust in helix and things have never been better.
nathias 11mo ago
how tedious must a life be if you go through it with this kind of thinking
pie_flavor 11mo ago
Maven was a great idea. Introduce a high barrier to entry for publishing packages. Paired with a search box operated by carrier pidgeon, this effectively meant what you were looking for didn't exist. Every time you had any kind of quirky need, you had to write it out by hand, or find someone smarter than you to do it for you, or worst of all buy it from a vendor for lots of money at horrible quality. People recite 'DSA is bad for coding challenges, when will I need to write a hash map', but once upon a time you did have to write a hash map here and there. Supply chain vulnerability is a cost, but the product was worth the cost: you can just import the darn package! I need a map of key ranges to values with intelligent range merging, it is right there on crates.io to import, it has been there since 2016, Maven Central didn't get one until 2018. In the olden days either it was in Apache Commons or it didn't exist. Halcyon days those.
d--b 11mo ago
Defining peak programming as entreprise Java using Eclipse on SVN is border delusionnal imo. > And here’s the funny thing: it never broke, because the person who built it did it well, because it wasn’t taxed within an inch of its life, and because we were keeping an eye on it. Sure, if you say so buddy...
lunias 11mo ago
> We run our k8s cluster in the “Cloud”. It’s a bunch of services that run on Linux, but we don’t run Linux ourselves, we run it on VMs that we rent by the hour for approximately the same cost as buying a computer outright every month. We do this because no one knows how to plug a computer in any more. My mind struggles with this reality everyday... the "cloud" has to be the most successful rebrand of all time. In 2005: "Be very careful what data you share on the internet". In 2025: "Yeah, I just put all my shit in the cloud".
- draw_down 11mo ago
  [dead]
t43562 11mo ago
It's horrifying to see someone who started working 10 years after me talking about "when I was young" :-D Programming was more exciting when you had amazing things to imagine having - like a 256 colour screen or BASIC that ran as fast as machine code (ACORN ARCHIMEDES) or the incredible thought of having a computer powerful enough to play a video and even having enough storage to hold a whole video! 2400bps! Checking email once a day Everything came true. My screen has 16million colours and I don't notice. I have 12 cores and 64GB of memory and fibre optic internet. The extremely exciting future arrived. That mind-expanding byte article I read about Object Oriented programming came true enough for us to see that it wasn't the answer to everything. There are 2 problems now - nothing one does is unique. You can't make a difference because someone else already has done whatever you can think of doing ....and of course AI which is fun to use but threatens to make us even more useless. I just cannot really get my sense of excitement back - which may just be because I'm old and burned out.
- wccrawford 11mo ago
  I'm disappointed that you said "2400bps" instead of "2400 baud". :/ It's always surprising to me when I see people being nostalgic for the old days. Yes, things seemed simpler, but it was because there was less you could do. I'll always fondly remember my attempt to get on GeoLink with a 300 baud modem, and then my parents realizing that the long distance calls made it far, far too expensive to use, and returning it. Sure, I was disappointed at the time, but it wasn't too much later that 56k modems existed and we had a local unlimited internet provider. And now it's a fun story. But I was actually just as frustrated at the time as I am now, but for different reasons. Change exists, and that's good. I agree that it feels harder to make your mark today. But I don't think it's actually harder. There's plenty of fun things that people would love to see people do. Just yesterday, I found out about the Strudel musical programming language and watched an amazing video of someone making Trance with it. And those kind of discoveries happen constantly now, where they were pretty seldom back 30 years ago. We're at the point that anyone can make a game, app, webpage, etc if they put enough effort into it. The tools are so easy and the tutorials are so plentiful and free that it's really just about effort, instead of being blocked from it. I've been saying "we live in the future" about once a month for years now. It's amazing what we have today.
pzo 11mo ago
> Where did it all go wrong? Just landscape changed significantly comparing to 2010. Before you didn't have current smartphones and tablets. On desktop you could just support windows only (today probably have to macOS as well). On browser you didn't have to support Safari. You didn't have to worry much about screen DPI, aspect ratio, landscape vs portrait, small screen sizes. Your layout didn't have to be adaptive. There was not much demand for SPA. Back then there was much less people worldwide with access to internet.
ojr 11mo ago
My first text editor for PHP was Komodo Edit, it was super slow and everyone jump shipped to Sublime Text, then VSCode was slower than Sublime but had incredible industry supported extensions like Git and Prettier, programming didn't peak during my PHP days, in fact the PHP frameworks sites I used are still around and incredibly slow. I am building an AI coding tool that doesn't eat RAM, there are super lightweight alternatives to Electron.
torben-friis 11mo ago
You know what made javascript so common, accessible, and thus later universal? Putting things on a screen was (is) stupidly simple. That's the whole thing. It's not the types or npm or whatever. It's that you could start with C/Python/Java and spend your first 6 months as a coder printing and asking values on a dark terminal (which is something a newbie might not even have interacted with before) or you could go the html/css/javascript route and have animations moving in your screen you can show to your friends on day one. Everything flows from that human experience. UIs are Electron because creating UIs for a browser is an extremely more universal, easy and creative-friendly experience than creating UIs for native apps, particuarly if JS is your native language for the previously stated reason. The industry failed to adapt to the fact that the terminal wasn't any longer the reality of computer users, and the web kinda filled that niche by default. Also, React was an answer to the advent of mobile phones, tablets, smart tvs, and basically all the explosion of not-a-desktop computer form factors. You could no longer assume your html was a proper format for everything. So you need an common API to be consumed by a mobile app, a tv app, a tablet app... react was the way to make the web another of the N apps that use the api, and not get special treatment. The idea made sense in context, back then.
- NooneAtAll3 11mo ago
  > The industry failed to adapt to the fact that the terminal wasn't any longer the reality of computer users I'm still waiting for some GUI-based terminal to appear I want to call git in Scratch!
  - zozbot234 11mo ago
    Jupyter notebook UI is essentially a proper GUI-based REPL/terminal.
- pmontra 11mo ago
  > Putting things on a screen was (is) stupidly simple. This is why HTML is still a great language for building UIs and that's why Visual Basic had a huge success in the early 90s: drag UI components on a panel, write the callbacks for clicks, save and distribute the exe. Almost anybody could do it. React and its siblings are much more complicated than that.
rdos 11mo ago
this is going straight into my funny folder
Havoc 11mo ago
In this respect I’m liking vibe coding. I can tell it use html css and js only and make me a frontend. That obviously has severe limitations but ideal if you don’t like the front end framework scene and want to put all your logic in backend. And there I find it a bit easier to navigate RIP guys in corporate that have things imposed on them
rvz 11mo ago
> I love writing JavaScript, and I’m glad I can run it on the server. But this doesn’t mean I think it’s a good idea to use it for everything. "Javascript" programming peaked.
chubot 11mo ago
Somehow this reminded me of a similar rant about devops: It’s the Future - https://blog.paulbiggar.com/its-the-future/ https://blog.paulbiggar.com/its-the-future/ And now I see that's from June 2015 -- it's over 10 years old now! Wow I'm not sure we're really in a better place in the cloud now ... The article says I’m going back to Heroku and in 2025, I think people still want that
syngrog66 11mo ago
strawman dystopia. simply choose to continue applying wise practices of old. be the effect you wish to see in the world. just because others are jumping off a cliff like lemmings does not mean you must as well
__mharrison__ 11mo ago
When I started programming we wrote code on a C64 in a freezing cold basement, with no disk drive. And we liked it...
georgeecollins 11mo ago
Programming used to be about finding the best way to communicate with the device. Now the device is trying to figure out the best way to communicate with you.
- sumuyuda 11mo ago
  Now it’s about how the device can be programmed to spy and manipulate you so the company can extract more value for the shareholders.
  - supportengineer 11mo ago
    A promo for you, short-term gains for the shareholders, and enshittification for the customer.
  - georgeecollins 11mo ago
    I meant, it used to be more low level, less abstracted. A long time ago.
mrbombastic 11mo ago
“ Once our work is done, we create a “pull request”. This is a way of emulating open-source development inside a single company, which as we know, is the only way to work. Typically, this means that the code is downloaded and built on another computer, and then several hours later, a colleague will come along and ask to change a few words. Once we change these words, the computer builds everything again, and then the next day, the same colleague will allow the code to be merged into the mainline.” Fix this and your life will be much better, generate testable preview apps on every pr, this feedback loop is a velocity killer. Management for some reason never wants to prioritize speeding it up even though it slows down every single project so advise to just do it and not ask permission.
dreamcompiler 11mo ago
> We also saw the rise of React, which is possibly the greatest tragedy to ever befall front-end programming (and I say this as a recovering React fan). Amen. Github (just to cite one example) has become much less usable since they switched to React. And it's clearly not a site that needs React, since it worked fine for 17 years without it.
furyofantares 11mo ago
I don't do any of that shit in the first section.
andyjohnson0 11mo ago
