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Agreed. In the other story about node.js I challenged people to describe the "Node way" of doing things, and was given a laundry list of things that applied to

by davedx 13y ago

Agreed. In the other story about node.js I challenged people to describe the "Node way" of doing things, and was given a laundry list of things that applied to every technology, like "modules". We are currently living through a programming language and tools renaissance the likes of which have never been seen before. Why are good developers deliberately blinding themselves to all the goodness throughout the whole programming ecosystem, choosing instead one tool (e.g. nodejs) as the One True Hammer? It's so unnecessary and so limiting.

gaius 13y ago
Interesting choice of words renaissance, as what we are actually seeing is people blindly reinventing things that were known in the 1970s. At least the true renaissance thinkers knew they were rediscovering things that existed before the Dark Ages; today people genuinely think they're onto something novel.
- Silhouette 13y ago
  what we are actually seeing is people blindly reinventing things that were known in the 1970s Or people who have worked exclusively in web development and for a relatively short time suddenly discovering general programming knowledge, like why modularity and separation of concerns are important, or that being able to write prototype code and get it into production quickly doesn't necessarily mean that code will be maintainable or support the same pace of development over the long term. Next week, if you do everything in a dynamic-everything language using a dynamic-everything framework with everything looked up at runtime from a database, your software will be slow. The idea that a simple blog site running on a modern server should have to worry about hitting the front page of an aggregator and then falling over because it got a few thousand visitors in the next hour is rather absurd, if you stop and think about how much processing power and raw bandwidth these modern systems actually have available.
- unoti 13y ago
  While it is true that the basics of computation did exist in the 70's, it's very clear that programmer productivity today far eclipses what we were doing even 20 years ago. I started coding professionally in the 80's. Today much of what I used to do is now handled by users on their own with spreadsheets and query tools. A small team of 1-2 people today can routinely take on a task that would have taken teams literally 10x as much effort back in the day. For example, anything involving interfacing computer systems together in any way took an order of magnitude more time back in the day. There were no real widely accepted, simple to use methods available. Networking and communications over modems tended to be so unreliable and difficult that systems tended to be made as monolithic things that just did everything for themselves. It occurs to me that a book could be e written describing why and how programmer productivity is better today than it was a couple decades ago. It is true that computer technology has been around a long time. And it's also true that a lot of the best stuff such as Lisp has been around for a long time. But there are all kinds of factors that make programmers complete projects in a matter of days today that they wouldn't be able to 10 or 15 years ago.
  - gaius 13y ago
    And yet, an incredible amount of software was written on VT100s. Software that is rock-solid reliable, does things on old hardware that would be impossible on even on modern hardware with scripting languages, and is still relevant and doing useful work after many decades. What looks like "productivity" today is just fluff, pretty interfaces that still offload their real work to old-school systems.
    - unoti 13y ago
      Get off my lawn!
feralmoan 13y ago
I've used a bunch of different languages over my career from device+graphics libraries in assembly to windows apps to servers, web stacks and (recently) front-end. These days admittedly I do a lot of node development and while not a huge fan, its really so easy to get something up and running all the while using all the same tools and even the same modules on the front+back ends. When I run a build its the same gruntfile for the stack and UI, there's no fussing about getting disparate servers, paradigms and teams playing nicely and its small enough for me to get an entire application installed and running literally within a few minutes even on resource limited hardware like a rasberry pi - that creative freedom is brilliant! I can definitely rant about all the things that are bad about nodejs but as a prototyping tool or sideproject toy its really valuable.

by davedx 13y ago

gaius 13y ago

Interesting choice of words renaissance, as what we are actually seeing is people blindly reinventing things that were known in the 1970s. At least the true renaissance thinkers knew they were rediscovering things that existed before the Dark Ages; today people genuinely think they're onto something novel.

Silhouette 13y ago
what we are actually seeing is people blindly reinventing things that were known in the 1970s Or people who have worked exclusively in web development and for a relatively short time suddenly discovering general programming knowledge, like why modularity and separation of concerns are important, or that being able to write prototype code and get it into production quickly doesn't necessarily mean that code will be maintainable or support the same pace of development over the long term. Next week, if you do everything in a dynamic-everything language using a dynamic-everything framework with everything looked up at runtime from a database, your software will be slow. The idea that a simple blog site running on a modern server should have to worry about hitting the front page of an aggregator and then falling over because it got a few thousand visitors in the next hour is rather absurd, if you stop and think about how much processing power and raw bandwidth these modern systems actually have available.
unoti 13y ago
While it is true that the basics of computation did exist in the 70's, it's very clear that programmer productivity today far eclipses what we were doing even 20 years ago. I started coding professionally in the 80's. Today much of what I used to do is now handled by users on their own with spreadsheets and query tools. A small team of 1-2 people today can routinely take on a task that would have taken teams literally 10x as much effort back in the day. For example, anything involving interfacing computer systems together in any way took an order of magnitude more time back in the day. There were no real widely accepted, simple to use methods available. Networking and communications over modems tended to be so unreliable and difficult that systems tended to be made as monolithic things that just did everything for themselves. It occurs to me that a book could be e written describing why and how programmer productivity is better today than it was a couple decades ago. It is true that computer technology has been around a long time. And it's also true that a lot of the best stuff such as Lisp has been around for a long time. But there are all kinds of factors that make programmers complete projects in a matter of days today that they wouldn't be able to 10 or 15 years ago.
- gaius 13y ago
  And yet, an incredible amount of software was written on VT100s. Software that is rock-solid reliable, does things on old hardware that would be impossible on even on modern hardware with scripting languages, and is still relevant and doing useful work after many decades. What looks like "productivity" today is just fluff, pretty interfaces that still offload their real work to old-school systems.
  - unoti 13y ago
    Get off my lawn!

feralmoan 13y ago

I've used a bunch of different languages over my career from device+graphics libraries in assembly to windows apps to servers, web stacks and (recently) front-end. These days admittedly I do a lot of node development and while not a huge fan, its really so easy to get something up and running all the while using all the same tools and even the same modules on the front+back ends. When I run a build its the same gruntfile for the stack and UI, there's no fussing about getting disparate servers, paradigms and teams playing nicely and its small enough for me to get an entire application installed and running literally within a few minutes even on resource limited hardware like a rasberry pi - that creative freedom is brilliant! I can definitely rant about all the things that are bad about nodejs but as a prototyping tool or sideproject toy its really valuable.