4 ms·

HN was the same about Node too. In a year we will see the same articles about Rust.

sanderjd 11y ago
See also: AngularJS, Rails, etc. A lot of this is just because things that a technology makes convenient fade into the background after awhile because you know longer feel the pain you felt before you had them, but you are actively reminded of the things that annoy you about a technology multiple times a day. For example, with Go, fast static compilation and "just works" deployment fade, while the copy-paste-tweak pattern for generic behavior continues to bite. For Angular, you start to forget how much easier it made defining modular view components and having up-to-date data everywhere, while actively finding complexity and performance frustrating. I'm sure you're right about Rust, and that people will be down on lifetime annotation burden, painful compilation times, painful data structure nesting, the complexity of unsafe code, and other things, while forgetting all the times things are actually easier, more performant, and safer due to all that language support. I see it as a natural damping curve: at first things seem peachier than they really are, then they seem much more frustrating than they need to be, then you come to terms with their unique trade-off of strengths and weaknesses. What I would like to know – if anyone here has discovered such a thing – is a way to skip to the last step more quickly.
- baudehlo 11y ago
  The thing you want is called "getting old". You realize the benefits of certain things and know about the weaknesses before they are even brought up. Sadly this can't easily be taught - it is just slowly learned. And yet us old farts continue to be shunned in many parts of the industry (perhaps because we are grumpy old curmudgeons who have seen it all before).
  - pcwalton 11y ago
    I think programming languages can bring new things to the table. For Go that's M:N userspace threading combined with a shared-everything mutable memory model in a high level language. For Rust, it's memory safety without garbage collection. For JavaScript, it's the event loop model. Those crucial differences make languages usable for unique niches where you won't want to use anything else. Unfortunately, most of the debate around languages involves "philosophy", where there's little objective measurement that can be done: composition vs. inheritance, the effect generics have on readability, whether immutability is a better way of reasoning about data, whether namespace syntax should use double-colons or periods, and so forth. These debates are endless but don't strike me as very useful: the exact issues that get brought up and argued on HN have been going back and forth largely since the '80s if not earlier, and they're neither interesting (because we've made little progress on consensus) nor relevant (since people who actually need to choose a language based on its merits will choose it because it helps their job, not because of philosophy).
- kibwen 11y ago
  There's an entire Wikipedia article on this concept, in fact: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle
  - sanderjd 11y ago
    Thanks for the link – an enlightening read.
- ascendantlogic 11y ago
  As I get older and I gain more perspective, I can't stress enough how true this is. Listening to younger programmers bemoan Ruby and Rails is humorous to me because they don't remember the world of Java web dev before Rails. Miles of XML configs everywhere, factories, impls, proxies, beans. So. Much. Boilerplate. It's easy to bitch about things the way they are now, but understand there are people and technologies who were around before you arrived on the scene and in general, things are consistently getting "better", for all subjective interpretations of "better".
  - Dewie3 11y ago
    Now I'm confused. I've heard that we should learn and appreciate that nothing is new under the sun and most interesting concepts and technologies have already been invented in the past and not newly by newer technologies. Now you're saying that newer technology consistently improve things? I'm getting confused as to how the older hive mind is telling me to feel.
    - jballanc 11y ago
      Concept and implementation are not the same thing. The concept of LISP hasn't changed in 50+ years, but the implementations have been constantly improving the whole time.
    - wtetzner 11y ago
      > I'm getting confused as to how the older hive mind is telling me to feel. Maybe that means it's not a hive mind? Different people have different views, I suppose.
  - serge2k 11y ago
    so what you are saying is, we should be fine to whine and complain because something better is coming.
    - ascendantlogic 11y ago
      Yes, then we can move on to whining and complaining about that.
Dewie3 11y ago
Are you bitter that people "don't like" Node any more?

See also: AngularJS, Rails, etc. A lot of this is just because things that a technology makes convenient fade into the background after awhile because you know longer feel the pain you felt before you had them, but you are actively reminded of the things that annoy you about a technology multiple times a day. For example, with Go, fast static compilation and "just works" deployment fade, while the copy-paste-tweak pattern for generic behavior continues to bite. For Angular, you start to forget how much easier it made defining modular view components and having up-to-date data everywhere, while actively finding complexity and performance frustrating. I'm sure you're right about Rust, and that people will be down on lifetime annotation burden, painful compilation times, painful data structure nesting, the complexity of unsafe code, and other things, while forgetting all the times things are actually easier, more performant, and safer due to all that language support. I see it as a natural damping curve: at first things seem peachier than they really are, then they seem much more frustrating than they need to be, then you come to terms with their unique trade-off of strengths and weaknesses. What I would like to know – if anyone here has discovered such a thing – is a way to skip to the last step more quickly.

baudehlo 11y ago
The thing you want is called "getting old". You realize the benefits of certain things and know about the weaknesses before they are even brought up. Sadly this can't easily be taught - it is just slowly learned. And yet us old farts continue to be shunned in many parts of the industry (perhaps because we are grumpy old curmudgeons who have seen it all before).
- pcwalton 11y ago
  I think programming languages can bring new things to the table. For Go that's M:N userspace threading combined with a shared-everything mutable memory model in a high level language. For Rust, it's memory safety without garbage collection. For JavaScript, it's the event loop model. Those crucial differences make languages usable for unique niches where you won't want to use anything else. Unfortunately, most of the debate around languages involves "philosophy", where there's little objective measurement that can be done: composition vs. inheritance, the effect generics have on readability, whether immutability is a better way of reasoning about data, whether namespace syntax should use double-colons or periods, and so forth. These debates are endless but don't strike me as very useful: the exact issues that get brought up and argued on HN have been going back and forth largely since the '80s if not earlier, and they're neither interesting (because we've made little progress on consensus) nor relevant (since people who actually need to choose a language based on its merits will choose it because it helps their job, not because of philosophy).
kibwen 11y ago
There's an entire Wikipedia article on this concept, in fact: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle
- sanderjd 11y ago
  Thanks for the link – an enlightening read.
ascendantlogic 11y ago
As I get older and I gain more perspective, I can't stress enough how true this is. Listening to younger programmers bemoan Ruby and Rails is humorous to me because they don't remember the world of Java web dev before Rails. Miles of XML configs everywhere, factories, impls, proxies, beans. So. Much. Boilerplate. It's easy to bitch about things the way they are now, but understand there are people and technologies who were around before you arrived on the scene and in general, things are consistently getting "better", for all subjective interpretations of "better".
- Dewie3 11y ago
  Now I'm confused. I've heard that we should learn and appreciate that nothing is new under the sun and most interesting concepts and technologies have already been invented in the past and not newly by newer technologies. Now you're saying that newer technology consistently improve things? I'm getting confused as to how the older hive mind is telling me to feel.
  - jballanc 11y ago
    Concept and implementation are not the same thing. The concept of LISP hasn't changed in 50+ years, but the implementations have been constantly improving the whole time.
  - wtetzner 11y ago
    > I'm getting confused as to how the older hive mind is telling me to feel. Maybe that means it's not a hive mind? Different people have different views, I suppose.
- serge2k 11y ago
  so what you are saying is, we should be fine to whine and complain because something better is coming.
  - ascendantlogic 11y ago
    Yes, then we can move on to whining and complaining about that.

Dewie3 11y ago

Are you bitter that people "don't like" Node any more?