> I started my first real, full-time job in 2010. We wrote Java... I started my first real, full-time job in 1992. Back here we write C, or maybe C++ if we're feeling cutting-edge. The Sparc 10 can get a bit slow when we're all on it, but I have a shelf full of O'Reilly X Windows books to look through if I can't figure something out. My mate in London sent me a QIC tape with something called "gcc" on it: sounds exciting, but before I can install it I have to find a spare day to update SunOS first. This 2010 programming setup seems pretty amazing tbh... can't wait to get me some of that. Nice languages and tooling, no more having to edit makefiles by hand in emacs or laboriously debug in gdb. Bet they don't even use sourcesafe anymore. I reckon by 2025 they'll have god-like stuff: fast, reliable hardware with more memory and storage than you can eat; powerful development and collaboration tools; lots of ways to find answers without having to ask that guy over in the other building. And a lot of it will be basically free! I wonder how they'll feel about all that awesome dev power, and whether they'll still use X terminals.
- danesparza 11mo ago
  I came here to say something like this. Programming has evolved several times since the early 90s (when I got in this business) and I had the impression it had already evolved several times by the 90s (especially talking with old mainframe or COBOL programmers). It's evolving again now, and that process is painful. Nobody knows what the future holds.
gaigalas 11mo ago
JavaScript is an interpreted language: write, run. No build steps required. Building was introduced as a temporary measure, to handle cross-browser awkwardness (grunt and stuff like that). People overused it. We totally don't need it anymore. TypeScript is awesome but a major blocker to this return to a more nimbler ecosystem. People in the 2000s discovered that mixing code with HTML tags was bad and big complexity demon mansion. By the end of the 2000s, this was fixed in the tools of that time. I consider JSX a best-practices regression. It feels like ASP.NET, but the kids don't notice because they have never seen ASP.NET. For a while, we also saw npm as temporary. A better thing, more web-friendly, would appear. That never happened. JavaScript could have been great.
dpc_01234 11mo ago
Programming with Rust and deployment and mgmt with Nix is so much better to how things used to be. Did I mention how much better my Helix works than how Neovim used to? Revision control with JJ, conflict resolution with mergiraf. My personal computers are more powerful than ever before and can get amazing stuff done super fast. Everything is better and keeps getting better if you make good decision instead of following the lowest common denominator tech.
JR1427 11mo ago
> Funnily enough, everything ran at about the same speed as it does now. I've often thought about how certain properties of humans impacts the tech we make and accept. For instance, to a human, something happening in a couple of seconds is quick, and in several seconds is fairly quick. Hence, build steps etc tend to creep up to those sorts of numbers.
kwar13 11mo ago
So js was great when jquery was the dominant library...?
robviren 11mo ago
I just liked programming when it contained a comprehensible amount of abstraction. Stacks have become so tall it is not even feasible for a single human to comprehend what is occurring. I also liked when standards had less surface area. Working in healthcare it has become obvious standards only ever get added, never removed. Complexity is absurd now. I'm not championing that we all become experts in bare metal assembly, but I feel for OP and a desire to at least fundamentally understand what is happening on some level.
monegator 11mo ago
Me, a young, but old fart at heart, writing firmware in C and applications in C++ (just for Qt!) that see everything wrong with the programming world today VS the junior that keep asking why we don't do the thing in javascript so we can have it on mobile as well (we do, we just use a different framework 'cause react won't ever cut it for our needs. It just takes a bit of what is called "effort" to make things look the same on all platforms) and wants emails lists to plan going out for a drink instead of, you know, asking. We're all in the same small office. Same stuff about deploying, we need github (no we don't. private git server), we need aws, woah what is this npm attack you're talking about? At times it seems he's learning, but then he leans back into GPT and it feels like a lost cause. Yo bro it's crazy, i just deleted 2k lines of code, as if it was normal, with me raising eyebrows asking how many modules were outright deleted and never needed to be there in the first place. Problem is, GPT and company will happily throw a lot of puke at the project and trust me bro that's essential we plan every single possible feature first and foremost instead of just testing the basics and build on top of them, because we have literally two requirements, so it's taking two months to do something i could do in two weeks, not because i'm more experienced, but because we should be doing what i'm telling to do, and not discuss whatever bullcrap the artificial manager is suggesting, which i would love to have the power to outright ban from our network. Me and the junior have more or less the same age, just very different life journeys that led to programming
supportengineer 11mo ago
Some of us are still out here, writing maven projects in Java with Eclipse. It works great.
pineappletooth 11mo ago
Well i am a Java developer in 2025 and we still use maven, we also got IntelliJ which is miles better than eclipse and the company where I am does hire testers. The world is not worse, you just ended up stuck in the wrong tech stack with the wrong company. I do agree that the JS ecosystem is terrible tho, and i was a full time js dev before (now i only do some frontend from time to time) we already have a dedicated frontend team.
projektfu 11mo ago
I'm enjoying some things about the programming world now, especially compared to my professional start circa 1997. I started on C++ on Windows, using MFC, and also using Visual Basic 5.0 when it came out. VB made my eyes bleed, but a lot of people are nostalgic about it. Visual C++ did not have many fans, but it had a lot of users. I got the first taste of the Microsoft treadmill during those days, where they would get you to use a new thing, and then in a few months they hardly used it anymore, and they were promoting the next new thing. As soon as you got comfortable with MFC, they were pushing ATL, and then .NET, etc. Really, the people who were happy with what they had and never upgraded were better off. I narrowly missed the big-manual days of programming, where it was unlikely you had online resources to help you through it. The Turbo Pascal folks and the early Mac folks remember that well. Instead, we had the big online help file (CHM) and search engines like Altavista. Code examples were few and far between. We often spent a lot of time just figuring out how to make the right incantations to get things to do what we wanted. There was a happy path, like with MFC if you make the same exact application over and over again. And then there is the difficult path, where you want it to be a little innovative. I came across Squeak Smalltalk and used that a lot for my own personal exploration, so I always felt like there was something missing from the world that actually came to be. Still, working alone on Squeak is only as fun as long as you don't get bored and don't need something that Squeak was too slow to handle. Like the author, I was into pair programming (eXtreme programming, actually). I never understood its detractors. Working was pretty fun. I never liked the MS ecosystem so I enthusiastically accepted Java. IBM offered a lot of support for Linux and there were good applications waiting to be written. It had its growing pains but quickly settled in to being very productive. In this period, Intellisense and similar technologies were becoming commonplace and the Refactoring Browser had been developed (for Smalltalk but then basically for Java). IntelliJ IDEA was released and was, honestly, revolutionary. The previous IDEs were just not serious until they caught up with the developer support in IDEA. I figured out that being a professional programmer is not for me, because I don't enjoy working on projects, and I went back to school, eventually becoming a veterinarian. So my professional career kind of ends there. I enjoy programming, but as a casual programmer it is hard to work on something and come back to it every few months. Things do seem to rot. What compiled before doesn't now. Library use changes radically. If you started a React project before hooks, you know what I mean. Sure, you can still do it without hooks, but nobody does so you're on your own. What AI does is it makes exploration and problem solving, as well as understanding what I did a few months ago so much easier. I don't have anyone to pair-program with. But the AI makes it easier to be the programmer who's not in the driver seat. I like that, and I think it could lead to good things in the field. The big risk is that LLMs are not very good at future things. If things are out of their training window, they make lots of annoying mistakes. For example, Debian Bookworm and Debian Trixie are somewhat different, and Claude doesn't know what it's doing yet with Trixie. Claude thinks the most recent version of Python is 3.11 or something. With LLMs you have to be comfortable working on yesterday's code. But for most of us, that's OK.
lazy_afternoons 11mo ago
Wait until he discovers vercel and nextjs.
- adamwong246 11mo ago
  these tools are so useless these days. All you need is Claude and esbuild, and you can make practically anything.
adamwong246 11mo ago
the idea of moving from TS back to Java fills me with dread
comex 11mo ago
Things don't always get worse. Sometimes they get better. TypeScript recently invited people to try their new compiler which is 7-10x faster. [1] VS Code is popular, but personally I write TypeScript in Vim, which is definitely faster and less resource-intensive than Eclipse. But thanks to VS Code's invention of the Language Server Protocol and its subsequent adoption in many editors, I can get 'compile the code as you type' functionality. [2] And then there's runtime speed. Java used to have legendarily slow startup times, and they're still an issue today. JavaScript's modern runtimes are optimized to start fast. On the other hand, Java still holds the crown for throughput, so it's a mixed bag. But if you want even better throughput without sacrificing too much usability, today we have Rust, as well as a vastly improved C++. (Though both of those languages have terrible compile times.) [1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/typescript/progress-on-typescript-7-december-2025/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/typescript/progress-on-typesc... [2] To be fair, a memory usage comparison should compare Eclipse not to Vim itself, but to the whole [Vim + coc.nvim + TypeScript compiler] stack, of which most of the memory usage comes from the TypeScript compiler. I'm not sure how that compares to Eclipse. But I'm more concerned about typing latency, where I _do_ only care about Vim itself because all the LSP stuff is asynchronous.
marcelr 11mo ago
old man yells at cloud
oliverpk 11mo ago
It's incredible how different the programming in 2025 can be if you work in a different kind of company.

