My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

https://blog.visionarycto.com/p/my-20-year-career-is-technical-debt

by spo81rty • 3 years ago

579 573 3 years ago

blog.visionarycto.com

woooooo• 3 years ago

Which is better/worse, the hack with a plan which is removed promptly or the barnacle that persists forever?

The barnacle did provide more lifetime business value after all.

maxbond• 3 years ago

Barnacles can cut you pretty badly if you're not aware of them, and they have a habit of reproducing. When you have a large colony on the hull of your vessel they impose a nontrivial amount of drag.

(I'm more committed to the bit than this position though, it's a judgement call that an engineer must make relative to the requirements and resources available.)

YZF2• 3 years ago

There is plenty of code I've written that's still out there doing useful things.

I'm sure some not insignificant parts of Windows, Linux, tools, libraries, browsers etc. etc. are fairly old code that just keeps working .. perhaps with fixes and improvements.

Good code lasts a long time. Technical debt is something you are continuously paying "interest" on. Just like any debt, sometimes it's a good thing and sometimes it's a bad thing.

inconceivable• 3 years ago

perhaps with fixes and improvements.

in my experience, if there's no will or budget for a rewrite, it gets virtualized, locked away behind a firewall/corporate network with a restricted set of users, and will basically run forever as long as the ISA and virtual storage is supported by emulation and the business process still exists and is able to support the infra/people involved.

think of it like a zero coupon 100 year bond in technical debt issuance underwritten by the central bank (corporate hq). and highly liquid in the sense that a virtual image is easy to move around.

the good part is it just gets faster and takes up less % resources as hardware improves, and forever-bugs are usually worked around and documented by the people pushing the buttons.

chrismarlow9• 3 years ago

I got a new laptop recently and I hadn't used Windows in probably a decade. It came with windows 11 and I saw so many old interfaces under the hood while exploring that it made me laugh a few times.

1-6• 3 years ago

As long as you know how to get out of technical debt (islands too) when you see one, you're suited for any task.

hedora• 3 years ago

The fun thing is that, until CS slows down, stuff gets better so fast that we get to reimplement the same thing, but 10x better every 5 years or so.

First I wrote single threaded code code with automatic memory management, then single threaded synchronous with manual memory management, then synchronous multi-threaded, then async, and then async lock free.

Now I am writing async lock free, and the compiler is helping me prove it is data-race-free and memory safe.

Each time I rewrite this stuff, someone hands me 6-7 figures. This is awesome.

kneebonian• 3 years ago

so fast that we get to reimplement the same thing, but 10x better every 5 years or so.

Citation needed. Seems that it just us getting more and more abstracted which can make it easier but not necessarily easier.

The hardest part for the next gen of developers is not having Moore's law to save them from crappy coding.

rr8082• 3 years ago

Right, I worked on a async non-blocking project in C++ in the 90s. It was a lot simpler than any modern project, no cloud, no yaml, no containers, no fancy security. Sure it didn't have a pretty web interface but was great software.

userbinator2• 3 years ago

10x worse is how I'd put it. First example that comes to mind: Microsoft Teams.

YZF2• 3 years ago

More like the hardware gets faster but the software gets slower or stays the same ;)

Lock-free goes way back. Multi-threaded goes way back. Both more than 20 years. SIMD goes way back. GPGPU goes way back.

What is newer-ish are large scale distributed systems. But even that isn't so new any more.

mumblemumble• 3 years ago

For a lot of this stuff 20 years is basically new in my book. MPI dates back at least 30 years and I still sometimes wonder if the only reason we don't use it anymore is because nobody wants to deal with C. I spend too much time these days watching technology like Spark make things slower rather than faster because nowadays the Java platform (not to mention containerization) is becoming an increasingly efficient way to splat oneself into the memory wall.

asdfman1234• 3 years ago

How do you make 7 figures writing code and not sitting in meetings all day talking about eye gougingly boring business requirements?

throwaway71271• 3 years ago

what exactly is 10x better than 5 years ago? the technology gets better but the outcome gets worse somehow.

most of the programs i use (besides the browser) are 20-50 years old (paste, cut, xterm, grep, emacs etc), almost any new thing i try is horribly slow (slack, whatsapp etc, the mac terminal app, even the mail app is slow compared to mutt)

open a web page on a computer without adblock and look at what we have built

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pq7NLMwynYg (funny video demonstrating the state of the modern web)

VaxWithSex2• 3 years ago

ripgrep

anonzzzies4• 3 years ago

Now I am writing async lock free, and the compiler is helping me prove it is data-race-free and memory safe.

I am writing async lock free code as well, but which compiler is helping you? Rust? As far as I know, it's cutting edge research to figure out a type system that fixes this for you. But maybe i'm not up to date.

stuff gets better so fast that we get to reimplement the same thing

So you are leaving the API in-tact and just change the implementation with new techniques? Or even better, you just rewrite low-level libraries you are using? Sounds like the ideal job to me.

mchaver2• 3 years ago

Unfortunately users are not seeing 10x better performance with the average application. A bit of the curse of more resources leads to using more resources wastefully.

yamtaddle• 3 years ago

When I look at team sizes for '80s and '90s programs, and how fast those teams worked, and consider what I'd expect to be the team size for a modern program tackling the exact same features and how long I'd expect development to take, it also makes me wonder just how much these supposed productivity improvements—which are promoted as where these benefits are being realized, since they're plainly not showing up in program & system performance for the user—actually, like, exist.

shrimp_emoji2• 3 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox but with RAM

ChuckNorris892• 3 years ago

Each time I rewrite this stuff, someone hands me 6-7 figures. This is awesome.

I envy you.

photochemsyn• 3 years ago

Interesting how C programming has survived that entire time period in the operating system and embedded worlds, although the spread of multicore hardware running lots of threads in parallel has also led to many changes (but even those changes were beginning to be implemented 20 years ago).

20 years from now, C will probably still be a core language in its niche.

2muchcoffeeman• 3 years ago

Is it interesting? Somewhere along the chain someone needs to know assembly. Either hand crafting it or some compiler exists for some language that is one step removed. At this level my feeling is that there is less desire to constantly change tools.

imoverclocked• 3 years ago

Queue rust apologists…

I think C and its direct descendants will slowly fade away over the next 20 years as new developers want to get away from the legacy of language specifications that span existing codebases. There are so many sharp edges in C that have automatic fixes/detections/etc in newer languages and don’t get me started about multiprocessing complexity in C.

dralley• 3 years ago

It will fade away the same way COBOL faded away, which is to say that it will still be at the core of a great many critical systems in 50 years, even if new critical systems aren't written in it.

sgtnoodle7• 3 years ago

My coworker and I were pair programming some Rust today. We were working on a convenience wrapper whose whole purpose is to reduce boilerplate. So, by its nature there's a lot of internal generic traits, thread safety, etc.

He knows Rust well but software design not so much. I know software design well but Rust not so much. My experience can be summed up with:

let &mut writer = Writer<T>::writer::new(connection.clone()).clone(); // TODO ??? writer.write(*data.clone()).unwrap();

Meanwhile in C++ I'm like

if (!write(connection, data, data_len)) { return false; }

chasil8• 3 years ago

SQLite's achievement of DO-178B compliance could carry C forward on it's own.

Dr. Hipp spent years achieving this, and any reimplementation will suffer his travails, regardless of language safety.

DO-178B means that SQLite can be used in avionics. No other major database has reached this level of code quality, as the database written for "programmers who are not yet born."

miketery• 3 years ago

That's impressive! Is it a specific version and what features or is it a subset?

oskarkk• 3 years ago

This got me curious, so I searched for some info and found this thread on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18039213

Looks like it may not be used exactly in avionics (or maybe most critical parts of avionics), as it isn't certified for the highest levels of DO-178B (and certification for lower levels was done by particular users of SQLite on their own, so the info is not public). Still very impressive.

SoftTalker3• 3 years ago

Yep. C and SQL are the two languages I've used my entire career (30+ years). I still use SQL almost every day, C not as much. Shell scripts and unix utilities are in there as well as daily-use tools.

userbinator2• 3 years ago

It is, relatively speaking, far easier to write a C compiler[1] than one for any other higher-level language, and the language lends itself to low-level tasks without needing to use Asm.

[1] There have been multiple articles on HN where a single person has written a C compiler.

kragen6• 3 years ago

lots of compilers have been written by a single person, including compilers for c++, d, turbo pascal, forth, scheme, ml, haskell, ancient lisp, and so on. craig burley got g77 to the point of compiling useful fortran programs before other people got interested. i think graydon wrote the first versions of the rust compiler himself too

it's probably always better to do it with someone else, because you get better ideas and faster debugging, but pretty much all hlls are possible for a single person to implement

binkHN• 3 years ago

Don't look, but C is slowly being ripped out and replaced with Rust...

chasil8• 3 years ago

Brian Kenighan wistfully removed the lex/yacc parser in the OneTrueAwk many years ago, and replaced it with a custom parser (I believe for performance reasons). The OneTrueAwk remains the standard awk in BSD, renewed, but not replaced. I don't think it's going anywhere.

The POSIX standards, flawed as they may be, have incredible staying power. These standards run our phones and embedded, supercomputers, current Apple workstations, game consoles, and are significant in many other places.

Microsoft itself implemented POSIX in Windows from the beginning (likely recognizing it's importance as the former vendor of Xenix), and while this has waxed and waned, running the "wsl.exe -l -o" command on modern Windows will catalog Ubuntu, Kali, and Oracle Linux that are not Linux, but serviced by the Windows kernel's POSIX layer under WSL1.

Applications that implement or greatly enhance POSIX have staying power.

Those who seek code longevity would do well to study it.

KerrAvon• 3 years ago

Counterpoint: POSIX is increasingly a creaky anachronism required to support a legacy base of old Unix software. Every modern Unix-derivative OS replaces or significantly augments core POSIX functionality with something that works better for modern hardware and software needs, or suffers in some areas if they don’t/can’t.

froh2• 3 years ago

that are not Linux, but serviced by the Windows kernel's POSIX layer under WSL1.

that's not how that works.

wsl is a Linux kernel running under a hypervisor integrated with windows.

josephcsible• 3 years ago

You're describing WSL2, but the post you quoted explicitly said WSL1.

temac• 3 years ago

Wsl2 is how you say. WSL1 is a Linux syscall reimplementation in the NT kernel space.

chasil8• 3 years ago

If you examine the wiki, you will find that the POSIX layer of Windows is the first implementation.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Subsystem_for_Linux

I had known for some time that VAX/VMS was strikingly similar to Windows NT, but I learned a few days ago that the failed Mica project introduced a POSIX interface.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEC_MICA

revelio11• 3 years ago

It can be argued the other way round. POSIX is tech debt and exists in modern machines so widely mostly because there happen to be free implementations of it. My experience from interviewing has been that a remarkably large number of developers actually never interact with POSIX directly these days: they never work with files and never open a socket or fork process trees. They certainly never use UNIX-adjacent stuff like X. Instead they interact with APIs layered on top like NodeJS, Java, C#, Android, Swift, HTML. None of which bears much resemblance to POSIX. Like, if you read about how to work with the network in iOS or Android you won't be directed to POSIX APIs.

chasil8• 3 years ago

I might counter with "adb sh" on Android, and the C behind Objective-C as development tools where the standards are still very much present.

smackeyacky• 3 years ago

I am somewhat amazed at the list of tech from that article, it's like he has a magical knack for picking dead ends.

C was the 2nd language I learned and I'm still using it. The big surprise for me has been javascript - it's so...bad it became good or at least ubiquitous.

nostrademons• 3 years ago

C and Javascript are both worse-is-better languages, as is SQL. They have known gotchas and quirks and lots of them. But they basically work, they were good enough, and because of that they became so ubiquitous that it's impossible to replace them.

59nadir• 3 years ago

They were both THE languages of systems that became/were important. I agree that they both have the "worse-is-better" quality about them, but C is a much more appropriate language for what it's supposed to do than JavaScript is. The fact that we (mostly) haven't been able to execute anything else reasonably in the browser is the reason why it's stuck with us. C has had alternatives for a long time but stays put, because it's just better at what it does.

revelio11• 3 years ago

Not ... really. Those languages all became popular and got critical mass because they were the only way to access operating systems-like things. People wanted the value provided by those platforms and had to go through the language to get at them. So they buckled up, tolerated it and promptly spent decades and billions of dollars on creating wrappers, FFIs, transpilers and the like to avoid having to touch the underlying monopoly language.

