Ask HN: Are there any “golden calfs” tools in your field that rub you wrong?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28053258

by seph-reed • 5 years ago

4 10 5 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Do you ever feel like you're taking crazy pills for being the only person who doesn't love some very popular tool within your industry? What tool is it, and what industry?

What should people know about X over-hyped software/framework/tool/design-pattern/etc?

seph-reed5• 5 years ago

Right now I feel like I'm taking crazy pills for not loving a very popular web-dev tool. I'm wondering if this happens to everyone. I'm hoping it's not just me.

PaulHoule2• 5 years ago

Spill what it is.

seph-reed5• 5 years ago

If you show me yours, I'll show you mine.

AnimalMuppet• 5 years ago

Lots of things. Lisp. Haskell. Functional programming. Apple computers. Anything described as The One Right Way.

But in none of these cases am I the only person. Far from it. I'm one of a quiet majority facing a minority of loud zealots.

Note well: Lisp and Haskell are reasonable languages in which one can be quite productive. My issue isn't with the languages per se; it's with the zealots. (I would probably feel the same about Rust, but I haven't bumped heads with as many Rust zealots.)

What should people know? X is useful. X also has flaws. There are other ways to go about it that are also useful, and also have (perhaps different) flaws.

seph-reed5• 5 years ago

I don't know Lisp or Haskell. But for what it's worth, I totally understand not worshipping functional programming, or apple computers. Both of which I use and appreciate, but neither of which are anywhere near perfect.

Functional programming in particular was one I got to be singled out for recognizing its weak spots.

mindcrime• 5 years ago

Everybody loves IntelliJ except me I think. I tried it and wasn't impressed in the least.

Not a fan of basically anything proprietary / closed source / patent-encumbered either, which is a group that probably includes a lot of popular "stuff". On that note, I don't use any Apple products, as I fundamentally disapprove of their "walled garden" ecosystem approach.

seph-reed5• 5 years ago

IntelliJ never hooked me either. I kept falling back to Sublime when that was in vogue. At this point VSCode has been working pretty well for me, but I'm in no way pushing its limits.

Nextgrid• 5 years ago

The general trend of microservices and making everything a distributed system with the data smeared across dozens of separate services.

It makes the development experience terrible, introduces a new set of bugs and failure modes you have to consider, and is unnecessary in the vast majority of cases.

Maybe there are some people that legitimately enjoy dealing with this complexity, but for me engineering is simply a tool to solve clients' business problems so I can get paid, and the least engineering I have to do (and my client has to maintain down the line) the better.

I've ranted about this before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28025934 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22877650.

Ask HN: Are there any “golden calfs” tools in your field that rub you wrong?

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