218 points by Antibabelic 11mo ago

This article in different forms keeps making the rounds and it's just so tiring. Yeah, let's remember everything that was great about 25 years ago and forget everything that sucked. Juxtapose it with everything that sucks about today but omit everything that's great. Come on man. If you think things suck now, just make it better! The world is your playground. Nobody makes you use YAML and Docker and VS Code or whatever your beef is. Eclipse is still around! There's still a data center around your corner! Walk over and hang a server in the rack, put your hardly-typechecked Java 1.4 code on there and off you go!

dkdcio 11mo ago
old man claims society collapsing; back in his day…
- sybercecurity 11mo ago
  Old man yells at cloud native...
- titzer 11mo ago
  You'll get old too one day and it will look a whole lot different watching the younguns stumble through completely avoidable mistakes and forget the long lessons of your life that weren't properly taught or were just ignored. We have records from many periods in history of old men crowing about how society is collapsing because of the weak new generations. Thing is, maybe they were always right, and the new generations just had to grow up and take responsibility? And then again, maybe sometimes they were little too right and society did in fact collapse, but locally. “Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.” ― G. Michael Hopf, Those Who Remain
  - mexicocitinluez 11mo ago
    The quote at the end has absolutely nothing to do with old people not liking change.
    - jabbywocker 11mo ago
      It kind of does, no one repeating it ever thinks they’re the weak men creating hard times
      - deleted 11mo ago
        [deleted]
    - Gormo 11mo ago
      That's because the thesis it's expounding on isn't "old people don't like change", but rather "experienced people often see their juniors unknowingly making avoidable mistakes".
  - dkdcio 11mo ago
    they were not right and I promise when I’m old, I will not have this attitude. it’s one of my least favorite types of people; and that’s precisely my point, old men have been saying society is collapsing since ancient times, yet here we are, with things better than ever
    - Gormo 11mo ago
      > they were not right If you don't think they were at least sometimes right, to what do you instead attribute the various cases of socio-economic collapse documented throughout history?
      - dkdcio 11mo ago
        if I predict a recession every year I’ll be right eventually
- hackthemack 11mo ago
  I wish people were not so inclined to reply with "Ad Hominem Ridicule" one liners. I like a good joke, but such replies lack a certain level of content that addresses the point and feel "low effort". I do agree that comparing the past with the present if fraught with complicated nuances, and people do tend to see the past with rose tinted glasses. But, I read Talwar's blog post more as a personal reflection on their experiences they are facing and not some kind of scientific treatise on what went wrong.
  - dkdcio 11mo ago
    fair criticism; didn’t mean this as an ad hominem but rather a summarization of (as the comment I replied to points out) this genre of article that keeps coming up (and not just for programming); it’s exhausting mindset to see repeatedly and breaking it down into the core argument (“I liked things better when I was younger”) does have some value IMO if this were titled “Java/JavaScript peaked” or “my reflections on XYZ” and written like that, I wouldn’t have given it a second thought. but claiming programming peaked 15 years ago leads me to not feel bad about my summarization
fainpul 11mo ago
Sure, you can do that for your hobby projects. But "at work" you generally have these decisions made for you. And these decisions have changed over time for the wrong reasons. As an aside: if we say k8s, we should also say j8t.
- skrebbel 11mo ago
  > But "at work" you generally have these decisions made for you. The idea that most employers make terrible decisions now, and amazing decisions back in the day, is plainly false. The author vividly recollects working at a decent Java shop. Even there I strongly doubt everything was amazing as they describe, but it sounds decent indeed. But plenty businesses at the time used C++, for no good reason other than inertia, usually in Windows-only Visual C++ 6-specific dialects. Their "build server" ran overnight, you'd check in your code in the late afternoon and get your compile errors back in the morning. The "source control" worked with company-wide file locks, and you'd get phoned your ass back to the office if you forgot to check in a file before leaving. Meanwhile, half the web was written in epic spaghetti plates of Perl. PHP was a joy to deploy, as it is now, but it was also a pain to debug. If you care deeply about this stuff, find an employer who cares too. They existed back then and they exist now.
  - vdupras 11mo ago
    The "terrible decisions" of yore hold no comparison to today's "terrible decisions". It's not the same ballpark, it's not the same sport.
    - deleted 11mo ago
      [deleted]
  - mexicocitinluez 11mo ago
    Amen. We love the idea that we don't have any agency in this field and we're constantly being pushed by the mean baddies at the top.
  - CyberDildonics 11mo ago
vdupras 11mo ago
The better tools are already there. It's not about making it better. It's about most programmers today choosing mediocrity. Sometimes, you can avoid contact with this mediocrity, but often you don't and you're forced to play in this swamp.
- andyferris 11mo ago
  > choosing Sometimes the programmer doesn't get to choose. I do find the business drive toward mediocrity quite maddening.
  - vdupras 11mo ago
    Yes, sometimes it's that, but what I've observed in the field is self-inflicted by programmers. It's the impostor syndrome. They don't know, but they don't want to show that they don't know. They look around for clues of what to choose. Monkey see, monkey do. And then, like monkeys, they bash their keyboard until it seems to work.
ToucanLoucan 11mo ago
I both agree and disagree with you. On the one hand: yes, this dev has clearly chosen a career/language specialization that puts him knee-deep in the absolute worst tooling imaginable.. I cannot fathom a workflow this fucking miserable and if this was my day to day, I would be far, far more depressed than I already am. AND, the fact that so very very much of our industry does run, perhaps not all of, but a significant amount of a workflow not awfully different from this is IMO, an indictment of our trade. To invoke the immortal sentiment of the hockey coach from Letterkenny, this shit is FUCKING embarrassing. So much major software that ships in a web browser because writing for Windows, Mac and Linux is just too hard you guys, it's simply too much for a sweet little bean like Microsoft ($3.62 trillion) to manage as they burn billions on AI garbage, is FUCKING embarrassing. Half the apps on my phone are written this way which is why they can barely manage 30hz on their animations, die entirely when S3 goes down, and when they are working, make my phone hot. To run an app that lets me control my thermostat from my desk. That's FUCKING embarrassing. And my desktop is only saved by virtue of being magnitudes more powerful than my original one back in the 90's, yet it only seems a scant more capable. In the early 00's I was sitting on Empire Earth and chatting with people over TeamSpeak. My computer can still do this, and with the added benefit of Discord can stream my game so my friends can all watch each other, and that's cool, apart from I lose about 10 fps just by virtue of having Discord open, and when I'm traveling? Oh god forget it, Discord flounders to death on hotel wifi despite it being perfectly cromulent DSL speeds. Not BLAZING, surely, but TeamSpeak handled VOIP over an actual DSL connection, with DSL latency, in the 00's. That's FUCKING embarrassing. All our software now updates automatically by default, and it's notable when that's a GOOD thing. Usually what it actually means is the layout of known features changes for seemingly arbitrary reasons. Other times more dark patterns are injected. And Discord, not to pick on them, but they're the absolute fucking worst for this. I swear they push an "update" every time one of their devs sneezes, I usually have to install 18 such updates on each launch, and I run it very regularly! And for all that churn, I couldn't tell you one goddamn thing they actually added recently. FUCKING embarrassing. And people will say "oh they could be better," "we know we can do it better," "these aren't the best companies or apps" okay but they are BIG ones. If the mean average car in America got awful fuel economy, needed constant service, was ill-designed for it's purpose and cost insane amounts of money... Oh, that happened too. I think I just made my metaphor more embarrassing for another industry.
