And when people started writing books instead of memorizing epic poems.

Had to work with a fixed string format years ago. Absolute hell.

Something like 200 variables, all encoded in fixed length strings concatenated together. The output was the same.

…and some genius before me used + instead of stringbuilders or anything dignified, so it ran about as good as lt. Dan.

And there are some truly magic tools.

XSDs are far from perfect, but waaay more powerful than json schema.

XSLT has its problems, but completely transforming a document to a completely different structure with just a bit of text is awesome. I had to rewrite a relatively simple XSLT in Java and it was something like 10 times more lines.

Python caches bytecode, so the translation happens only once.

Java loads everything immediately and keeps it in memory. All beans, all connections, etc. That takes up a ton of memory.

Of course, but I’m not productive in it.

If I have to do everything myself, it will take more time to get it done. The trade-off is of course always control/speed vs convenience, but C is definitely too inconvenient for me.

Not that limited. Limited means an old thin client, not a microcontroller. I already set up a small web server on a pi pico with mpy, so it’s quite impressive. But from what I understand, the interop with “MacroPython” is not that great.

Did you use mpy for x86 devices? Are the limitations worth it?

But that would mean either using Graal/native image or going full Scala, right?

I only used Scala for Gatling, where it’s obviously very java-y.

There’s nothing to really grow. It’s mostly just small helpers. Aggregate sensor data, pull data from A and push it to B every hour, a small dashboard, etc.

C is too involved for my case , I want to be productive after all.

Rust is already rather low level, though there are some cool looking frameworks.

Train nerds are a weird bunch.

Please never change.

And DBAs. I’m currently working on a project where I said from the very start, I can set up this DB in k8s and I can get it to work decently, but I have neither the knowledge nor the time to get it right. Please give me someone who knows how this works.

No, don’t worry, it’ll be fine, we don’t need that, this kuverneles thing I keep hearing about handles that!!!

Six months of hard contact with the enemy on production later:

Well, we’re currently looking for someone who actually knows how DBs work, because we have one of those issues that would cost a proper DBA 5min and me 5 months.

To be fair, a lot of roles simply disappeared over the years.

Developers today are much more productive than 30 years ago, mostly because someone automated the boring parts away.

A modern developer can spin up a simple crud app including infrastructure in a day or so. That’s much much more productive than 1995. We just cram a lot more of the world into software, so we need 20x the amount of developers we needed back then.

It’s really weird, though, that nobody really created a language/tool to bridge these two world. It’s always just generating one representation from the other, mostly in a bad way.

I’d argue, that for many problems, a graphical view of the system can help reasoning. But there simply is nothing in that regard.

One of our customers does that. It happened multiple times already that one dev fixed an issue in production, and the next regular deployment overwrote everything.

But fortunately, it’s just critical infrastructure and nothing important.

The older generations kept leaking contaminated water (reactor coolant), many harbors simply refused entry because they didn’t know the risks involved, and I’m pretty sure the decommissioning isn’t clear either. The way current laws are set up, it’s quite possible that these things go through a few hands and end up on a beach in some underdeveloped country and get dismantled like any other ship under horrible working conditions - but now with the added benefit of nuclear contamination.

Of course it is like that. You’re saying that the complaint is wrong because the author doesn’t know the history, and now you accuse me of not understanding you, because I pointed this out.

If you have to accuse everyone of “not understanding”, maybe you’re the one who doesn’t understand.

It’s easy to criticize something when you don’t understand the needs and constraints that led to it.

And that assumption is exactly what led us to the current situation.

It doesn’t matter, why the present is garbage, it’s garbage and we should address that. Statements like this are the engineering equivalent of “it is what it is shrug emoji”.

Take a step back and look at the pile of overengineered yet underthought, inefficient, insecure and complicated crap that we call the modern web. And it’s not only the browser, but also the backend stack.

Think about how many indirections and half-baked abstraction layers are between your code and what actually gets executed.

But why?

There’s absolutely no benefit compared to just burning it and using plant based materials as a resource.

There is a pretty good way: burn it.

Most plastics can’t be recycled in any meaningful way, so just burn it and use the energy. There are some legitimate uses for plastics, but most of it is wasted.

And always remember: most of the plastic in the ocean is fishing gear, not household waste.

It’s always “in mice” or on an extremely small scale for ridiculous prices.

Scientists only develop the first stepping stones, most of which lead to nothing, that’s okay. But the university PR > newspaper pipeline leads to everything being a major breakthrough, and that leads to fatigue with the reader.

Stored Procedures have been a thing for literally decades. But they’re an absolute pain.

What would really improve the usefulness of databases are autoindexes and generally more “let me handle that for you”. I’d argue 90% of business apps essentially need a way to store objects and their relationships, but doing that in an efficient manner is really hard (at least if you’ve got a few more rows to handle).