7 ms·

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 ev

by 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
        Gormo 11mo ago
        I'm not sure that's directly analogous, though. We're talking about people looking at specific cultural trends and making reasoned arguments about specific causes and effects, not just saying "X will happen". Specific models and assumptions about how human societies work are often validated by historical example, and don't just predict end states, but sequences of events that extend over longer terms. When people say they see history repeating itself, it's worth hearing them out.
        dkdcio 11mo ago
        I’m saying if every generation has old men screaming “society is collapsing”, they aren’t right, even when they’re locally “right” (broken clock right twice a day) I’m all for hearing well-reasoned arguments; presenting pithy quotes as fact is absurd; claiming programming peaked 15 years ago is absurd
        Gormo 11mo ago
        > I’m saying if every generation has old men screaming “society is collapsing”, they aren’t right, even when they’re locally “right” But every generation doesn't have old men screaming "society is collapsing" at the same rate. There's always a baseline of people with a "get off my grass" mentality, but if you factor that out, occurrence of people actually pointing out that the world is on a dangerous path isn't uniform from one era to the next. Very few people, if any, were seriously making such an argument 30 years ago. People who are genuinely making reasoned arguments, and not just complaining about things being outside their comfort zone, should absolutely be taken seriously. > claiming programming peaked 15 years ago is absurd Well, what are you measuring? It certainly peaked in some dimensions 15 years ago. Whether you personally see those dimensions as important is of course a subjective question.
  - jodrellblank 11mo ago
    An interesting Reddit r/AskHistorians thread on the question """Does the aphorism "Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. Weak men create hard times", accurately reflect the evolution of civilizations through history and across different cultures?""" copying only the conclusion for a tl;dr: "The only way that the aphorism explains history is by reinforcing confirmation bias - by seeming to confirm what we already believe about the state of the world and the causes behind it. Only those worried about a perceived crisis in masculinity are likely to care about the notion of "weak men" and what trouble they might cause. Only those who wish to see themselves or specific others as "strong men" are likely to believe that the mere existence of such men will bring about a better world. This has nothing to do with history and everything with stereotypes, prejudice and bias. It started as a baseless morality tale, and that is what it still is." https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/hd78tv/does_the_aphorism_hard_times_create_strong_men/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/hd78tv/does_...
    - frumplestlatz 11mo ago
      Ironic given how strongly Reddit, r/AskHistorians, and the humanities in general bring their own biased lens to bear. Just like everyone else.
      - deleted 11mo ago
        [deleted]
      - tarsinge 11mo ago
        I’m not sure what you mean. I don’t see a bias here, the point is plainly stated: the notion of weak men is dubious. You might not agree, but then engage with something substantial.
        frumplestlatz 11mo ago
        If you don’t see a bias in political communication (and that is what all of this is), then chances are very high you share the bias. Abundance allows comfort, comfort enables complacency, and complacency can weaken the social fabric by encouraging short-term gratification over long-term maintenance. People worry about masculinity because masculinity requires structured, pro-social outlets to not be toxic. A aimless or misdirected male population is an incredibly corrosive and/or dangerous thing. It can rot out a society from within, or make a society susceptible to subversion from without. Societies use rhetoric about strength because if a society does not maintain systems that cultivate competence, responsibility, purpose, and pro-social ambition (especially in its most impulsive members), it becomes brittle.
  - glenstein 11mo ago
    Agreed! If anything, I think I'm tired of the "everyone says this when they get old!" hot take. Sometimes things really do get visibly worse and the intergenerational complaining about it is due to it really happening. I bring this example up every time, but I'm a baseball fan. And seemingly every generation of fan has said there's more people striking out than there used to be. Is it because there part of getting old as a baseball fan? No! It's really happening. Strikeouts have quite literally been going up from one decade to the next for basically a century. So sometimes it's because the thing is really happening. Environmental ecosystem collapse? Real. People having shorter attention spans every next generation? Real! Politics getting worse? Well, maybe the 1860s were worse, but the downward trajectory over the last 50 years seems pretty real. Inefficiency of increasingly automagic programming paradigms? Real! Sometimes things are true even if old people are saying them.
  - scotty79 11mo ago
    > Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times. Actually it's the opposite. Strong men create hard times by trying to show to each other how strong they are. Hard times create weak men because during hard times strong men kill each other, thus mostly weak men remain. Weak men create good times because instead of trying to show their strength they just build stuff so that the world is easier for them. In good times people breed and the population returns to the mean with just enough strong men to start the cycle again. WWII was the last time strong men created hard times. We are overdue for another round and it shows.
- 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*.