ben_w 11mo ago
> The world is your playground. Nobody makes you use YAML and Docker and VS Code or whatever your beef is Nobody, except your future employment prospects. There's good reasons and bad reasons for a lot of technical options; "can I hire people to do it?" is a very good reason, but it does directly lead to CV-driven-development, where we all chase whatever tech stack the people writing the job adverts have decided is good. The same people who capitalise "MAC" in "MAC & PC", the same people who conflate Java with JavaScript, the same people who want 10 years experience in things only released 3 years ago.
- stuartjohnson12 11mo ago
  Right, and there's the rub, and what's behind all these changes - coordination. We containerized to coordinate our ability to use lots of different runtime environments. We typescript'd and python'd the web stack so that our frontend and our data friends could feel at home in the backend. We created ever-more-elaborate package repositories to make layering increasingly complex software projects simpler. I think what people who write essays like this wish for is the smaller scale of things. Industrial steel production is objectively better than old-timey blacksmithing, but hammering out sets of cutlery certainly feels a lot more personal. Steelmaking wasn't better before all these fancy mechanisms and danger and pollutants and logistics, but when it was craft, it was more satisfying to work on.
  - djmips 11mo ago
    That was very well said - that's how I really feel.
  - RealityVoid 11mo ago
    It sounds fun hammering out a set of cutlery but after the... Like... First two... You go screw this, give me a metal stamping press.
fullstackchris 11mo ago
Agreed. If folks want to write java in elipse they are more than welcome to do so... dont understand these yelling at clouds posts really
- zeroc8 11mo ago
  Only if they found their own companies. Usually those decisions were already made for you.
hnthrow0287345 11mo ago
>Nobody makes you use YAML and Docker and VS Code or whatever your beef is. Not VS Code, but maybe YAML and Docker if your company is trying to align what tools it uses. C# places might still force you to use Visual Studio proper. Everyone says use the right tool for the job, but for bog standard CRUD web development, we do have a shitload of tools that work and there's multiple ways to get to a fast, working product. I still chuckle that my laptop is 3 times as fast as the cloud thing that serves our CRUD app and we pay many more times for it, but also knowing full well I do not ever want to be RDP'ing into a production box again and pouring through IIS or Windows logs. What I definitely do see is a degradation in making choices about when to adopt a more complicated technology because of the incentives of the hiring market. People have loudly beaten the drum to keep your skills up to date and so people choose stuff that's popular because it benefits them personally, even when the product doesn't need it. This in turn leads companies to only select people who know that stack, and the more that companies do that, the more people make technical choices to get them the best job that they can handle. We absolutely, very much 100% see that happening now with LLM AI if you ever needed a bigger piece of proof. Pretty much everything that is happening now has just been a louder example of every bad practice since the run up to the dotcom bust. Because of that, I'd frankly never suggest running on-prem or building a local-only app unless there was a much bigger reason (legal, security, whatever) especially if the other products in the company have chosen the cloud. Why? Because convincing the next job that that would have been the right choice is too hard. Edit: and to someone else's point, I made the choice to be in the Microsoft/Azure/Windows hell hole but digging myself out and moving to something else is practically working a second full-time job and holding 2 ecosystems in my head at once
rglover 11mo ago
They don't want a cure, they want something they can bitch about.
- soganess 11mo ago
  Speak for yourself. The pathologies/neuroses on display here... 'cure'... 'bitch'... seriously, are we still talking about software?
  - rglover 11mo ago
    Is that so, doctor?
    - deleted 11mo ago
      [deleted]
    - soganess 11mo ago
      Yes, good of you to ask. But don’t you worry your little head, now! You aren’t the first patient that developed a thin skin from their own medicine, and you won’t be the last.
- xtracto 11mo ago
  I think it is a great exercise of self awareness to take a step back and see how things are done now. I started my first prpgramming job in 2003. Some things where better, others were worse. But the only way we can improve the "craft" of software development is by having introspection. It's kindnofnwhat happen during the "software crisis" of the 80s, and why "waterfal" was rrplaced by "iterative" software development. Now, with such an impactful change like AI aided coding, it is a great opportunity to see if we can evolve anything in the building process.
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
drob518 11mo ago
Yea, my immediate reaction was, “Okay. Stop doing all the stupid stuff.” If you want to program like it’s 1999, go for it. I generally don’t use AI, for instance. I just haven’t found it to be a net-positive yet.
ramon156 11mo ago
> If you think things suck now, just make it better This completely ignores the fact we're doing this for our boss, not for ourselves
mrweasel 11mo ago
Just yesterday a friend and I was talking about writing a clone of a popular website, using the technologies of yesteryear. There's absolutely no reason why we wouldn't be able to make a credible competitor using mod_perl and db2. From a technological view, we're a point where your development stack doesn't matter all that much.
zahlman 11mo ago
> Yeah, let's remember everything that was great about 25 years ago and forget everything that sucked. Juxtapose it with everything that sucks about today but omit everything that's great. Come on man. That's fair. When I see bad code today, and try to explain to myself what's bad about it, I realize that people totally did the same things 25 years ago. Nowadays there is just so much more code, and we stand on taller piles of "architecture" trying to scale higher heaps of expectations. The thing is, the effect of the bad stuff seems to compound more readily than the effect of the good stuff. And meeting the demand for more code involves broadening the base of people doing the coding. > If you think things suck now, just make it better! The world is your playground. I agree with this. A lot of the modern expectation is artificial, emphasizing form over function. Even where it isn't, a lot of the modern technique is unnecessary cargo-culting. You can do a lot locally if you believe in your machine (https://thundergolfer.com/computers-are-fast https://thundergolfer.com/computers-are-fast ; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucWdfZoxsYo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucWdfZoxsYo). For PAPER I'm targeting Python 3.6+ (where they added `pathlib.Path` and f-strings, and upgraded the SSL version) with the intent to support it indefinitely (which involves forking certain dependencies).
wduquette 11mo ago
And in fact, professionally, I still live in the good old days. I code in Java 21, I minimize dependencies, and I use an IDE that can do the heavy lifting when I want to refactor something…which is often. I produce a .jar that gets installed with a loader script rather than in the cloud. And it all works, and it’s *stable*.