People wanted browsers. JS came along for the ride. It wouldn't have been so popular if it had lived its life outside the browser

asdfman1234• 3 years ago

JavaScript is that guy you knew who didn’t have a lot of talent but has stuck at it for the last 30 years, so is now embarrassingly doing much better at his thing than you are.

QuadrupleA3• 3 years ago

Interesting thought experiment, how much worse would JS have to have been to have been abandoned and replaced?

QuadrupleA3• 3 years ago

I wonder where python will fall in history - it seems one of the few common languages that gained usage because people like it.

revelio11• 3 years ago

Python is weird. It's a nice language but it was heading for tech debt status along with (maybe) Ruby, then the ML guys went all-in on it and that saved it. But how often do you find new programs being written in Python outside of the ML/AI space? People got burned repeatedly in the 2000s/2010s by building giant empires on the back of dynamically typed scripting languages and they all ended up either doing rewrites into statically typed languages or (when successful enough) funding PL R&D to try and dig themselves out of it.

Eric_WVGG• 3 years ago

I was thinking the same thing. Silverlight? Silverlight??

I just ended a job with a guy who going on about how he was a Flash hotshot back in Y2K days, lamenting "Steve Jobs for killing it." Like, dude, everyone with two neurons to rub together told you it was a fundamentally terrible idea, doomed from the start. Gawd.

I also fell for a few of his picks — Angular was a rough blow — but what a list of lousy bets.

29athrowaway• 3 years ago

What do all these things have in common?

MS Visual Basic 6, MS ActiveX, MS Silverlight, MS Visual Foxpro, MS C# .NET Compact Framework, MS ASP.NET WebForms, MS ASP.NET MVC, MS Windows Communication Foundation...

I think there common is a theme there. But shhh, don't tell him.

metaltyphoon• 3 years ago

Oh yes… those were for sure the only thing to perish.

tuchsen2• 3 years ago

The space jam website from 96 is still up :). Standards go a long way.

https://www.spacejam.com/1996/jam.html

rr8082• 3 years ago

They're all faster, more productive and richer environments than modern web apps?

senko3• 3 years ago

VB6 and FoxPro, yes. Others, not so much.

djbusby• 3 years ago

Why not just say what's common (over hyped dead-ends)? Snark don't make you sound smarter.

dagss• 3 years ago

Microsoft.

tasuki• 3 years ago

I thought it was a smart comment. I did not notice the commonality before 29athrowaway pointed it out.

29athrowaway said eight times what's common. Eight times!

nurettin2• 3 years ago

Most of that was replaced by their own .net core and Google's efforts to optimize JavaScript and establish Chrome as the defacto browser, which remains as one of Google's few ongoing projects.

HNDen212• 3 years ago

your forgot Biztalk, commerce server, MTS, Visual J++ :-)

MartinMcGirk• 3 years ago

I feel like this is heavily connected with the idea of legacy. I grew up in Scotland, and lots of the buildings, culture, etc, have been around for hundreds of years. It would be nice to feel like something I was building would last as long and outlive me. It doesn’t though.

Sometimes I think that this is just the nature of software development. Most of the stuff I build is built to solve an immediate business problem. It probably lasts 5/10 years and then someone rewrites it in a new language, or more often the task isn’t relevant anymore so the code gets deleted.

I find myself thinking that maybe if I’d been in civil engineering or something then I’d be building stuff that lasts, but speaking to people who’ve worked a long time in construction has taught me that it’s the same there. Most of the buildings that go up, come down again in a few decades once regulations/fashions change or the new owner of the site wants something else.

Every so often something like a Cathedral gets built, and those get built to last. But most people don’t get to work on those. If there’s a software equivalent of a Cathedral then I still haven’t found it.

Krutonium• 3 years ago

Core Libraries/Kernels, like LibC or The Linux/NT Kernel.

fbdab103• 3 years ago

To invoke the RIIR train, probably a lot of fertile ground in being the definitive Rust implementation of "solved" foundational libraries: zlib, libpng, libjpeg, etc. Something ubiquitously used which has very minimal/no churn. As Rust usage grows, dependency on the original C implementation will diminish.

bombcar6• 3 years ago

Even those change substantially over time, even if they're not directly rewritten, things get updated and relocated.

It's like how the streets in Rome have been the same for much longer than many of the buildings have been standing, even though the buildings are hundreds of years old.

bombcar6• 3 years ago

I'd say something like TeX might be a software cathedral, and even that one isn't going to last much longer than Knuth himself (almost everyone today doesn't run TeX, they run a compatible software platform, some are even entirely different).

But even a Cathedral changes over time, and your work may not last; but all human work is a shrill scream against the eternal void - all will be lost in time, like tears in rain. The best we can do is do the best with what we have in front of us. And maybe all the work you did to make sure your one-off database code correctly handled the Y38 problem back in 2000 will never be noticed; because your software is still running and didn't fail.

kragen6• 3 years ago

pretty sure most latex papers and chapters are formatted with tex82, though translated from pascal to c

tharkun__• 3 years ago

Externally visible stuff: definitely. You really need something like TeX or by now Linux and some GNU Tools etc. to stand the test of time.

My very first job was to work on the backend of some software for internal use. You have probably all bought products that were "administered" in said software. When I worked on it it was 15 years old. It evolved over this time of course but original bits and pieces were all around me. And I evolved bits and pieces of it as did others. By now it's been another 15 years and while I know they did a rewrite of some parts of the system I bet that some of both my code and the code I found to have been written almost 15 years before I started there is still around and you and me keep buying products touched by that software without knowing. The rewrite was also done by at least one person that was around when the original was built. He learned a new language to implement it.ut he took all of his domain and business logic knowledge over.

Its even more funny because I knew the guy that wrote some of the code I worked with directly from a different company but I had no idea he worked there or that he worked in that project until I saw his name in the CVS history. Yes CVS. I personally moved it to SVN to "modernize". I hope that was recognized as "technical debt" and they moved to git but I wouldn't know.

tuchsen2• 3 years ago

People are commenting core OS libraries and kernels, but the Space Jam movie website from 96 is still up. I bet the guy that wrote that didn't think it'd be around nearly 20 years later, I hope it never goes down.

https://www.spacejam.com/1996/jam.html

moosedev• 3 years ago

nearly 20

Nearly 30. Sorry :-)

chrisco255• 3 years ago

It's comforting to think that 2000 years from now, all that may remain of the early web and modern culture is the Space Jam website. Maybe Space Jam the movie will be looked at as our Gilgamesh or Iliad.

tzfld• 3 years ago

That's until there is someone to keep it up. Will disappear the moment the domain isn't renewed.

cxr2• 3 years ago

From the outset, the framing of a Web site as staying "up" (or going "down") is definitely an accessory to the mindset that leads to the effect observed. Rather than regarding Web sites as collections of hypertext-enabled publications like TBL spelled out in "Information Management: A Proposal", we have this conception of a Web page being something like one part software, two parts traditional ephemera. But they're documents. Merely observing this difference in framing and being conscious of the contrast between intent/design and practice can go a long way to addressing the underlying problems that arise from the practice.

jansan2• 3 years ago

Funny that the original Space Jam website can be considered the internet's equivalent to a cathedral.

harleypig• 3 years ago

https://imdb.com started in 1990.

paulddraper• 3 years ago

100% agree.

But I like to think that ideas and solutions and products can be legacies.

It's semi-uncommon to write code that legitimately lasts 5+ years.

But it's very common to work on projects/products/companies that last 15+ years.

And I have to be content with that.

cookieperson3• 3 years ago

Most code that survives 5 years survived for all the wrong reasons. That said, most code that's survived five years is often a profitable product with a reasonable human at the helm telling us needs to not to touch it

nolroz• 3 years ago

When I was young I spent a year framing houses. I reflect a lot on how much longer those have lasted then so much of what I built software wise along the way.

hereonout2• 3 years ago

Very true, I'd expect a house to outlast almost all of our software. There's really not much permanence in this industry.

I've built IKEA bookcases that have outlasted most of the stuff I have written.

Gigachad• 3 years ago

I think this is by far the most common outcome for work. A chefs product only lasts an hour at most. Most jobs don’t create anything other than a temporary service.

asdfman1234• 3 years ago

That’s because most of the things we need are temporary services, of course. You need dinner. And gas to get to work. And a roof that will last 10 years. Etc.

greenyoda• 3 years ago

A chefs product only lasts an hour at most.

A chef's recipe, which is also something the chef creates, may last hundreds of years.

jcpst• 3 years ago

Sqlite intends to keep their cathedral intact until 2050.

https://sqlite.org/lts.html

luckman212• 3 years ago

SQLite is awesome. TIL that its database structure is robust enough to have been chosen as one of only 4 Recommended Storage Formats for long term data preservation[0].

"Recommended storage formats are formats which, in the opinion of the preservationists at the Library of Congress, maximizes the chance of survival and continued accessibility of digital content.

[0] https://www.sqlite.org/locrsf.html

throwaway20372• 3 years ago

I never saw this page before. Brilliant! Like catnip for nerds.

    Disaster planning → Every byte of source-code history for SQLite is cryptographically protected and is automatically replicated to multiple geographically separated servers, in datacenters owned by different companies. Thousands of additional clones exist on private servers around the world. The primary developers of SQLite live in different regions of the world. SQLite can survive a continental catastrophe.

SQLite can survive a continental catastrophe!!!

emodendroket4• 3 years ago

If there’s a software equivalent of a Cathedral then I still haven’t found it.

Probably like, some parts of Windows or Linux, or GNU tools, or some thing like that that, while still being updated, also has ancient components hanging around.

throwaway20372• 3 years ago

Good point about GNU coreutils: https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/

Also: That includes the man pages. They should be around in 50 years.

_Algernon_• 3 years ago

If there’s a software equivalent of a Cathedral then I still haven’t found it.

That one old file dialog window that still somehow shows up in windows 11 from time to time?

Or the Linux kernel.

sgtnoodle7• 3 years ago

This is completely random, but you remind me of something that makes me laugh every time I use Google Maps navigation.

Last year I was messing around with my phone's text to speech settings, and I selected a male voice but cranked the pitch setting to the max. I proceeded to forget about it. For some reason when navigating, the voice is still the default pitch. Maybe about 1 in 20 turns at random though, the voice has the pitch cranked up to the max. It's rare enough that my 4 year old and I always burst out laughing when it happens.

norir• 3 years ago

I expect few will be using/working on the linux kernel in 30-50 years.

mchaver2• 3 years ago

It isn't necessarily software, but algorithms will likely last a long time. Euclid's algorithm and the sieve of Eratosthenes are still around. Researchers are still developing new ones. Just like building techniques may outlive the buildings that were created in their shadows.

_glass• 3 years ago

But the thing is, that the ghost of the code lives on. Many times I saw specific database designs, and technical decisions all taken to accommodate a solution that didn't exist for a decade or so.

cxr2• 3 years ago

I find myself thinking that maybe if I’d been in civil engineering or something then I’d be building stuff that lasts, but speaking to people who’ve worked a long time in construction has taught me that it’s the same there.

Right. People who assume otherwise aren't spending much time browsing the relevant subjects on Wikipedia or historical registers or just paying attention to their municipality. Simple demonstration: look into how many Carnegie libraries that were built are now gone versus how many are still around.

WA3• 3 years ago

Why though? Does it really matter if something outlives you by 200 years? 500? On a not-that-long timeline like 10,000 years, nothing lasts. The "cathedral-like" timeline is completely arbitrary I think.

Imho, there’s freedom in accepting that nothing I produce will last a long time.

mirror_neuron• 3 years ago

I agree with your takeaway message, but the timeline isn’t completely arbitrary. From the perspective of humans appreciating things, there’s a difference between something that endures for .01x vs. 10x a person’s expected lifespan.

generic92034• 3 years ago

That is when you are shooting a car into space. ;)

crabbone• 3 years ago

Because what matters is not the number you can think of, but the scale proportionate to human life / needs.