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
      - Gormo 11mo ago
        I'm not sure that's directly analogous, though. We're talking about people looking at specific cultural trends and making reasoned arguments about specific causes and effects, not just saying "X will happen". Specific models and assumptions about how human societies work are often validated by historical example, and don't just predict end states, but sequences of events that extend over longer terms. When people say they see history repeating itself, it's worth hearing them out.
        dkdcio 11mo ago
        I’m saying if every generation has old men screaming “society is collapsing”, they aren’t right, even when they’re locally “right” (broken clock right twice a day) I’m all for hearing well-reasoned arguments; presenting pithy quotes as fact is absurd; claiming programming peaked 15 years ago is absurd
        Gormo 11mo ago
        > I’m saying if every generation has old men screaming “society is collapsing”, they aren’t right, even when they’re locally “right” But every generation doesn't have old men screaming "society is collapsing" at the same rate. There's always a baseline of people with a "get off my grass" mentality, but if you factor that out, occurrence of people actually pointing out that the world is on a dangerous path isn't uniform from one era to the next. Very few people, if any, were seriously making such an argument 30 years ago. People who are genuinely making reasoned arguments, and not just complaining about things being outside their comfort zone, should absolutely be taken seriously. > claiming programming peaked 15 years ago is absurd Well, what are you measuring? It certainly peaked in some dimensions 15 years ago. Whether you personally see those dimensions as important is of course a subjective question.
- jodrellblank 11mo ago
  An interesting Reddit r/AskHistorians thread on the question """Does the aphorism "Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. Weak men create hard times", accurately reflect the evolution of civilizations through history and across different cultures?""" copying only the conclusion for a tl;dr: "The only way that the aphorism explains history is by reinforcing confirmation bias - by seeming to confirm what we already believe about the state of the world and the causes behind it. Only those worried about a perceived crisis in masculinity are likely to care about the notion of "weak men" and what trouble they might cause. Only those who wish to see themselves or specific others as "strong men" are likely to believe that the mere existence of such men will bring about a better world. This has nothing to do with history and everything with stereotypes, prejudice and bias. It started as a baseless morality tale, and that is what it still is." https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/hd78tv/does_the_aphorism_hard_times_create_strong_men/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/hd78tv/does_...
  - frumplestlatz 11mo ago
    Ironic given how strongly Reddit, r/AskHistorians, and the humanities in general bring their own biased lens to bear. Just like everyone else.
    - deleted 11mo ago
      [deleted]
    - tarsinge 11mo ago
      I’m not sure what you mean. I don’t see a bias here, the point is plainly stated: the notion of weak men is dubious. You might not agree, but then engage with something substantial.
      - frumplestlatz 11mo ago
        If you don’t see a bias in political communication (and that is what all of this is), then chances are very high you share the bias. Abundance allows comfort, comfort enables complacency, and complacency can weaken the social fabric by encouraging short-term gratification over long-term maintenance. People worry about masculinity because masculinity requires structured, pro-social outlets to not be toxic. A aimless or misdirected male population is an incredibly corrosive and/or dangerous thing. It can rot out a society from within, or make a society susceptible to subversion from without. Societies use rhetoric about strength because if a society does not maintain systems that cultivate competence, responsibility, purpose, and pro-social ambition (especially in its most impulsive members), it becomes brittle.
- glenstein 11mo ago
  Agreed! If anything, I think I'm tired of the "everyone says this when they get old!" hot take. Sometimes things really do get visibly worse and the intergenerational complaining about it is due to it really happening. I bring this example up every time, but I'm a baseball fan. And seemingly every generation of fan has said there's more people striking out than there used to be. Is it because there part of getting old as a baseball fan? No! It's really happening. Strikeouts have quite literally been going up from one decade to the next for basically a century. So sometimes it's because the thing is really happening. Environmental ecosystem collapse? Real. People having shorter attention spans every next generation? Real! Politics getting worse? Well, maybe the 1860s were worse, but the downward trajectory over the last 50 years seems pretty real. Inefficiency of increasingly automagic programming paradigms? Real! Sometimes things are true even if old people are saying them.
- scotty79 11mo ago
  > Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times. Actually it's the opposite. Strong men create hard times by trying to show to each other how strong they are. Hard times create weak men because during hard times strong men kill each other, thus mostly weak men remain. Weak men create good times because instead of trying to show their strength they just build stuff so that the world is easier for them. In good times people breed and the population returns to the mean with just enough strong men to start the cycle again. WWII was the last time strong men created hard times. We are overdue for another round and it shows.
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.

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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*.