canto 11mo ago

MY GOD THIS IS GOLD. Nothing but the truth here.

spiderfarmer 11mo ago

Programming was so much better 15 years ago, except for all the parts that sucked.

analogears 11mo ago

There's something to this. I recently shipped a music curation site and deliberately avoided React/Next/etc - just HTML, CSS, vanilla JS. The cognitive load difference is stark. The 'peak' might be less about capability and more about us rediscovering that simpler tools often suffice.

ToucanLoucan 11mo ago
Same. I build stuff for local businesses in my area with nothing but boring old HTML, PHP, CSS and JS. I guess my shit isn't "web scale" but it works, and it works consistently, with minimal downtime, and it worked during both Amazon and Cloudflare's latest outages. I don't need my software to eat the world, I'm perfectly content with it just solving someone's problems.
mcntsh 11mo ago
It's all about picking the right tools for the job. The "cognitive load" might be larger in a vanilla project compared to React when your interface is more complex and interactive.

gary_0 11mo ago

> Funnily enough, everything ran at about the same speed as it does now. Actually, where I was sitting on a decent PC with broadband Internet at the time, everything was much, much faster. I remember seeing a video on here where someone actually booted up a computer from the 2000's and showed how snappy everything was, including Visual Studio, but when I search YouTube for it, it ignores most of my keywords and returns a bunch of "how to speed up your computer" spam. And I can't find it in my bookmarks. Oh well.

titzer 11mo ago
YouTube has become enshittified at a record clip. Search is useless and shorts have turned it into just another TikTok brain dopamine machine.
- zahlman 11mo ago
  > just another TikTok brain dopamine machine. You can fight this machine. You can view shorts on desktop. In a browser on desktop, when you see one on your subscriptions tab (or the front page if you still use that), you can right-click and open in new tab. You can replace "shorts/" with "watch?v=" in the URL and load the same video in the regular UI. You don't have to scroll down.
codelikeawolf 11mo ago
> I remember seeing a video on here where someone actually booted up a computer from the 2000's and showed how snappy everything was... Was this what you were referring to?: https://jmmv.dev/2023/06/fast-machines-slow-machines.html https://jmmv.dev/2023/06/fast-machines-slow-machines.html
- kwertyoowiyop 11mo ago
  Notice also how you can clearly see which window is selected, and which item within that window is selected. Microsoft has just lost the plot.
- D13Fd 11mo ago

mattlondon 11mo ago

This feels very much like the tired "the modern internet sucks - the old web with old websites was better!" trope that appears on here regularly. You can still code the old way just like you can still put up your old website. No one is forcing you to use AI or VS Code or even JavaScript. Of course you.might not getting those choices at work, but that is entirely different since your paid to do a job that benefits your employer, not paid to do something you enjoy. Have fun.

maxsilver 11mo ago

I get it. I agree with most of this article. But also like, nothing went away. If you pine for the days of Java and Maven, you can still do that. It’s all still there (Eclipse and NetBeans, too!) If you don’t like using Node and NPM, that’s totally valid, don’t use them. You can spin up a new mobile app, desktop app, and even a SaaS-style web app without touching NPM. (Even on fancy modern latest-version web frameworks like Hanami or Phoenix) If you don’t want everyone to use JS and NPM and React without thinking, be the pushback on a project at work, to not start there.

mcntsh 11mo ago

If the author doesn't want to work with NPM and the JavaScript ecosystem he could just get a job writing Spring/Boot, which makes up probably 90% of the jobs at large enterprise companies. I don't agree that this world has disappeared...

noident 11mo ago

The author is writing like Java was outlawed or something. There are tons of shitty enterprise Java jobs out there for those who want them. Personally, I worked one of those jobs a decade ago, and the article's description of the "golden age" didn't bring back good memories. It's easy enough to avoid the NPM circus as well. Just don't put JavaScript on your resume and don't get anywhere near frontend development.

BenGosub 11mo ago

Javascript wins by keeping the costs down. Companies today want to do more with less, which is how it should be and you are still free to choose from a myriad of technologies. When you pair this setup with LLMs, it's actually the best it has ever been IMO.

orwin 11mo ago

Java is usable now, but in 2013 it was the worst debugging experience one could have. I would rather work with PHP5 than with Java (unless I started a project from scratch). Also auto-refactoring was clearly worse, because well, Java. It was around that time that I tried Scala then Clojure, and even if debugging the JVM was still an experience (to avoid as much as possible), at least limited side effects reduced the issues. If programming peaked, it certainly wasn't in 2010.

throwaway_2494 11mo ago
> it was the worst debugging experience one could have. Hard disagree. I'm not going to argue that Java debugging was the best, however: 1. You could remote debug your code as it ran on the server. 2. You could debug code which wouldn't even compile, as long as your execution path stayed within the clean code. 3. You could then fix a section of the broken code and continue, and the debugger would backtrack and execute the code you just patched in during your debugging session.† This is what I remember as someone who spent decades (since Java 1.0) working as a contract consultant, mainly on server side Java. Of course this will not convince anyone who is determined to remain skeptical, but I think those are compelling capabilities. † Now I code in Rust a lot, and I really enjoy it, but the long compile times and the inability to run broken code are two things which I really miss from those Java days. And often the modern 2025 debugger for it is unable to inspect some for the variables for some reason, a bug which I never encountered with Java.
- nextaccountic 11mo ago
  > 2. You could debug code which wouldn't even compile, as long as your execution path stayed within the clean code. In Java? How?
- nextaccountic 11mo ago
  About your †, I think that new Rust tooling like dx will eventually enable hot patching code during debugging https://lib.rs/crates/subsecond https://lib.rs/crates/subsecond (Note, it was created by Dioxus, but it's usable in any Rust project)

Glemkloksdjf 11mo ago

Honestly, the person should spend their time of fixing their shit instead of writing blog posts. I find intellij a great IDE, modern frameworks are fun to use, ai helps me doing things i don't want to do or things i just need (like generate a good README.md for the other people). Containers are great and mine build fast. My Startup has a ha setup with self healing tx to k8s and everything is in code so i don't need to worry to backup some random config files. Hardware has never been that cheap. NVMs, RAM and Compute. A modern laptop today has a brilliant display, quite, can run everything, long batterytime. Traffic? No brainer. Websphere was a monster with shitty features. I remember when finally all the JEE Servers had a startup time of just a few seconds instead of minutes. RAM got finally cheap enough that you were able to run eclipse, webserver etc. locally. Java was verbose, a lot more verbose than today. JQuery was everywere.

webdevver 11mo ago
truthnuke
howdyhowdy123 11mo ago
Ew

Kuyawa 11mo ago

I am still a happy programmer after all these years using only node, express, postgres and sublime. I try not to listen to the sirens singing on the rocky shores...

efields 11mo ago
Postgres and Sublime user here. Life is pretty good!

coolThingsFirst 11mo ago

In other words you have competitive advantage because your cloud costs will be 10x less. This is exactly what 10 years of experience did for you. Why complain?

wiz21c 11mo ago

I've been coding since 40 years old and professioannly since about 30. And let's set this straight: it is much (much, like really much) better nowadays. We have super powerful editors, powerful languages, a gazillion of libraries ready for download. I use to write video games and it took months (yeah, months of hobby-time) to put a sprite on a screen. And for Java, yeah, things have improved so much too: the language of today is better, the tooling is better, the whole security is more complex but better, the JVM keeps rocking... And now we've got Claude. I'm really happy to be now.

NooneAtAll3 11mo ago
were you trying to say you've been coding *for* 40 years? that "old" in "40 years old" confuses me a lot or are you 60 years of age now, starting at 40 and have been coding long enough to see editors progress?
- sgc 11mo ago
  I'm pretty sure they are not a native English speaker. Many languages use 'since 40 years' to mean what we say as 'for 40 years'.
  - apprentice7 11mo ago
    Or maybe "since <<I was>> 40 years old"?
    - dkdcio 11mo ago
      I think it’s an unfortunate typo…”old” => “ago”?
      - wiz21c 11mo ago
        yeah, typed too fast. I was talking about 40 years ago. Apple 2+ to be specific.
- wiz21c 11mo ago

mexicocitinluez 11mo ago

> The most popular is “VS Code”, which needs only a few gigabytes of RAM to render the text. > We used Eclipse, which was a bit like VS Code. This made me laugh. You can't possibly be a serious person if you think Eclipse was better in any way shape or form than VS Code. I don't have a great memory, but one thing I can absolutely still remember with 100% clarity is how bloated and memory hungry Eclipse was. It was almost unusable.

tumdum_ 11mo ago

I think I’m lucky, because for me it’s the other way. In 2009 I started my first real programming job writing c++ in vim. For the last 5 years I’ve been writing rust in helix and things have never been better.

nathias 11mo ago

how tedious must a life be if you go through it with this kind of thinking

pie_flavor 11mo ago

Maven was a great idea. Introduce a high barrier to entry for publishing packages. Paired with a search box operated by carrier pidgeon, this effectively meant what you were looking for didn't exist. Every time you had any kind of quirky need, you had to write it out by hand, or find someone smarter than you to do it for you, or worst of all buy it from a vendor for lots of money at horrible quality. People recite 'DSA is bad for coding challenges, when will I need to write a hash map', but once upon a time you did have to write a hash map here and there. Supply chain vulnerability is a cost, but the product was worth the cost: you can just import the darn package! I need a map of key ranges to values with intelligent range merging, it is right there on crates.io to import, it has been there since 2016, Maven Central didn't get one until 2018. In the olden days either it was in Apache Commons or it didn't exist. Halcyon days those.

d--b 11mo ago

Defining peak programming as entreprise Java using Eclipse on SVN is border delusionnal imo. > And here’s the funny thing: it never broke, because the person who built it did it well, because it wasn’t taxed within an inch of its life, and because we were keeping an eye on it. Sure, if you say so buddy...

lunias 11mo ago

> We run our k8s cluster in the “Cloud”. It’s a bunch of services that run on Linux, but we don’t run Linux ourselves, we run it on VMs that we rent by the hour for approximately the same cost as buying a computer outright every month. We do this because no one knows how to plug a computer in any more. My mind struggles with this reality everyday... the "cloud" has to be the most successful rebrand of all time. In 2005: "Be very careful what data you share on the internet". In 2025: "Yeah, I just put all my shit in the cloud".

draw_down 11mo ago
[dead]

t43562 11mo ago

It's horrifying to see someone who started working 10 years after me talking about "when I was young" :-D Programming was more exciting when you had amazing things to imagine having - like a 256 colour screen or BASIC that ran as fast as machine code (ACORN ARCHIMEDES) or the incredible thought of having a computer powerful enough to play a video and even having enough storage to hold a whole video! 2400bps! Checking email once a day Everything came true. My screen has 16million colours and I don't notice. I have 12 cores and 64GB of memory and fibre optic internet. The extremely exciting future arrived. That mind-expanding byte article I read about Object Oriented programming came true enough for us to see that it wasn't the answer to everything. There are 2 problems now - nothing one does is unique. You can't make a difference because someone else already has done whatever you can think of doing ....and of course AI which is fun to use but threatens to make us even more useless. I just cannot really get my sense of excitement back - which may just be because I'm old and burned out.

wccrawford 11mo ago
I'm disappointed that you said "2400bps" instead of "2400 baud". :/ It's always surprising to me when I see people being nostalgic for the old days. Yes, things seemed simpler, but it was because there was less you could do. I'll always fondly remember my attempt to get on GeoLink with a 300 baud modem, and then my parents realizing that the long distance calls made it far, far too expensive to use, and returning it. Sure, I was disappointed at the time, but it wasn't too much later that 56k modems existed and we had a local unlimited internet provider. And now it's a fun story. But I was actually just as frustrated at the time as I am now, but for different reasons. Change exists, and that's good. I agree that it feels harder to make your mark today. But I don't think it's actually harder. There's plenty of fun things that people would love to see people do. Just yesterday, I found out about the Strudel musical programming language and watched an amazing video of someone making Trance with it. And those kind of discoveries happen constantly now, where they were pretty seldom back 30 years ago. We're at the point that anyone can make a game, app, webpage, etc if they put enough effort into it. The tools are so easy and the tutorials are so plentiful and free that it's really just about effort, instead of being blocked from it. I've been saying "we live in the future" about once a month for years now. It's amazing what we have today.

pzo 11mo ago

> Where did it all go wrong? Just landscape changed significantly comparing to 2010. Before you didn't have current smartphones and tablets. On desktop you could just support windows only (today probably have to macOS as well). On browser you didn't have to support Safari. You didn't have to worry much about screen DPI, aspect ratio, landscape vs portrait, small screen sizes. Your layout didn't have to be adaptive. There was not much demand for SPA. Back then there was much less people worldwide with access to internet.

ojr 11mo ago

My first text editor for PHP was Komodo Edit, it was super slow and everyone jump shipped to Sublime Text, then VSCode was slower than Sublime but had incredible industry supported extensions like Git and Prettier, programming didn't peak during my PHP days, in fact the PHP frameworks sites I used are still around and incredibly slow. I am building an AI coding tool that doesn't eat RAM, there are super lightweight alternatives to Electron.

torben-friis 11mo ago

You know what made javascript so common, accessible, and thus later universal? Putting things on a screen was (is) stupidly simple. That's the whole thing. It's not the types or npm or whatever. It's that you could start with C/Python/Java and spend your first 6 months as a coder printing and asking values on a dark terminal (which is something a newbie might not even have interacted with before) or you could go the html/css/javascript route and have animations moving in your screen you can show to your friends on day one. Everything flows from that human experience. UIs are Electron because creating UIs for a browser is an extremely more universal, easy and creative-friendly experience than creating UIs for native apps, particuarly if JS is your native language for the previously stated reason. The industry failed to adapt to the fact that the terminal wasn't any longer the reality of computer users, and the web kinda filled that niche by default. Also, React was an answer to the advent of mobile phones, tablets, smart tvs, and basically all the explosion of not-a-desktop computer form factors. You could no longer assume your html was a proper format for everything. So you need an common API to be consumed by a mobile app, a tv app, a tablet app... react was the way to make the web another of the N apps that use the api, and not get special treatment. The idea made sense in context, back then.

NooneAtAll3 11mo ago
> The industry failed to adapt to the fact that the terminal wasn't any longer the reality of computer users I'm still waiting for some GUI-based terminal to appear I want to call git in Scratch!
- zozbot234 11mo ago
  Jupyter notebook UI is essentially a proper GUI-based REPL/terminal.
pmontra 11mo ago
> Putting things on a screen was (is) stupidly simple. This is why HTML is still a great language for building UIs and that's why Visual Basic had a huge success in the early 90s: drag UI components on a panel, write the callbacks for clicks, save and distribute the exe. Almost anybody could do it. React and its siblings are much more complicated than that.

rdos 11mo ago

this is going straight into my funny folder

Havoc 11mo ago

In this respect I’m liking vibe coding. I can tell it use html css and js only and make me a frontend. That obviously has severe limitations but ideal if you don’t like the front end framework scene and want to put all your logic in backend. And there I find it a bit easier to navigate RIP guys in corporate that have things imposed on them

rvz 11mo ago

> I love writing JavaScript, and I’m glad I can run it on the server. But this doesn’t mean I think it’s a good idea to use it for everything. "Javascript" programming peaked.

chubot 11mo ago

Somehow this reminded me of a similar rant about devops: It’s the Future - https://blog.paulbiggar.com/its-the-future/ https://blog.paulbiggar.com/its-the-future/ And now I see that's from June 2015 -- it's over 10 years old now! Wow I'm not sure we're really in a better place in the cloud now ... The article says I’m going back to Heroku and in 2025, I think people still want that

syngrog66 11mo ago

strawman dystopia. simply choose to continue applying wise practices of old. be the effect you wish to see in the world. just because others are jumping off a cliff like lemmings does not mean you must as well

__mharrison__ 11mo ago

When I started programming we wrote code on a C64 in a freezing cold basement, with no disk drive. And we liked it...

georgeecollins 11mo ago

Programming used to be about finding the best way to communicate with the device. Now the device is trying to figure out the best way to communicate with you.

sumuyuda 11mo ago
Now it’s about how the device can be programmed to spy and manipulate you so the company can extract more value for the shareholders.
- supportengineer 11mo ago
  A promo for you, short-term gains for the shareholders, and enshittification for the customer.
- georgeecollins 11mo ago
  I meant, it used to be more low level, less abstracted. A long time ago.

mrbombastic 11mo ago

“ Once our work is done, we create a “pull request”. This is a way of emulating open-source development inside a single company, which as we know, is the only way to work. Typically, this means that the code is downloaded and built on another computer, and then several hours later, a colleague will come along and ask to change a few words. Once we change these words, the computer builds everything again, and then the next day, the same colleague will allow the code to be merged into the mainline.” Fix this and your life will be much better, generate testable preview apps on every pr, this feedback loop is a velocity killer. Management for some reason never wants to prioritize speeding it up even though it slows down every single project so advise to just do it and not ask permission.

dreamcompiler 11mo ago

> We also saw the rise of React, which is possibly the greatest tragedy to ever befall front-end programming (and I say this as a recovering React fan). Amen. Github (just to cite one example) has become much less usable since they switched to React. And it's clearly not a site that needs React, since it worked fine for 17 years without it.

furyofantares 11mo ago

I don't do any of that shit in the first section.

andyjohnson0 11mo ago

> I started my first real, full-time job in 2010. We wrote Java... I started my first real, full-time job in 1992. Back here we write C, or maybe C++ if we're feeling cutting-edge. The Sparc 10 can get a bit slow when we're all on it, but I have a shelf full of O'Reilly X Windows books to look through if I can't figure something out. My mate in London sent me a QIC tape with something called "gcc" on it: sounds exciting, but before I can install it I have to find a spare day to update SunOS first. This 2010 programming setup seems pretty amazing tbh... can't wait to get me some of that. Nice languages and tooling, no more having to edit makefiles by hand in emacs or laboriously debug in gdb. Bet they don't even use sourcesafe anymore. I reckon by 2025 they'll have god-like stuff: fast, reliable hardware with more memory and storage than you can eat; powerful development and collaboration tools; lots of ways to find answers without having to ask that guy over in the other building. And a lot of it will be basically free! I wonder how they'll feel about all that awesome dev power, and whether they'll still use X terminals.

danesparza 11mo ago
I came here to say something like this. Programming has evolved several times since the early 90s (when I got in this business) and I had the impression it had already evolved several times by the 90s (especially talking with old mainframe or COBOL programmers). It's evolving again now, and that process is painful. Nobody knows what the future holds.

gaigalas 11mo ago

JavaScript is an interpreted language: write, run. No build steps required. Building was introduced as a temporary measure, to handle cross-browser awkwardness (grunt and stuff like that). People overused it. We totally don't need it anymore. TypeScript is awesome but a major blocker to this return to a more nimbler ecosystem. People in the 2000s discovered that mixing code with HTML tags was bad and big complexity demon mansion. By the end of the 2000s, this was fixed in the tools of that time. I consider JSX a best-practices regression. It feels like ASP.NET, but the kids don't notice because they have never seen ASP.NET. For a while, we also saw npm as temporary. A better thing, more web-friendly, would appear. That never happened. JavaScript could have been great.

dpc_01234 11mo ago

Programming with Rust and deployment and mgmt with Nix is so much better to how things used to be. Did I mention how much better my Helix works than how Neovim used to? Revision control with JJ, conflict resolution with mergiraf. My personal computers are more powerful than ever before and can get amazing stuff done super fast. Everything is better and keeps getting better if you make good decision instead of following the lowest common denominator tech.

JR1427 11mo ago

> Funnily enough, everything ran at about the same speed as it does now. I've often thought about how certain properties of humans impacts the tech we make and accept. For instance, to a human, something happening in a couple of seconds is quick, and in several seconds is fairly quick. Hence, build steps etc tend to creep up to those sorts of numbers.

kwar13 11mo ago

So js was great when jquery was the dominant library...?

robviren 11mo ago

I just liked programming when it contained a comprehensible amount of abstraction. Stacks have become so tall it is not even feasible for a single human to comprehend what is occurring. I also liked when standards had less surface area. Working in healthcare it has become obvious standards only ever get added, never removed. Complexity is absurd now. I'm not championing that we all become experts in bare metal assembly, but I feel for OP and a desire to at least fundamentally understand what is happening on some level.

monegator 11mo ago

Me, a young, but old fart at heart, writing firmware in C and applications in C++ (just for Qt!) that see everything wrong with the programming world today VS the junior that keep asking why we don't do the thing in javascript so we can have it on mobile as well (we do, we just use a different framework 'cause react won't ever cut it for our needs. It just takes a bit of what is called "effort" to make things look the same on all platforms) and wants emails lists to plan going out for a drink instead of, you know, asking. We're all in the same small office. Same stuff about deploying, we need github (no we don't. private git server), we need aws, woah what is this npm attack you're talking about? At times it seems he's learning, but then he leans back into GPT and it feels like a lost cause. Yo bro it's crazy, i just deleted 2k lines of code, as if it was normal, with me raising eyebrows asking how many modules were outright deleted and never needed to be there in the first place. Problem is, GPT and company will happily throw a lot of puke at the project and trust me bro that's essential we plan every single possible feature first and foremost instead of just testing the basics and build on top of them, because we have literally two requirements, so it's taking two months to do something i could do in two weeks, not because i'm more experienced, but because we should be doing what i'm telling to do, and not discuss whatever bullcrap the artificial manager is suggesting, which i would love to have the power to outright ban from our network. Me and the junior have more or less the same age, just very different life journeys that led to programming

supportengineer 11mo ago

Some of us are still out here, writing maven projects in Java with Eclipse. It works great.

pineappletooth 11mo ago

Well i am a Java developer in 2025 and we still use maven, we also got IntelliJ which is miles better than eclipse and the company where I am does hire testers. The world is not worse, you just ended up stuck in the wrong tech stack with the wrong company. I do agree that the JS ecosystem is terrible tho, and i was a full time js dev before (now i only do some frontend from time to time) we already have a dedicated frontend team.

projektfu 11mo ago

I'm enjoying some things about the programming world now, especially compared to my professional start circa 1997. I started on C++ on Windows, using MFC, and also using Visual Basic 5.0 when it came out. VB made my eyes bleed, but a lot of people are nostalgic about it. Visual C++ did not have many fans, but it had a lot of users. I got the first taste of the Microsoft treadmill during those days, where they would get you to use a new thing, and then in a few months they hardly used it anymore, and they were promoting the next new thing. As soon as you got comfortable with MFC, they were pushing ATL, and then .NET, etc. Really, the people who were happy with what they had and never upgraded were better off. I narrowly missed the big-manual days of programming, where it was unlikely you had online resources to help you through it. The Turbo Pascal folks and the early Mac folks remember that well. Instead, we had the big online help file (CHM) and search engines like Altavista. Code examples were few and far between. We often spent a lot of time just figuring out how to make the right incantations to get things to do what we wanted. There was a happy path, like with MFC if you make the same exact application over and over again. And then there is the difficult path, where you want it to be a little innovative. I came across Squeak Smalltalk and used that a lot for my own personal exploration, so I always felt like there was something missing from the world that actually came to be. Still, working alone on Squeak is only as fun as long as you don't get bored and don't need something that Squeak was too slow to handle. Like the author, I was into pair programming (eXtreme programming, actually). I never understood its detractors. Working was pretty fun. I never liked the MS ecosystem so I enthusiastically accepted Java. IBM offered a lot of support for Linux and there were good applications waiting to be written. It had its growing pains but quickly settled in to being very productive. In this period, Intellisense and similar technologies were becoming commonplace and the Refactoring Browser had been developed (for Smalltalk but then basically for Java). IntelliJ IDEA was released and was, honestly, revolutionary. The previous IDEs were just not serious until they caught up with the developer support in IDEA. I figured out that being a professional programmer is not for me, because I don't enjoy working on projects, and I went back to school, eventually becoming a veterinarian. So my professional career kind of ends there. I enjoy programming, but as a casual programmer it is hard to work on something and come back to it every few months. Things do seem to rot. What compiled before doesn't now. Library use changes radically. If you started a React project before hooks, you know what I mean. Sure, you can still do it without hooks, but nobody does so you're on your own. What AI does is it makes exploration and problem solving, as well as understanding what I did a few months ago so much easier. I don't have anyone to pair-program with. But the AI makes it easier to be the programmer who's not in the driver seat. I like that, and I think it could lead to good things in the field. The big risk is that LLMs are not very good at future things. If things are out of their training window, they make lots of annoying mistakes. For example, Debian Bookworm and Debian Trixie are somewhat different, and Claude doesn't know what it's doing yet with Trixie. Claude thinks the most recent version of Python is 3.11 or something. With LLMs you have to be comfortable working on yesterday's code. But for most of us, that's OK.

lazy_afternoons 11mo ago

Wait until he discovers vercel and nextjs.

adamwong246 11mo ago
these tools are so useless these days. All you need is Claude and esbuild, and you can make practically anything.

adamwong246 11mo ago

the idea of moving from TS back to Java fills me with dread

comex 11mo ago

Things don't always get worse. Sometimes they get better. TypeScript recently invited people to try their new compiler which is 7-10x faster. [1] VS Code is popular, but personally I write TypeScript in Vim, which is definitely faster and less resource-intensive than Eclipse. But thanks to VS Code's invention of the Language Server Protocol and its subsequent adoption in many editors, I can get 'compile the code as you type' functionality. [2] And then there's runtime speed. Java used to have legendarily slow startup times, and they're still an issue today. JavaScript's modern runtimes are optimized to start fast. On the other hand, Java still holds the crown for throughput, so it's a mixed bag. But if you want even better throughput without sacrificing too much usability, today we have Rust, as well as a vastly improved C++. (Though both of those languages have terrible compile times.) [1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/typescript/progress-on-typescript-7-december-2025/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/typescript/progress-on-typesc... [2] To be fair, a memory usage comparison should compare Eclipse not to Vim itself, but to the whole [Vim + coc.nvim + TypeScript compiler] stack, of which most of the memory usage comes from the TypeScript compiler. I'm not sure how that compares to Eclipse. But I'm more concerned about typing latency, where I _do_ only care about Vim itself because all the LSP stuff is asynchronous.

marcelr 11mo ago

old man yells at cloud

oliverpk 11mo ago

It's incredible how different the programming in 2025 can be if you work in a different kind of company.