For somewhat related context: all my life until recently I rented, but now had become a house owner. My strategy with things I bought for daily use was that they were meant to survive until the next move. For many things it wasn't economical to take them with me to the new place. So, for example, I didn't want to buy a "proper" pan / skillet, and was happy with a teflon one just because it would wear off about the time I needed to move again. I could just throw it away and get a new one. Now that I don't intend to move, I'd choose to buy things that last, because cost of moving vs cost of garbage cleanup changed.

Now, when it comes to software, it looks like the industry is overwhelmingly motivated by short-term benefits, where, in principle, it shouldn't have been. And this is the surprising part. Lack of vision / organization leads to the situation where we never even try to make things that last. There are millions of e-commerce Web sites in the world, but they are all trash because nobody could spend enough time and effort to make one that was good (so that others could replicate / build on top of it, and also have a good product). We have the most popular OS, that's absolute garbage, both the core and the utilities around it, which is due to shortsightedness and even unwillingness to plan on the part of the developers. Same thing with programming languages, frameworks etc.

So, looping back to your question: why the magnitude matters? -- what matters is how your own planning compares to the lifespan of your product. Many times in my career I was in the situation where I was building an already broken thing from a design that was known to be broken from the start or very soon afterwards. And that had nothing to do with changing requirements, it had all to do with the rat race of getting a product to the market before someone else does / investor's money dries out. The idea behind "things that last" is that at least at the time you are making them you cannot see how whatever you are making can be done better (as in more reliable / long-lasting).

In the end of the day, what happens now in programming is that things that shouldn't outlive their projected deadlines do, or, predictably, die very fast. But we don't have any section in the industry that builds things to last. We just keep stuffing the attic with worn-out teflon pans.

Compare this to, for example, painters, who despite knowing that most of their work will likely be lost and forgotten, still aspire to produce "immortal" works of art, and if a picture takes a lifespan or more to make, then so be it. (In the past, some works of art were carried out by generations of artists, especially, when it comes to books where scribes were succeeded by their children who'd continue writing the book after their parents death).

cableshaft• 3 years ago

Games seem to have a longer shelf-life, or at least tend to be passed around for longer. Some of my Flash games from 15 years ago are still being passed around game torrents and still playable on Newgrounds, and the console games I worked on are still playable in emulators and part of rom collections (and the one physical game I worked on, a PSP game, is still available to buy used on Amazon).

Now, how many people are actively playing those games? Probably very few people. But at least it's still there when people get the urge, or decide to play through a collection.

emehex• 3 years ago

If there’s a software equivalent of a Cathedral then I still haven’t found it.

Actually you have. It’s HN! The website that hasn’t changed in decades… used by the most tech savvy people in the world!

cameronh90• 3 years ago

Consider constructions that have survived thousands of years such as the Tarr Steps or Stonehenge, or more recent constructions such as roman roads, Dunfermline Abbey or St Bartholemew's Hospital.

These sorts of constructions have been repaired and re-set hundreds of times over their existence, and have sometimes gone through periods of destruction during war and natural disasters, disrepair then subsequent periods of restoration and reuse. At a certain point, very little or nothing of the original construction really remains, but you can nevertheless draw a line through hundreds or thousands of years of history.

Software may be more like this: continually rebuilt and maintained, but still physically or philosophically related back to some original construction. Nobody uses Multics any more, but almost everything in use today is derived from it in some way.

kiliantics• 3 years ago

To your point about buildings, I wish we considered the "technical debt" of our society's built infrastructure more. It seems we went very wrong with this habit of building and rebuilding on such short cycles, especially on large projects that have much longer lasting consequences on the more important infrastructure of our natural ecosystems. All that carbon burned to extract, produce, and transport building materials. All those sprawling roadways built over habitats and forcing people into unsustainable patterns of living, burning more carbon in their day to day to get around. This debt needs to be measured and it needs to be addressed with high priority.

SoftTalker3• 3 years ago

printing from the browser was its own fun nightmare

Remember Crystal Reports? Oh god, the pain. The pain.

spo81rty• 3 years ago

I got hired for a job specifically because I knew crystal reports! I don't miss that.

Kon-Peki• 3 years ago

I got hired for a job because I was willing to learn to program on OpenVMS. I'd never heard of it, but asked the interviewer "it's a lot like UNIX, right?". He looked at me, waited 5 or 10 seconds, and said "no." Oh well, I passed their C and SQL tests, they weren't going to let me go that easily.

I'll probably retire when they finally retire it, but at the rate they're going I may beat them to it. I won't miss it, but I won't regret it either.

comte7092• 3 years ago

Remember? If only.

I work outside of tech. We still use it.

nabogh• 3 years ago

Yep still kicking in the water industry in Australia. Glad I left that behind

HNDen212• 3 years ago

I used that with classic asp as well as with ColdFusion :-) Eventually SQL Server Reporting Service replaced that in places I worked

irrational• 3 years ago

I’ve worked on the same website for 20+ years. Recently we were informed that the site was being shutdown and we would be reassigned to other teams. On the one hand, as long as they are still paying my exceedingly well, do I really care what I am working on? On the other hand, it is a bit painful seeing 20+ years worth of work being deleted.

SoftTalker3• 3 years ago

I've been doing this for over 30 years. Not only have I seen years of my work deleted, I've also seen large fractions of the rest of it never even used.

anonzzzies4• 3 years ago

I've also seen large fractions of the rest of it never even used

These were some of my favourite as a young freelancer (long time ago): they'd pay me $90/hr to write stacks and stacks of code with our small parents-garage team and when we finished, we demoed to the client who were very happy. But instead of having to wait for bugs, fixes and addition, we just got a new assignment after learning 'great job, but this is no longer needed'. Now I find it painful, but back then we could just focus on 'new things' like that. It didn't happen often, but there were a few large ones that I remember well.

FrustratedMonky2• 3 years ago

Everyone one that has counter examples thinking they prove the opposite, are just not waiting long enough. All the kids think they will be young forever. Can't blame MS for new JS libraries every month, or a new language released every month. This web site is dedicated to people showing off things they created, which replace something that turns into debt, and in turn also become flavor of the month.

Yes, biased old man that saw 30 years of code get replaced with the latest "thing that kind of works like the old thing, but not really as good, but we have to do it to keep up with technology or we'll have debt". I've seen old VB6 apps fulfill a business need just as well as anything written in a full LAMP stack that takes a team to implement. (not that I'd ever use VB6, but hey, it did a job).

Take me out back of the shed and end it quick while I'm hunched over programming something cool.

asdfman1234• 3 years ago

It’s so weird, I used to be much more of STEM triumphalist, the kind of person who used to think the past was evil and the future can’t come fast enough.

I wouldn’t consider myself conservative by any means but increasingly in 30s I’m beginning to think everyone needs to stop messing with stuff and accept imperfection.

riffraff• 3 years ago

As the adage goes, things that are new when you're a kid are the norm, things that are new when you're a young person are exciting, things that are new when you're older are unnecessary, confusing, or scary.

It's true for everyone in every subject I'm afraid:)

revelio11• 3 years ago

That's the usual path of becoming conservative as you grow up. Or phrased another way, becoming normal. The training process humans go through leads to a lot of weird biases, just like how RLHF contributes to models getting bad ideas as well as good.

For example, you spend years in school being instructed as efficiently as possible in the one right way to do things that was already discovered. You are only rarely or never shown the messy process of trial and error needed to get there, and many really big errors are hardly covered at all (the history of communism didn't even get a look-in when I was at school!).

Another: you're instructed near exclusively by specialists, who are definitionally always right (if you argue with the teacher, you lose).

Yet another: as you progress through the system, you're rewarded as the ideas you handle get more complex. You aren't rewarded for simplicity. You are also rewarded for bullshitting, because just like RLHF, exams don't award points for saying "I don't know" but they can award points for a lucky guess.

These sorts of systems inevitably lead to an assumption that progress is linear, mistakes rare, complexity intrinsically has value, that expertise is nearly infallible, that guessing is OK if you don't know and the situation seems important etc. The longer one spends in education the further from reality these intuitions become, until you reach academia and become a public intellectual who produces the most complex/radical ideas possible based on educated guessing and then ignores whether they work or not.

Life outside the training environment eventually starts to correct these false ideas. You see how many things are tried that fail, how nuanced and ambiguous the value of ideas really is, how complexity blows up in people's faces due to problems they didn't anticipate and so on. You start to value incrementalism, evolutionary processes, systems that gather and aggregate the wisdom of the crowds. You become less impressed with ivory tower intellectuals who think they got it all figured out in advance on a blackboard. You become conservative, and end up railing against the young radicals who have some bright idea for reshaping society by force.

contravariant• 3 years ago

For better or worse STEM in the English speaking world is still slightly stuck in the empiricist mindframe where inventing new technology and discovering new things by observation is the main method of advancement.

This creates a bit of a blind spot for stuff like mathematics where a good idea can continue to be used and be improved on for ages, or in physics where some of the most groundbreaking stuff in the 20th century was not found by observation but by thought experiment.

There's a lot that can be gained by recognising and reusing the same good idea for centuries, but it is not really 'progress' in the 'discovering / building new stuff' sense.

Klonoar• 3 years ago

There's a difference in the modern era with the term "conservative", and you may find the term "reserved" fits what you're describing here better.

I wouldn't consider myself conservative by any means, but I do find myself more reserved in my decision making - I'll take a bit more time to come to a decision rather than firing from the hip, etc.

ly3xqhl8g9• 3 years ago

If you don't want to be replaced you must solve real issues, like centering a div vertically. Joke aside, the good part of LLMs replacing the programming jobs is that programming can become fully an art [1], such as calligraphy or manual woodworking [2].

[1] Was looking at another HN thread, CS 61B Data Structures, Spring 2023 UC Berkeley, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35957811 and in one of the videos, Lecture 27 - Software Engineering I, https://youtu.be/fHEVKqYb9x8?t=387 the professor says "Programming is an act of almost pure creativity"

[2] Japanese Joinery, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-ODWGUfBEM

noobermin• 3 years ago

It isn't necessarily a cycle, a lot of the issue is just a cultural issue with software development. You can change culture, however slowly, it can change.

WesolyKubeczek2• 3 years ago

It's a good thing if the environment around your VB6 stuff can still work with it, or accept it. Many systems get replaced when the substrate they run on is no longer supported as in "won't run on any hardware still in its warranty cycle or with parts available", or everything around has changed and the layer of glue needed to keep the old system alive and talking to everything else has grown to be prohibitively complex and expensive and is now more like a load-bearing structure by itself. If you can replace it and also fire warm bodies who used to keep it alive by being the irreplaceable wizards with arcane knowledge and job security, it just might be a net win.

I hear tales about several layers of emulators the sources for which are forever lost, with the bottommost of them running some very mission critical early COBOL or ALGOL-69 (or Lisp, who knows) code written back in the days when it had been that newfangled thing young guns liked, and which no one now can reimplement today (maybe because elves have died out from smog and the golden age is over), but they may be bunk.

arvinsim• 3 years ago

Seeing the cyclic nature of things after 12 years of programming, I am focusing on the solving the domain aspects of a problem rather than code.

I will leave that to juniors who probably appreciate doing the coding.

cabaalis• 3 years ago

I have found my doppleganger. The exact same technologies, progression, I even wrote a VIN scanning app for car dealers myself. My mind is blown.

nurettin2• 3 years ago

I started with 6510 assembly. I have 25 year old delphi apps. But nodejs and go hypes are also 10+ years old. If you haven't learned, maybe you are stuck on purpose.

kragen6• 3 years ago

a thing most of these have in common is that they're proprietary, so the users are dependent on the companies that own them for enhancements, bug fixes, and ports to new platforms. this is a recipe for wasting your time

visual basic, asp, coldfusion, foxpro, activex, flash, and silverlight, windows ce, asp.net, webforms? proprietary, proprietary, proprietary, proprietary, proprietary, proprietary, proprietary, and proprietary

and mostly pretty dead as a result

how about the non-proprietary things in the list? html, css, js, fortran, java, ruby, and rails are all just about as alive as they were 10 or 20 years ago, if not more so, except that rails didn't exist then

the exceptions are perl, objective-c, and the js frameworks. perl, ember, and backbone aren't going to disappear anytime soon but they will likely continue to stagnate. but unlike silverlight or windows ce, you can probably run your perl and backbone and angular and react and swift code 10 or 20 or 30 years from now on whatever platform people like then

unless the platform is centrally controlled by an owner who forbids it, so try to avoid platforms like that

(java applets were already dead 20 years ago, and soap sucked from the beginning, so these examples are out of place)

there is certain knowledge with a very limited half-life. but hopefully you aren't spending most of your time learning react apis or wasm instructions or editor keystrokes or chromium bugs, but rather general principles that transfer across domains. algorithms, reasoning, type theory, math, writing skills, hierarchical decomposition, scientific debugging, generative testing, heuristic search, that kind of thing. a lot of that stuff goes back before computing

and most code has an even shorter lifespan than the knowledge we use to build it. which is as it should be: most code is written to solve a problem that won't last decades or even years, but it's still profitable for companies to have it written. modifying a big system is harder than modifying a small one, so it's better to maintain just the code you need for today's problems. writing code and throwing it away is mostly fine

still, i've spent my career on free-software tools, and their half-life seems to be a lot longer, about 25 years. i reviewed some of the stuff i'm using right now in a comment on here 10 days ago, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35829663

i know a guy whose preferred programming editor is ex. the non-full-screen version of vi

turtleyacht• 3 years ago

whose preferred programming editor is ex

It's intriguing, because that implies he can work on most things in a way that "fits inside one's head."

Do you know if he extensively calls out to external tools, custom aliases, and the like?

I imagine there is some fullscreen mode where he can--temporarily--suspend ex, make use of custom sourced mappings, and the output is piped back into his editing session.

It's hard to find certain tidbits, so I'm always glad for even the smallest details.

Thank-you.

johncowan• 3 years ago

I'm the ex(1) troglodyte in question. I don't use custom aliases, because I have had all editing tasks hardwired into my brain for decades, ever since I dropped Teco for ed and then ex. (Ed is the standard editor, but I'm willing to trade off a little standardosity for added convenience.) If the te command had been widely available, I might have stayed with it and not used ex, but that day has passed.

I do pipe stuff through various commands more or less constantly. I most often pipeline through awk, sed, sort, uniq, cat -n, etc. I have a back-burner project to write a meta-editor that works by pipelining and maintains a whole persistent undo-redo history.

revelio11• 3 years ago

Not very convincing. The world is full of abandoned open source projects and companies that maintain proprietary platforms near indefinitely. Angular 1 is dead, Python 2 is dead, Perl is dead, GTK 1-3 are dead, old KDE is dead, X11 is dying, but you can still buy supported versions of Delphi, COBOL and even VB6 is still somewhat maintained by MS [1]. ActiveX was killed by browsers (open source), the underlying proprietary APIs are very much not dead.

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/visualst...

kragen6• 3 years ago

it's not at all difficult to run code written for angular 1, python 2, gtk 2, gtk 3, or x11; you don't even have to port them, you can just run them, and i do every day. it doesn't even require any effort

contrast that to applications written for silverlight, activex, or flash

with respect to gtk 1, you sort of have a point, but gtk 2 was released in 02002, and it's usually not hard to port gtk 1 apps to gtk 2 (and almost all of them have already been ported). and i'm not sure what you mean about 'old kde'

free software licenses provide strong legal protections to users to do whatever is necessary to maintain and extend the software they depend on and share that with others, and in practice they do, and the consequence is that the hype cycle is much slower and less destructive

jgb1984• 3 years ago

I guess I was lucky: I started 15 years ago doing web development using python and django on linux, which is still my toolset today ;)

anonzzzies4• 3 years ago

Nice. I was a less smart person who wanted to learn, like everyone does these days it seems (but not back then), the latest and the greatest. My Django projects of 10-15 years are running fine in production and get updates in their respective companies. All the rest I've written has all kinds of issues. And Django is still relevant, just not hip. Should've stuck with it.

albertopv• 3 years ago

Absolutely, that's why I'm trying to move to management, to leverage on my non tech experience. I'm 40 and younger colleagues are faster learner if not already "expert" on new stuff. I often have to "forget" what and how I learned old things to learn new techs, the effort can easily double.

hgs3• 3 years ago

Don't define your career by the technologies you've used, but rather by the problems you've solved and the knowledge and experience you've acquired.

gravypod• 3 years ago

One of the biggest challenges we had at Stackify was getting stuck on an old version of Elasticsearch. At one point, they made some significant changes to how it worked that were not entirely backward compatible.

I am glad I am not the only one who hit this roadblock with Elasticsearch. It felt like always trying to play catch up.

richardw2• 3 years ago

One company I worked at had heavy SQL Server stored procs. I was pretty dismissive initially ("don't put business logic in the database layer!") but grew to understand that really those were the gold. The first versions were written in 1997 and by the time I arrived that code was bulletproof. There were about 4 UI technologies over 20+ years (VB, ASP, Forms + asp.net), but the procs were the same shape with thousands of edits for edge cases. Changing UX for the new hotness was massively de-risked and faster because the procs were solid.

CTO's change. They started replacing it with a "proper" ERP system around the time I left and it's been nearly 6 years of pain. Joel spaketh: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

(As usual: of course you can break the rule, but first deeply understand the risk you're taking.)

toadi• 3 years ago

think around 2010 I worked for the one and only payment processor in my country. All ATM tx, POS, online were handled. The back office handling was done with Agile and Java. It was a pile of garbage. The frontend was still a massive mainframe. It had 10k+ COBOL program running it. With comment changelog on top from somewhere end of the 70s. The code review guy was doing this for 20 years and could tell if things would be slow and not scale all the Tx with just reading the code. Until today they never replaced it and is still running on it.

sometimes you don't need fancy new stuff. Just learn the things very well at your disposal. Heck sed, awk and bunch of simple cli tools still work well on Big data sets :)

mongol• 3 years ago

Yeah, when I started in this field 20+ years ago, the wisdom I learned was that it was bad practise to tie yourself to the DB like that. But just like you I can see the value in doing it. SQL may be one of the most futureproof languages there are.

richardw2• 3 years ago

Exactly. Code you learned a decade ago is absolutely useful today.

When I started I outsourced SQL to the DBA’s or an ORM. Not since that team! It’s been a semi-secret weapon for me because most people ignore it.

lutorm• 3 years ago

20 years ago I was mostly writing C++ for work. I still am.

ThePhysicist• 3 years ago

I think it's normal. Some systems I've built were quite sticky in the sense that they started as prototypes to be scrapped once we figure out the "real" system architecture, and 8 years later they're still in use and integrated into dozens of business processes, so hard to replace.

In general, looking back at old code I wrote it seems my solutions were better when I was more naive / less experienced, as I would often go for the immediately obvious and simple solution (which is the right one in 90 % of cases). Working many years in software development and reading HN seems to have made me more insecure regarding software, as I tend to over-engineer systems and constantly doubt / second-guess my technical decisions. So one thing I'm actively trying to do is to go back to using simpler approaches again, and caring less about perfect code.

lambdaloop• 3 years ago

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2730/

dsign• 3 years ago

Plot twist: biological evolution works like that too.

mattmanser• 3 years ago

I've taken the opposite lesson to you, I now keep everything super simple and am quite conservative on adopting new concepts.

It's because I've so often seen the cycle here of "X is brilliant" and then 2 years later "how we switched off X and saved millions of manhours!".

rickdeckard• 3 years ago

Sounds like you took the same lesson

lfkdev• 3 years ago

So, the same lesson

lastangryman• 3 years ago

as I tend to over-engineer systems and constantly doubt / second-guess my technical decisions

I find this as well. I also think that there is a sub-conscious fear as you become more senior that you need to justify that with more elaborate/complex solutions. In my experience there are also a lot of people in software who never come out of the other side of that view and constantly equate "complex" with "good". Being in an environment with lots of people like this makes it hard sometimes. Ultimately you need to trust yourself and do what you think best. If it goes wrong, at least you know you did it for the right reasons.

sgtnoodle7• 3 years ago

Anyone with young children may be familiar with Peppa Pig, an animated British show. Daddy Pig is an expert when it comes to concrete. A far off land sends for him to inspect their concrete, and he travels by overnight train. In the dining car, his breakfast is catered to better than royalty. When he gets there, he taps a block of concrete with his pen, declares it good, and the king and everyone rejoices.

In many ways, that's what it's actually like when you've punched through and become a true expert in your field. Important problems are solved with an overnight sleep, a cup of coffee, and a few careful taps. By the time you get there you're insane, but at least you're offered both coffee and orange juice if you ask.

flippinburgers2• 3 years ago

I don't know what this means about my personal (in-)ability but I've been developing for years (15+) and I feel like all of the other developers I have to deal with are constantly turning to weird, convoluted solutions to problems. I have also never been able to get past the first step in the google interview process so I have this deep, frustrated insecurity. And people constantly like to point out how simple my stuff is in a tone that suggests that is a bad thing.

My hatred of the complex solutions is so deep that I just suffer through all of the commentary silently.

themoonisachees• 3 years ago

Definitely my experience as well. My dark horse is trying to optimize for speed when i don't need it, and not doing it when i do.

When i was more naive, i'd just stick with the first solution that worked. Now, i find that i'm always worried that someone is going to try to input a 30000-line csv in my tool and that i must use the slightly faster way because it's the right thing to do.

One of my tools to prevent this has been the non-accepted answers from stackoverflow. I find that they are generally of similar quality to the accepted answer, but that because they are less tailored to the (necessarly) different problem, they fit less and have a lesser chance of being accepted despite being more useful to more people.

Tade02• 3 years ago

I started doing the same thing out of impatience.

Recent example: I have a side project with Typescript on the backend and frontend which also uses an Audio Worklet, so it loads a JS file at runtime to be run in a separate process, isolated from anything else.

I also have a class which I need to use in all three mentioned pieces.

Three years ago I would spend hours trying to figure out how to make this work with the build system so as to not have duplicated code and maybe eventually arrive at a mostly working solution before the e.g. frontend framework maintainers update their build system version which may or may not break something.

This time I just copied the damn file everywhere - the Audio Worklet got the compiled JS output pasted at the start. It's a class, it works and I have maybe one idea what changes I could make there in the future at which point I'm just going to copy everything again.

intelVISA2• 3 years ago

I think most of us go through that journey.

Can be hard to decouple overengineered messes from Good Software: an idiot admires complexity, et cetera.

chaostheory• 3 years ago

Apparently, we’re making either Tibetan mandala art or Theseus’s Ship

Smaug123• 3 years ago

Insert Pirates of the Caribbean meme. "This is without doubt the worst ship that's ever floated." "But it does float." There's no inherent shame in Ship-of-Theseusing something to accommodate changing requirements! Complete rewrites are hard and take forever!

chriscappuccio• 3 years ago

The dude equivocates programming in Perl to programming in FoxPro, both are simply "deprecated" and "hard to find." Is this true?

senko3• 3 years ago

Perl is not so much deprecated, more like the community performed collective jump off the cliff with Perl 6.

If you think Python 2->3 transition was ugly, you haven't been watching that slow-mo trainwreck.

Jorengarenar7• 3 years ago

Wait, wasn't Perl 6 rebranded as new language Raku?

biorach• 3 years ago

The guy way overused "deprecated" in that article.

Perl 5 is alive and well, and while not the most actively developed of languages still has a steady trickle of small improvements.

It's installable in all major linux distros and you can probably get code from 2 decades ago running without much hassle.

Most people would shudder at the thought of starting a new project in it, but if you need to keep a legacy codebase going the community have your back for many many years to come.

carl_sandland• 3 years ago

Maybe implementations have much less value than has been assumed and paid for by stakeholders over the decades. If code is a throw-away implementation detail of some model/abstraction then why are we getting paid so much money again? Really makes me worry about generative AI approaches; just as well there is no universal very high level modelling language everyone loves yet. I think this is why working on games is nice; it's not technical debt it's just a toy, maybe everything is.

Our cathedrals are surely [L,U]inux and the C programming language, HTML has done pretty well too.

kqr5• 3 years ago

Don't confuse short-lived for low value. Software solving the right problems has incredibly high ROI, even accounting for high programmer salaries.

We're not getting that money for generating realistic-looking syntax, but for discussing with stakeholders and choosing appropriate designs with an eye for both the bigger picture and details. These are language-and-library-independent things, mostly, and incredibly difficult work.

You may be able to give an LLM directions to do something like what you would have been able to do, but the money is not in the parts the LLM is able to accomplish, it's in the direction you give it.

NikhilVerma• 3 years ago

I've been programming professionally close to 16 years. Here is what I can remember of my code:

# Job 1 (3 yrs)

  - Worked on around three products, all shut down, code probably lives in some SVN archive.
  - Learnt advanced JS, PHP, MySQL, Photoshop, jQuery etc (skills mostly relevant)

# Job 2 (1.6 years)

  - Project never launched, code never saw the light of the day. Probably lives in some Git archive.
  - Learnt a few in-house frameworks (irrelevant) but also leant Git (relevant)

# Job 3 (8.5 years)

  - Worked on several products, the biggest one is still active and seeing millions of users weekly. Rest got shut down and live in a Git repo.
  - Learnt about some inhouse frameworks (irrelevant). React, React Native (skills still relevant)

# Job 4 (2 years)

  - Actively working
  - Learnt Vue (skills still relevant)

QuadrupleA3• 3 years ago

https://phrasegenerator.com/ , one of my first web projects, has survived since 1996 (almost 30 years, wow). It's definitely required a few "tech debt collections" - the original was in ColdFusion, the hot stuff of the time. Then an asp.net / xml phase when that was cool. Now hopefully a boundless future of stability and modernity with python and JavaScript. At least until the world sunsets any pre-4 python versions, and browser JavaScript is thrown away in favor of pure WASM. But seeing as we still support the <font> tag, I've got some time ...

bboygravity• 3 years ago

This is what blows my mind about web stuff.

You needed to completely change framework and even languages 3 times in not even 30 years?! Just to keep things maintainable?

I don't feel that it's the same for other area's of programming: desktop apps, embedded stuff. Maybe I'm wrong...

z3t4• 3 years ago

A website made in 1999 still work today, the browser is like an OS and the concensus is that you should never break userland, eg. You don't break the web. Then there are as many frameworks that there are developers.

revelio11• 3 years ago

Sure it is.

Win16 -> Win32 (only partly backwards compatible) -> .NET WinForms -> WPF -> WinUI 2 -> WinUI 3 (with of course Java and Electron being in the mix too)

... or ...

Motif -> GTK 1 -> 2 -> 3 -> 4 (all backwards incompatible)

... or ...

macOS Classic -> Carbon -> Cocoa/ObjC -> Cocoa/Swift

The browser is actually one of the more stable environments out there with a lot of the churn being on the server side and optional JS frameworks as people oscillate around trying to figure out the best way to wrangle a document renderer into being an app platform.

emodendroket4• 3 years ago

I will say that the core idea of SOAP/WCF services is honestly pretty sound. There is no sensible reason (imo, anyway) that everyone needs to be using stringly-typed data and manually parsing REST responses when the underlying code all has type definitions. I get that it came with headaches (and I suppose people wanted to work in untyped languages) but jettisoning the entire idea of generating the client feels like it was throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

edejong4• 3 years ago

But you know what happened to SOAP? It was smothered by its own success. The allure of interoperability and extensibility attracted everyone and their cat to the party. With so many stakeholders involved, it became a classic case of "too much design by committee." It's like trying to paint a masterpiece by having a thousand artists contribute strokes—chaos ensues.

And let's not forget the influx of junior developers during that time. I mean, we can't blame them entirely, can we? SOAP standards were complex and enormous. It's no wonder they struggled to grasp the underlying paradigms. We had an army of fresh faces flooding the scene, and the sheer complexity overwhelmed them.

So, SOAP ended up being the baby tossed out with the bathwater. It had its merits, but the challenges it faced were just too much to bear. Still, it's worth reflecting on its strengths and the lessons we can learn. Maybe someday we'll find a way to strike a balance between the elegant core idea and the practical realities of implementation.

emodendroket4• 3 years ago

It's not like people don't find a way to screw up REST semantics and make that complicated anyway.

Faint• 3 years ago

It ended up being so complex, that none of the implementations were up to spec, and hardly any 2 implementations talked to each other out of the box. i.e. the exact opposite it was meant to do.

easton• 3 years ago

We are pretty much right back where we started with OpenAPI. You can generate a client (or a server) from this YAML file that a lot of frameworks can generate for you from your code, and the file also describes the types. I wouldn't say it is much simpler though, the schemas can get super complicated (as can configuring the darn API Gateway people inevitably think is necessary).

keithnz• 3 years ago

weird, tons of my 20 year old code is still around, but my 30 year old code, except for embedded stuff, is likely dead.

edejong4• 3 years ago

As I think about all the technologies that have come and gone, it's good to find some sturdy rocks as well. Here are some techs that withstood the test of time in my personal journey:

* Simple, but reliable file formats: My old photos collection is 25 years old (jpeg) and I still look at them occasionally.

* My influxdb/grafana/openhab setup is now 8 years old and has been operational with only minimal hickups.

* Some home automation scripts I wrote have endured for 8 years now.

* My Linux/Unix knowledge is 26 years old (although much has changed since Slackware).

* My C and C++ programming language knowledge is 28 years old (although I rarely use it anymore, because of Rust). Occasionally it is useful during debugging performance problems in kernels.

* My knowledge of distributed systems (stuff like leader election, distributed and centralised algorithms) is 15 years old. It is still very relevant to understand both existing systems and to evaluate new systems.

It is crucial to distinguish the knowledge that stands the test of time from the fleeting trends. And finally then there are the non-technical skills, which pay off even more. Effective communication, negotiation skills, organisational finesse, inspirational leadership, adept management... These are the true constants that support us during our professional life.

kqr5• 3 years ago

Is jpeg really that simple or did it just happen to win the popularity contest big time?

deepsun• 3 years ago

I have projects at my company in the old version of Angular that is a major technical debt we must upgrade.

My favorite job -- to refactor something old. If only businesses wanted to pay for it.

anonzzzies4• 3 years ago

It's mine too. But it really depends on the time that has passed. Currently I'm redoing a 2 decade old project; it's not refactoring as that would be basically impossible. It's just a rewrite. Which I like too, but less, as now I need to really dive deep in the business side of things as decisions need to be taken to properly incorporate all the crap that was taped on over 20 years. Or, worse, make a whole new project. Then i'm out.

secretsatan• 3 years ago

From the article "Swift is another excellent example of how fast development tools change. As soon as Apple released Swift, it was hard to justify writing code in Objective C anymore. I am sure there are some use cases where it is still needed. But Swift is significantly easier to develop and a major evolutionary step forward.

I would argue that any apps written in Objective C are probably technical debt now"

I switched to Swift a few years ago after many years of obj-c, at first I was reluctant as there were still many things I liked about obj-c but Swift won me over. Thought I would never touch obj-c much until I had to integrate a cpp library, I can't believe how much I forgot in such a short time. It was interesting to find out how to structure the obj-c code to translate nicely to swift though.

satisfice• 3 years ago

A better way to think about technical debt is to understand that what WAS technical debt-- the residual tasks necessary to make something reasonably inexpensive to maintain and improve that come from kludging things together under time pressure-- gets FORGIVEN when the whole technology on which a product is based becomes obsolete.

Products don't become technical debt, they merely depreciate along with any aassociated technical debt. This is why I don't like the term technical debt: it implies something that must be paid back. But you don't have to pay back the "debt" on product that will be completely replaced anyway.

When I have a long list of todo items to perfect my work for a client, and then they run out of money for the whole project and end my contract. I don't say "oh no, now I'll never dot those i's and cross those t's!" I say "yay, I will cross everything off my todo list forever."

Shorel• 3 years ago

I think looking only at technologies is the wrong approach.

The underlying concepts stay the same. Your own experience is much improved.

Some old technology gets replaced? I celebrate the demise of Flash.

I am not Flash or even a Flash developer. I am a software developer.

I am a bit sad Dlang is not more used? Yes, I am. But I am not a "Dlang" developer.

Tying yourself to some technology seems self limiting.

self_awareness• 3 years ago

Whole BSD's /bin directory disagrees with this thesis that everything eventually becomes technical debt.

If you pick new technologies, don't be surprised that they will be quickly overridden by something else. Pick stable and boring frameworks and languages. I.e. lots of old Java Swing applications runs on today computers without recompilation.

peteforde2• 3 years ago

It's so weird that you'd even consider putting Rails in the same category as FoxPro, even as a theoretical.

Rails is kicking ass. A huge number of people are coming back from bloated JS frameworks to realize that Rails just keeps getting better every year.

Hotwire and similar technologies make the argument for SPAs look very questionable.

And let's not forget where we are; over 75% of the raw gross value created by YC-backed companies use Rails. So it seems like Rails is only popular with successful startups.

xiphias2• 3 years ago

You don’t need to use a bloated JS framework.

I think TypeScript is important because of how bad JS operators are defined (operator matrix is just plain stupid, throwing error would be a better option), but everything else is optional. Otherwise JS is good enough.

On the other hand hotwire (moving HTML around) costs real latency and money to mobile users with data plans. Since when it’s better than just executing code on the (for most people strong enough mobile) device with close to 0 cost?

peteforde2• 3 years ago

I fail to understand how shuttling JSON back and forth is superior to sending the HTML fragment(s) that have changed.

JSON needs to be parsed and in 99% of scenarios, this blocks the main thread.

Once the JSON has been converted to a data structure and passed around through your SPA's state logic and template rendering, what do you do? You convert it to HTML and render it.

No matter how you slice it, sending HTML fragments and updating the DOM is faster and lighter than sending JSON. My app is already displayed and responsive before your app has even started parsing.

The above doesn't even address the complexity and additional failure modes that you take on when you have to handle edge cases and errors, all of which is quite literally reimplementing functionality that the browser and HTTP already give you.

SPA supremacy is a group delusion mind virus. Thank goodness the pendulum is finally swinging back.

jononor• 3 years ago

Paraphrasing... "There are only two kinds of code: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses"

Tade02• 3 years ago

The other day my friend from a previous job linked me to a PR I did 7 years ago, which he accepted, that introduces a regression which went unnoticed all this time and that is probably the oldest piece of code I've written that's provably in use today.

The whole project will eventually disappear in history in favour of a rewrite which is around since before the pandemic.

TacticalCoder• 3 years ago

My entire career is now technical debt, or the code has been deprecated.

My fellow dev often laugh when I tell them that instead of looking at all the long dead techs that are not useful to me anymore, my way to feel good is to look back at all the long dead techs that I didn't bother to learn.

And, geez, is the graveyard huge.

Java Applets were also a big thing once upon a time. They were slow, and having the correct version of Java installed on your computer was always a mess.

Java applets were never that big. They didn't work very well (for the reason you mention) and weren't ubiquitous. They also nearly all looked like shit.

But Java isn't disappearing anytime soon. Java is huge and it'll have a legacy dwarfing COBOL big big times. Many may not find Java sexy but the JVM is one heck of a serious piece of tech, with amazing tooling available.

And most devs hating on Java are using an IDE written mainly in Java (all the JetBrains ones): the irony of that one gives me the giggles.

Did anyone in the mid to late nineties / early 2000s really discover Java and Java applets and thought: "Java applets is the tech that'll catch on, I'll invest in that" and not invest in Java itself? To me Java was the obvious winner (not that it was that great but it was clear to me Sun was on to something). And, well, compared to the other dead tech, at least if you learned Java applets you got to learn Java too so it's not all lost.

hobbescotch• 3 years ago

I learned Java Applets in school in 2009 and it was clear to me then that they were sort of… awkward. Java itself is fine and I still do a little Java work from time time and it’s a breath of fresh air from the daily python work.

ascar2• 3 years ago

And most devs hating on Java are using an IDE written mainly in Java (all the JetBrains ones): the irony of that one gives me the giggles.

Reminds me of so many devs hating on Ruby and the number of times I heard that Ruby isn't used for anything relevant, while the huge majority of them either use GitHub or Gitlab for their work.

OJFord3• 3 years ago

Does anyone say that? It's out of vogue but surely there must still be plenty of RoR about the web. Shopify too.

Ruby not on Rails 'not used for anything relevant' is maybe a bit more defensible. Not sure it matters/what the point is though.

Sai_• 3 years ago

Even more than Java Applets, I remember looking at Java Beans and being heavily, mightily underwhelmed.

negamax4• 3 years ago

And most devs hating on Java are using an IDE written mainly in Java (all the JetBrains ones): the irony of that one gives me the giggles.

Don't forget Confluence and JIRA and all Atlassian products. Minecraft too. I facepalm when people say Java this and that

Hamuko• 3 years ago

Who are the people who belong to "I hate Java" and "I love Jira" sets? I'd love to see that Venn diagram.

ilyt8• 3 years ago

They don't hate it coz it's in Java...

OJFord3• 3 years ago

You can absolutely tell Jira is written in Java and not in a good way. I guessed the first time I went through one of the '...' > 'Move'/'Clone'/'Convert to subtask' flows.

cyber_kinetist• 3 years ago

Minecraft is actually a really good example of the opposite. Maybe some might hate the Java edition of Minecraft because of its frequent GC pauses, but the new performant Minecraft Bedrock written in C++ isn’t really that popular because of lackluster mod support.

The reason Minecraft was able to have such a large mod ecosystem (even when it still doesn’t have an official modding API!) is that JVM bytecode is easily reverse-engineerable and extendable (…relatively, compared to fully compiled C++ code). Bedrock actually tried providing a modding API via JS scripting, but it was pretty lackluster in its flexibility and thus users mainly stayed in Java edition for the mods (using robust ecosystems like Spigot/Paper)

DrScientist2• 3 years ago

Yep - Applets never really worked. The problem was the interface between the browser and the applet was buggy.

I wrote a very simple applet in the early days - it leaked memory - nothing I could do.

Also the deployment story - with a single shared version of the JVM ( at a time it was moving quite fast ) in the browser - was an issue.

Quickly decided Applets were dud, but Java itself was fantastic. It's easy to forget what the other options were at the time if you wanted to write complex servers or cross-platform desktop apps.

Lapsa• 3 years ago

irony of that irony is like celebrating you crapped your pants just a bit less than the next guy

lopis• 3 years ago

My fellow dev often laugh when I tell them that instead of looking at all the long dead techs that are not useful to me anymore, my way to feel good is to look back at all the long dead techs that I didn't bother to learn.

I share this sentiment. All my adult life I've been in contact with the "tech-anxious" kind of dev that needs to be up-to-date with all the new frameworks all the time. While I've entertained several new trends, I found it counter-productive to my well-being to focus on more than 1-2 stable stacks at a time. There will always be an order or magnitude more failed frameworks than successful and this perspective keeps me healthy.

Nanana909• 3 years ago

IMO an argument against this is that the benefit though is not in the new tech itself, but different design paradigms it exposes you to and thought patterns you learn.

Even if Rust were to die off tomorrow I’d be happy I invested my time in getting familiar with it as I’ve learned quite a bit about memory management and ways to reason about it.

ilyt8• 3 years ago

And most devs hating on Java are using an IDE written mainly in Java (all the JetBrains ones): the irony of that one gives me the giggles.

The IDE that's written in Java most likely shares nothing with Java ecosystem parts they "hate" (I'm guessing all of the EJB, applets an general 90's Java enterprise stuff). Only irony here is you thinking it is.

The 90's Java was a thing to hate. Running fat complex app server with bunch of code-as-XML for configuration just to run simple API app. IDEs are not doing that (althought Eclipse was a bit of a monster of glued in parts)

Did anyone in the mid to late nineties / early 2000s really discover Java and Java applets and thought: "Java applets is the tech that'll catch on, I'll invest in that" and not invest in Java itself?

...entirety of management it seems, it was the most popular hammer for the problem for quite some time in enterprise. Hell, we still have some less than decade old servers needing java applets for KVM

jen203• 3 years ago

I assure you code as XML has not disappeared from enterprise Java.

abraxas• 3 years ago

Ironically, deployment, management, monitoring and security of a single (even clustered) EJB app server was a much more straightforward affair that today's cloud based Rube Goldberg machines that I encouter in practically every "modern" enterprise app.

watwut3• 3 years ago

The IDE that's written in Java most likely shares nothing with Java ecosystem parts they "hate"

Most vocal java haters I had met were JavaScript programmers who knew basically nothing about Java. Their hate was purely cultural - they learned on discussion forums that they should hate java. But, they had literally zero knowledge whatsoever.

osigurdson2• 3 years ago

> bunch of code-as-XML for configuration

Code as json or yaml is fundamentally the same while being nicer to look at (yaml at least).

pkphilip3• 3 years ago

For the past several years, the Java enterprise development is very, very easy compared to the mess that is node.js nonsense. And if you are not happy with the JEE environment, you can continue to use frameworks like micronaut, quarkus etc.

For instance, in Quarkus, you can have a full REST application in about 12MB of RAM and running on the Graalvm.

In Spring (often looked at a heavy framework), this is the code required to write a full REST endpoint:

@SpringBootApplication @RestController public class DemoApplication {

@GetMapping("/helloworld") public String hello() { return"Hello World!"; } }

_ea1k5• 3 years ago

The IDE that's written in Java most likely shares nothing with Java ecosystem parts they "hate"

IDK, I think the irony is you thinking IDEs wouldn't use those patterns. I bet you'll find tons of weird interfaces and abstractions in IntelliJ. It is a huge and complicated code base.

josephg14• 3 years ago

And most devs hating on Java are using an IDE written mainly in Java (all the JetBrains ones): the irony of that one gives me the giggles.

Guilty as charged! I hate using Java because everything written in java seems to blend into the same indistinguishable swamp of classes with meaningless names, full of methods that constantly find new and interesting ways to obscure what your program is actually trying to do. Debugging very large Java codebases feels like living through Terry Gilliam's 1985 film Brazil.

I think the problem is cultural, not technological. It seems like there's a lot of people in the Java community who still think OO is a great idea. Who think Bob Martin's awful, muddled code examples in Clean Code are something to aspire towards. People who claim the path of enlightenment requires them to replace concrete classes with interfaces - even when those interfaces only have 1 implementation.

Anyone who writes class names like FactoryBuilderFactoryImpl and claims to walk in the light is at best a scoundrel, and at worst a follower of a religion so dark we don't name it in polite company.

This is what makes IntelliJ so impressive. It takes a master craftsman to forge something beautiful from such an unholy material. VS Code pulls off the same feat on top of election. In each case I can't tell whether to be horrified or impressed! Either way, I'm a huge fan.

winrid2• 3 years ago

I feel like if Java had immutability by default it would be such a better language to work with. It is so hard to determine what actually gets modified where in a large Java codebase.

tibbydudeza• 3 years ago

"Anyone who writes class names like FactoryBuilderFactoryImpl and claims to walk in the light is at best a scoundrel, and at worst a follower of a religion so dark we don't name it in polite company."

Awesome quote ... LOL.

davedx• 3 years ago

Bingo!

I’ll never forget working for a tiny startup under an ex Google CTO in 2013 who wrote plain Java code and chose simple libraries. Saying it was a breath of fresh air is an understatement.

Code is culture and culture is code.

klibertp7• 3 years ago

Does anybody know where I can find a good, substantiated, critique of the common Java coding patterns, including on Android? This niche is such a huge mess that simply documenting all the bad things in a single codebase (along with explanation why they're bad) took me a month. It's tiring and mentally draining to do this: every other line of code you read makes you go "Why. Please, just tell me why anybody could ever think good code should look like this". Worse yet, there's hardly a discussion to be found about these things - it's "Uncle Bob" & co and the horde of their followers all the way, no dissenters. It looks like an echo chamber so hermetic that the most basic principles like DRY or YAGNI have a hard time penetrating it.

What is the most painful for me with all this, other than it being 99% self-inflicted and not caused (you could argue it's encouraged by it, but the ultimate cause is the culture) by the language, is the fact that it has infected Kotlin code. Kotlin was built to increase expressive power of the language, doing away with multiple limitations of Java and offering lots of modern-ish features on top of it. The community looks split in half: the Kotlin community tries to get the most out of Kotlin, and the Android community that does anything in their power to make Kotlin back into Java, writing code as if the limitations were still in place and new features didn't exist. I know that the churn and "production readiness" of things on Android generally favors a more conservative approach, but it's still too much. I cry tears of blood every other code review I'm forced to do.

If there's a single, definitive resource that I could point my coworkers to and eventually turn it into enforced guidelines, the author can count on a serious donation from me.

flippinburgers2• 3 years ago

I cannot dislike "clean architecture" enough.

BigJ1211• 3 years ago

Do you know of any well written articles of critique against OO? I've read a few against Clean Code, that actual went over the problems with the actual examples given. Nevertheless I hardly ever see good critiques against the principles themselves.

I'd be interested in reading about it in more detail.

another2another• 3 years ago

'git reset' preserve us from acolytes of Uncle Bob!

Clean Code makes just as much of a mess in .net land too.

marginalia_nu3• 3 years ago

It seems like there's a lot of people in the Java community who still think OO is a great idea

If you're coding in Java, you've better think OO is a great idea. It's an object oriented language. And despite having loosely bolted on FP paradigms, that's not really going to change.

Although I feel most of the criticism against OO is actually more like a critique of the FactoryBuilderFactoryImpl-style application of design patterns, which is something else and really unfashionable today in Java.

goda90• 3 years ago

I've spent most of my programming life working in OOP. I see people critical of it, but I don't know what the alternative is for the kind of stuff I do for my job (not to say I have a choice in changing how we do it). Does anyone know of an open source project that implements a complex GUI app that doesn't use OOP so I can see what that code can look like?

arcbyte3• 3 years ago

I've seen people take Bob Martin's concepts and do some truly awful things with it. Mind-bogglingly awful contortions of concepts into classes in arrangements that have to be sourced from demonic inspiration.

At the same time, I've seen the best code of my entire life formed from his concepts. Code that will last decades, far outlasting the UIs that feed it data or the databases that will store it.

I think the difference is all on whether the developers who wrote it understood that the "concepts" are not meant to be put into code on a 1 for 1 basis. For example, making a AddToDoUseCasePresenterInteractor class is literally taking the concept and making it 1 to 1 in the code. On the other hand, writing domain appropriate code, minimizing accidental complexity, and recognizing the clean code concepts as emerging from groups of classes and methods and packages in a code base leads to really clean, testable, maintainable, and FAST TO WRITE code.

I think the single biggest improvement for java programmers is to group all the classes related to a use case together in the same package - which means STOP MAKING "controller", "service", "model", etc packages where every different unrelated except by use is just dumped. If you're working on a part of the code base you should just have to change classes in one single folder. A new feature should just be a new folder. That change alone speeds up teams by huge factors.

FpUser5• 3 years ago

"It seems like there's a lot of people in the Java community who still think OO is a great idea."

Java is not the only language in existence and the OO is a great idea as well as many other paradigms when not being overused. Problem is with the programmers who learn one language / paradigm and would fight tooth and nails to solve all world problems with it no matter how poor for particular case.

dep_b2• 3 years ago

Anyone who writes class names like FactoryBuilderFactoryImpl and claims to walk in the light is at best a scoundrel, and at worst a follower of a religion so dark we don't name it in polite company.

I have to say I already expected the comments to be good when I read the title but this nugget of pure gold - I would PAY to read comments like this!

ff317• 3 years ago

Someone has to link this here, so it may as well be me :)

https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdo...

denton-scratch• 3 years ago

I think the problem is cultural, not technological.

I'm sure that's true. You don't have to write classes with names like DoubleFactoryFactory; nobody does that in other languages. It's a tribal thing.

What's amusing (to me) is that Java isn't actually object-oriented, because many of the core datatypes aren't objects.

ravenstine5• 3 years ago

Guilty as charged! I hate using Java because everything written in java seems to blend into the same indistinguishable swamp of classes with meaningless names, full of methods that constantly find new and interesting ways to obscure what your program is actually trying to do. Debugging very large Java codebases feels like living through Terry Gilliam's 1985 film Brazil.

That describes just about every codebase I've worked with that relies on object-oriented patterns, which is basically every codebase. This is particularly bad with Java, but as you mentioned, this is a cultural problem and not so much a language problem. I like Java the language, but what kept me away from it was every Java codebase I've seen. Layers upon layers of needless abstraction, overly abstract names, and so much code is meant to describe things rather than a sequence of data changing.

It's not that OO is completely wrong, but it's a meme that we as programmers are refusing to shake. It's like people are still getting taught OO in college courses by programmers who haven't worked professionally in decades, and those students are still going into the real world thinking that everything's gotta be object oriented. And usually what OO ends up meaning is having classes and inheritance and "this" and mutability, as opposed to having objects that pass each other information. The latter doesn't need classes, or inheritance, or any of the other similar features in programming languages. But if you've got to write to a file, then you've gotta make a class that wraps the file system functions, right? /s

tracker14• 3 years ago

I have similar feelings on the .Net space as well. It's not the language (C#) or the platform so much as the "Enterprise" community.

lloeki• 3 years ago

Around here, e.g banks are big on Java, and banks are not going away anytime soon, nor is their Java code, which represented huge decade-scale efforts to move away from COBOL on IBM machines (both of which seemingly not going away either). And that's only one data point.

Sexy? nope. Hot new thing? neither. But the jobs are out there.

Similarly that mention of RoR being "in danger" seems incorrect. It's just that Rails is not the topmost big player in the market, and I don't think it ever was, even at its early peak. Sure it made rounds in the news and had a big impact but even back then it certainly wasn't The Tech That Everyone And Their Dog Uses.

That's fine. A tech doesn't need to be in the top 3 market leaders to be useful, successful, and lively.

MaxMatti• 3 years ago

I agree with most of what you're saying but some java applets were quite big, just not for everyone. RuneScape is the first that comes to mind, some websites that had lots of flash games also had quite a few java applet games, although I don't remember their names. There was also a google-earth-like program that ran in an applet, although I don't remember its name.

pjmlp3• 3 years ago

Many may not find Java sexy but the JVM is one heck of a serious piece of tech, with amazing tooling available.

Not only that, what about the guest language folks spitting on the Java libraries and runtime infrasture (written in a mix of C++ and Java) that makes their shinny snowflake possible to start with?

Same applies to the C# bashing on the CLR side.

OJFord3• 3 years ago

And most devs hating on Java are using an IDE written mainly in Java (all the JetBrains ones): the irony of that one gives me the giggles.

I don't use an IDE (or its not written in Java, depending how you define it) but I think I can reliably tell a Java app - if not before - when it gives me an error.

They always (or often - I can't say it's definitely not Java when I haven't identified it) seem to spew stack traces that the end user doesn't care about, or in many cases (not an IDE) wouldn't even know what it was.

throwaway019254• 3 years ago

And most devs hating on Java are using an IDE written mainly in Java (all the JetBrains ones): the irony of that one gives me the giggles.

And using AWS that has most services written in Java.

Java improved a lot in the last few years and it’s not going anywhere.

wernercd• 3 years ago

Java, COBOL, C#, JavaScript, etc... all tech that's not "sexy" but are the backbones.

Even dead languages like COBOL aren't dead.

These techs are the tech that'll be here in 40+ years - or atleast until Skynet rewrites them in binary and we're nuclear ash. I think COBOL will be driving the satellites that monitor the heat death of the universe.

okeuro49• 3 years ago

I think Java virtual threads and structured concurrency are going to only improve its standing.

People complain about Java, but then it could be much, much worse. What we have is a rich open-source ecosystem, great backwards compatibility and carefully considered new features.

znpy• 3 years ago

Java applets were never that big. They didn't work very well (for the reason you mention) and weren't ubiquitous. They also nearly all looked like shit.

Not sure if it's the same thing, but... when i was 16 or 17 i did tech support for an uncle who used to do trading with a trading client application written in java and some other tech stuff.

The java thing was launched via a desktop launched and the splash screen i later found out being java web start (.jnlp extension iirc?).

I didn't see the value at that time, but now that i think of it, java web start was a nice solution to manage "apps" installed and also fetch updates, automatically. IIRC there was a setting to always download the latest version, if possible.

Needless to say, this was ahead of its time.

As I move forward in my career i always find some new interesting thing about the java virtual machine, it truly is a marvel of technology.

The latest things that got me amazed were the flight recorder and mission control toolbox (very cool to be able to see in realtime what your application is doing and why it's performing the way it is) and the new garbage collectors (we're currently using G1, but i want to propose testing Shenandoah or ZGC).

jeff_d_miller3• 3 years ago

I'd rather claim that the main reason is that the author seemed drawn towards proprietary tech stacks that the companies behind them wanted to fully control and that contributed to their demise. It was clear from the start that Flash and VB and ColdFusion and all that wouldn't last long, just because no open ecosystem could form to keep them adapting and vibrant.

I feel that's substantially different with Python, Go, JS and ... C/C++.

akdor1154• 3 years ago

I love go, but still, one of those things is not like the others.

inflam52• 3 years ago

Definitely agree. It’s not “the code has been deprecated”, it’s “your attitude has been deprecated”. One of the big challenges with technology is staying current because it moves so fast. We’ve all seen trends come and go, even outside of software. If it wasn’t evolving we’d be doing something wrong.

Izkata6• 3 years ago

Java applets were never that big. They didn't work very well (for the reason you mention) and weren't ubiquitous. They also nearly all looked like shit.

It's also entirely possible you were encountering them more than you thought. My highschool website, for example, had around 4-8 on the homepage - minimalistic applets that simply showed and cycled through images, placed in a grid in the header area. They totally could have been javascript instead, you couldn't tell the difference just using the page.

mathgladiator3• 3 years ago

long dead techs that I didn't bother to learn.

this is how I currently feel about Kubernetes and docker. I'm having all sorts of fun with the JVM, a monolithic jar, and about 20 lines of shell script. I can deploy in 20 seconds without much fuss.

pkphilip3• 3 years ago

Absolutely. Java development is ridiculously easy compared to many of the alternatives.. in some senses, it is actually even easier to develop in than PHP especially since Java is statically compiled.

jayd16• 3 years ago

And most devs hating on Java are using an IDE written mainly in Java (all the JetBrains ones): the irony of that one gives me the giggles.

Didn't they also make Kotlin so they could use the JVM without Java?

everdrive• 3 years ago

Conversely, I’ve often heard people say they like working in tech because they’re “always learning new things!” It seems pretty clear to me that most of the stuff I learn in tech is a total waste of time, except for the fact that I need to understand it to get paid. It feels as if I’m learning how to work on puzzles in a book. (eg, Sudoku, or other logic puzzles.) It might be interesting to work through them, but they don’t really have any value in my life.

winternett• 3 years ago

What is most funny to me in hindsight is how much I had to fight off warnings and offers to learn Macromedia/Flash development... I literally had tons of people who were only making $45k a year telling me I was a dinosaur while I was making $70k investing in PHP dev...

Fast forward to now and PHP jobs are paying over twice the old rate and grinding along while Flash is long dead and buried. Follow your instincts, not your friend's advice. :P

JohnFen• 3 years ago

And most devs hating on Java are using an IDE written mainly in Java (all the JetBrains ones): the irony of that one gives me the giggles.

I'm not sure why this is a salient point. There's no contradiction in hating Java and using an IDE written in Java. Lots of people hate C, too, but that doesn't make it strange that they use lots of software written in it.

ravenstine5• 3 years ago

my way to feel good is to look back at all the long dead techs that I didn't bother to learn.

That's how I feel about design patterns. Talk about the most useless pile of academic bullshit that gets overemphasized in terms of what "every programmer" must know before going into an interview. Although there are some domains where they may be necessary to know of the top of one's head, for the most part there's usually no utility in filling your head with individual ideas that worked in one circumstance but may lead to bad patterns in another. I'm so glad I gave up memorizing design patterns, especially given that many employers seem to have lost interest in trivia questions about design patterns as well.

vikramkr• 3 years ago

I'm not sure why hating Java means I'm supposed to hate things written in Java, or where the irony is there

stodor89• 3 years ago

Did anyone in the mid to late nineties / early 2000s really discover Java and Java applets and thought: "Java applets is the tech that'll catch on, I'll invest in that"

I did. Getting people to install JRE didn't really seem that hard of a problem, and neither did sandboxing.

Around the same time Rockstar Games released GTA 3 with its third-person camera, and I thought this is the worst idea ever. 20 years and 400 million sales later, I still hate it.

michalu• 3 years ago

I remember about 12-14 years ago I was deciding between learning Python vs. Groovy. I didn't know anything about programming then and for some reason at that particular point all articles/advice I found were saying the future is either Python or Groovy. Luckily I ended up going with Python :)

PaulHoule• 3 years ago

I had a job coding Java applets for higher ed when Java was still in beta.

A Java applet could be small and fast loading but that required careful scoping, design, and coding. In JDK 1.0 you didn’t have JAR files and no serialization built in the platform. I wrote a program that would let you edit finite element meshes and submit to a FORTRAN code running as a CGI and the serdes code was about as large as the rest of the program.

SergeAx• 3 years ago

Technical debt is something one have to "repay" eventually, thus the naming. "Making technical debt" is to do something in a quick but hacky way with the intention to re-do later and better. Almost never happens, by the way.

jraph• 3 years ago

That's fine. We build code for issues that are here and now. Like most jobs: they answer immediate needs.

The small amount of code that's useful for years or decades needs to be built on a stable foundation and with few dependencies. This probably matters a lot more than the code being a bit messy. It should require as little maintenance as possible.

I have two pieces of PHP code I wrote more than 10 years ago, in PHP 5.1, that I still use. Both are messy, one is outright horrible, but they have no dependencies (the horrible one optionally depends on GeSHi, but there's a runtime check for its presence and has a "degraded" mode for when it's not there). They work and are relatively bug-free (the horrible one in particular is battle-tested). I didn't have much to do to run them on PHP 8.2. A few superficial fixes that were actual issues (and took half an hour to fix). By the way, I can't figure out how PHP 5 was even able to run this code. You could have mandatory parameters after ones with default values. Yuk.

WA3• 3 years ago

Same here. I have PHP code in production that dates back to 2008. zero dependencies, a few quirks, it runs on PHP 7.something for now, might upgrade to 8 at some point.

It’s ugly, but it gets the job done.

Best thing is that front-facing HTML and JS from 10+ years ago still works flawlessly, even though the UI is certainly dated.

But I guess that’s the same with HN, where the design never really changed at all and just works.

withinboredom3• 3 years ago

You do realize PHP 7 is EOL for quite a while now[1]? PHP 8.0 is on security updates only. You might want to upgrade sooner rather than later unless you're paying for backports.

[1] https://endoflife.date/php

aspyct• 3 years ago

I must say, I never quite liked PHP as much as other environments, but I keep using it because it just gets the job done.

nomercy400• 3 years ago

The technology might have aged, but the initial concepts used for that technical design are still there and relevant.

chrisatthestudy• 3 years ago

For much of my (35+ years) programming career I have worked in Delphi/Object Pascal. When I was first introduced to it, it was the new hotness, but the last Delphi job I worked on was supporting a 15 year old legacy product.

On the other hand I'm currently working on Android, where everything seems to be obsolete within a year...

RalfWausE• 3 years ago

The company i work for is using a C64 mainboard for controling some production equipment... and there are ABSOLUTELY no plans to move to anything different. Is this system deprecated from a technological standpoint? Yes, absolutely. But on the other hand it is a super stable solution that will work tomorrow in the same way as it has worked the last 30 years (and with the whole retro computing scene around spare parts will be no big issue in the forseeable future).

Cthulhu_• 3 years ago

But it will be an issue _eventually_... hopefully you'll be able to move the workload onto a VM / emulator easily.

hef198982• 3 years ago

Depends on the equipment. Either it is physically dismantled by then, or people find ways to keep it running. No joke, I worked at sites than ran production equipment from the interwar period and, in one case, the early 1900s. If it is profitable, and you are allowed to run it fornenvironmental reasons, it will run forna long, long time indeed regardless of tech (controlers, chips, software) used in running.

By the way, those pre-pre-war stuff ran in the southern part of Germany. So funds and avaiaibility for newequipment was not a big issue in the literal century+ since it was built.

tlocke• 3 years ago

Ozymandias By Percy Bysshe Shelley

  I met a traveller from an antique land,
  Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
  Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
  Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
  And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
  Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
  Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
  The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
  And on the pedestal, these words appear:
  My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
  Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
  Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
  Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
  The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

tsukikage• 3 years ago

The Palace - Rudyard Kipling

    When I was a King and a Mason - a Master proven and skilled 
    I cleared me ground for a Palace such as a King should build. 
    I decreed and dug down to my levels. Presently under the silt 
    I came on the wreck of a Palace such as a King had built.  

    There was no worth in the fashion - there was no wit in the plan - 
    Hither and thither, aimless, the ruined footings ran - 
    Masonry, brute, mishandled, but carven on every stone: 
    "After me cometh a Builder. Tell him I too have known.   

    Swift to my use in the trenches, where my well-planned ground-works grew, 
    I  tumbled his quoins and his ashlars, and cut and reset them anew. 
    Lime I milled of his marbles; burned it slacked it, and spread; 
    Taking and leaving at pleasure the gifts of the humble dead.  

    Yet I despised not nor gloried; yet, as we wrenched them apart, 
    I read in the razed foundations the heart of that builder’s heart. 
    As he had written and pleaded, so did I understand 
    The form of the dream he had followed in the face of the thing he had planned. 
      
         

    When I was a King and a Mason, in the open noon of my pride, 
    They sent me a Word from the Darkness. They whispered and called me aside.
    They said - "The end is forbidden." They said - "Thy use is fulfilled. 
    "Thy Palace shall stand as that other’s - the spoil of a King who shall build."

    I called my men from my trenches, my quarries my wharves and my sheers. 
    All I had wrought I abandoned to the faith of the faithless years. 
    Only I cut on the timber - only I carved on the stone:
    "After me cometh a Builder. Tell him, I too have known."

akuchling• 3 years ago

"Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone." -- Jorge Luis Borges, somewhere.

peter_retief• 3 years ago

Think of the hours lost building code that becomes useless. This is one of my greatest regrets in writing code. I blame the likes of Microsoft that have consistently created bad frameworks that locked out other options and designed for their own buggy operating systems. This is still happening, one of the reasons I do not use Microsoft. Hang on I lie, I am using visual code on my Linux box at the moment.

maxehmookau• 3 years ago

The Strong Bad clip at the end just transported me back 15 years.

hermitcrab• 3 years ago

"In the long run. we are all dead". But I find it hard not to look at software and think how ephemeral it all is. All those late nights and all that debugging and it has mostly disappeared without a trace within 10-20 years. And that is the stuff that even got used at all. :0(

geraldwhen• 3 years ago

Don’t stay up late. Work during normal business hours, and don’t stress too hard. Almost none of what most software developers are doing really matters.

ascar2• 3 years ago

This might ring true for most jobs and especially for anything business related. If you go lower on the library, tooling or infrastructure side things tend to live on much longer, especially if it's simple but necessary functionality. Code doesn't automatically become technical dept just because it becomes older.

robertlagrant• 3 years ago

It's harder now. Way back when you could write ls and it would basically be a "done" piece of software to be distributed everywhere. More recently the big standards are enormous projects involving thousands of people, such as Docker or Kubernetes, that seem to have fairly unbounded feature lists.

One exception: I think the jq tool could stay viable, if it made it into a standard toolset. It solves a defined problem.

ben_w• 3 years ago

Similar vibes, looking back on my CV; now I'm the "grumpy old man" shaking his fist at reactive programming and VIPER…

jpgvm• 3 years ago

This is largely why I have tried to build as much as possible with OSS and contribute stuff as necessary to make that possible.

OSS tends to have a much longer relevant shelf-life and experience with it, especially internals remain highly transferable skills.

My work in and around Apache and CNCF ecosystems has been the only code I have written that truly endures in a good way rather than an ossified and decrepit legacy way.

amelius• 3 years ago

"Your grandfather was a brilliant man and his peers all praised him. Go ask him about it!"

"Grandfather, what did you spend your life on?"

"I made people click ads. Don't worry, it's all technical debt or deprecated now ..."

foderking• 3 years ago

lol

winstonprivacy• 3 years ago

This is such a silly statement. You could say it about practically anything.

"Your grandfather was a brilliant man and his peers all praised him. Go ask him about it!"

"Grandfather, what did you spend your life on?"

"I fixed people's shoes. Don't worry, ..."

DrScientist2• 3 years ago

Element of inevitability of course, but I have to look at those tech choices - largely from the MS walled garden - and wonder whether that was a factor as well.

Do walled gardens not last as long I wonder?

throwaway3838g• 3 years ago

If a business lasts long enough for your code to be replaced, that’s a success. The code you wrote helped your company beat the odds and stay alive.

bryanrasmussen• 3 years ago

My 20+ year career is technical debt, deprecated, or parts of governmental standards.

theK2• 3 years ago

I find it interesting how tech that mostly comes out of enterprises tends to have a shorter shelf life than the "more open" options.

Basic, Silverlight, ColdFusion, asp...

I'd add > Lingo, Flash

Basically if Microsoft, Adobe or any other entrenched player make it easy for you to develop in it and they offer the only Dev stack then its probably going to die quickly.

Counter case, apple seems to be doing fine with swift. So I might be wrong here.

ChuckNorris892• 3 years ago

Basically if Microsoft, Adobe or any other entrenched player make it easy for you to develop in it and they offer the only Dev stack then its probably going to die quickly.

.NET and C# are heavily used, so is SAP and other corporate proprietary stuff. Enterprise customers prefer entrenched players that own the whole stack.

theK2• 3 years ago

Agreed. I also think it sort of makes my point. Afaik the .Net ecosystem started getting significantly more traction once they started opensourcing it and giving control to more open bodies.

I don't know why you would bring up SAP though. I've dealt with SAP deployments in the past its usually the type of the project where you have to integrate through some arcane protocol due to reasons(TM) and the end results resembles less a live connection and more a sneakernet

ilyt8• 3 years ago

That's like calling a chair you built 10 years ago "technical debt" because it can eventually break.

No, it's just a fucking product you made. The fact it has to be maintained doesn't mean it is "debt", it's just like any other asset.

You don't get to your car and think "that's technical debt". There is nothing technical about it. It's a tool with maintenance needs.

The difference is choosing worse now to get it faster, that's technical debt.

hoodwink• 3 years ago

thank you.

svnt• 3 years ago

I was going to make a joke about how it isn’t all that surprising that a person with this history of language selection would completely misunderstand and misuse relevant technical slang in the English language. But I’m not supposed to sow discord so I won’t.

The author navigates the technology world very differently than I do.

koheripbal• 3 years ago

Well, a more accurate comparison would be if you made a chair 20 years ago, and now no one makes chairs anymore because we have all become robots.

Jorengarenar7• 3 years ago

If everybody became a robot and there's no need for chairs, then to whom is the technical debt supposed to be paid?

If there are still fleshbags who need chair, the one created 20 years ago, if properly cared for, works just fine.

Now, if I used a piece of rotten wood for one leg, because I couldn't bet bothered to go fetch a new plank, this is debt that will need to be paid in the form of putting additional work to fix said leg later.

rco87863• 3 years ago

The difference is choosing worse now to get it faster, that's technical debt.

Right, but we always do that. We always make some tradeoff to get things shipped faster. And that's fine, otherwise we wouldn't ship things. It's a balance - and the general meta of "all technical debt bad" is harmful to actually building working software.

ilyt8• 3 years ago

But way too many times it is used as an excuse. If you are startup, fair enough.

If you have existing consumers, it's not. Spend that extra 20% making code maintainable or not picking the quickest possible solution. Spend that extra 40% on planning and designing feature that will be in your product for next 5 years

P_I_Staker2• 3 years ago

I don't understand the need for obscenities. Their are children on this blog.

veidr2• 3 years ago

nope; just checked, there are none

(and even the ones that are pretending to not be here said they don't give a shit)

ilyt8• 3 years ago

Not using obscenities when fitting is reducing the depth of expression. Some things are done suboptimally, some are done badly, and some are utterly fucked.

And replacing obscenities with silly words is just that, silly

Their are children on this blog.

Putting children on tech blogs is abuse, they might learn something terrible like JS by accident, that's worse than any bad word they could find

Jorengarenar7• 3 years ago

It baffles me it's the only comment pointing this out and it's not even at the top.

The rest of commenters for some reason seem to equate "technical debt" with old technology and "legacy" projects.

ilyt8• 3 years ago

People just like excuses to rewrite stuff with new fancy toys I guess.

We have code running for 10+ years in our CM. It's not technical debt. It's well tested asset that continually produces value without much problems or maintenance, coz most of them were already rooted out.

Sure if it was 10 years old blob in language nobody writes in in company it would have been potential liability but assuming every piece of software is that because it is old is a problem.

mobiuscog• 3 years ago

Many managers or higher-up business leaders do not understand the concept of maintenance, which is why it becomes 'technical debt'.

They just expect the existing thing to keep working in the background and more imporantly do the new stuff that is wanted.

It's generally a debt, because engineers are not given time to maintain it properly. Imagine the car never getting to go to a garage to be serviced, because it's needed for driving all the time. There is your debt.

fsniper• 3 years ago

Am I reading this incorrectly or author is equating "using old/boring/forgotten techs" as technical debt?

How did technical debt become so bloated and meaningless? Isn't it "remaining half baked/incorrect code, known edge cases, bad/slow implementations, or even bugs due to constraints imposed on the engineering team"? How is dead technologies are imposed constraints?

Author is not talking about technical debt but experience that is not directly applicable anymore.

rudenoise• 3 years ago

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe... Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion... I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain... Time to die.

syntheweave• 3 years ago

The lessons I've learned from all my programming projects are:

1. If the codebase would still work on a "dead platform", but you are targeting something new, you are chasing after hype, to some degree.

2. If the code involves significant data entry, you probably want to leverage a spreadsheet, because eventually you will want to edit something tabular and also make charts and reports. The things "dashboards" do are also very reasonable to do from inside a spreadsheet - make a tiny shim to pipe in some data, and then make the dashboard frontend using all the built-in goodies.

3. If the code is mostly about making custom UI, you are on the path to saleable application software, or at minimum, a tech demo that people will talk about.

forgotmypw17• 3 years ago

I write a project using primarily a foss stack which has a 20+ year history of being committed to backwards compatibility, and I couldn't be happier.

Utilizing the Lindy Effect to my benefit, I've been able to almost entirely avoid the typical framework frustrations, such as breaking changes and abandoned dependencies.

Instead, I've been able to focus on features, figure out a good code style, and support nearly all mainstream or once-mainstream browsers. On the back-end, I'm working on the Windows install process, but on *nix it's fairly uniform across different flavors and lineages.

For those curious, it is Perl, text files, PGP, HTML, CSS, low-sugar JS, and a little bit of sh, Python and PHP for server glue. Now probably to include batch files...

876978095789789• 3 years ago

Will Rust succeed in eventually making all C (and even C++) code technical debt?

3v1n0• 3 years ago

I don't think it will... C will never die.

If it does, congrats. But still so far C is for many things the prime access

raincole• 3 years ago

I mean unless the human as a species stop growing, all of your career will be deprecated one day, right?

hoc• 3 years ago

Lot's of "near-RAD" tools with large runtimes and platform/environment/framework dependencies in this list.

The typical thing some of us tried to avoid while others (or their employers) totally embraced these comfortable (advertised as productive and fast) and often proprietary tools. The contrasting would be HTML, JS, C/C++, all closer to the bare metal of their respective targets. Or Java and Python as the two that made the race in more complex but purely language levels, as Rust is doing right now. