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A shame that you didn't decided to make this very insightful comment on one of the "Library ___ in [Rust|Go]" threads. I'm not trying to bag on anyone, just wan

by zo1 12y ago

A shame that you didn't decided to make this very insightful comment on one of the "Library ___ in [Rust|Go]" threads. I'm not trying to bag on anyone, just want us to maybe consider that there is some sort of "underlying" malaise that is causing us to invent, and reinvent constantly. Is it due to us simply wanting to reinvent things, or perhaps due to libraries/frameworks eventually becoming too big that we need to reinvent it in smaller forms and new languages? I don't know, but it needs to be discussed...

bsaul 12y ago
"Is it due to us simply wanting to reinvent things" After observing myself and a couple of developer friends over the last few years, i can most definitely say yes. We are addicted to building our own things, creating layers after layers of abstraction, frameworks, tools, because it makes us feel like we're creating something. What saves some of us, is to have a greater satisfaction seing someone else actually use our things, than creating that thing. And so the goal becomes more "what do people need" rather than "what would i have fun building today".
pdpi 12y ago
To be fair, the Java ecosystem is quite mature, whereas Go and Rust are relatively young languages, and we still need people to develop all the amenities of modern programming for those languages. Yet Another Java(Script) Framework is more deserving of that sort of comment than The First Couple of Rust|Go Frameworks of Their Kind are.
kyllo 12y ago
People are building those things in Go and Rust because they're currently implemented in unsafe languages like C/C++ and are therefore riddled with undiscovered memory management bugs, overflow bugs, undefined behavior etc, which are often security vulnerabilities waiting to be exploited. I don't think it's reinvention for reinvention's sake, I think they're genuinely trying to fix some of the horrible historical mistakes of C.
robbintt 12y ago
I think I can attach another insight into this. The underlying malaise is probably related to the human condition. Humans are fundamentally a medium for our collaborative works (in this context) and two factors causes these rebuilds. 1. A need to cut your teeth on a solved problem when diving in to a new category of thinking. 2. The high cost of transferring a model of thinking between two humans, especially over a vast amount of time. I think 3 years is vast compared to maybe 100 work hours to model and implement the core of a problem.

by zo1 12y ago

bsaul 12y ago

"Is it due to us simply wanting to reinvent things" After observing myself and a couple of developer friends over the last few years, i can most definitely say yes. We are addicted to building our own things, creating layers after layers of abstraction, frameworks, tools, because it makes us feel like we're creating something. What saves some of us, is to have a greater satisfaction seing someone else actually use our things, than creating that thing. And so the goal becomes more "what do people need" rather than "what would i have fun building today".

pdpi 12y ago

To be fair, the Java ecosystem is quite mature, whereas Go and Rust are relatively young languages, and we still need people to develop all the amenities of modern programming for those languages. Yet Another Java(Script) Framework is more deserving of that sort of comment than The First Couple of Rust|Go Frameworks of Their Kind are.

kyllo 12y ago

People are building those things in Go and Rust because they're currently implemented in unsafe languages like C/C++ and are therefore riddled with undiscovered memory management bugs, overflow bugs, undefined behavior etc, which are often security vulnerabilities waiting to be exploited. I don't think it's reinvention for reinvention's sake, I think they're genuinely trying to fix some of the horrible historical mistakes of C.

robbintt 12y ago

I think I can attach another insight into this. The underlying malaise is probably related to the human condition. Humans are fundamentally a medium for our collaborative works (in this context) and two factors causes these rebuilds. 1. A need to cut your teeth on a solved problem when diving in to a new category of thinking. 2. The high cost of transferring a model of thinking between two humans, especially over a vast amount of time. I think 3 years is vast compared to maybe 100 work hours to model and implement the core of a problem.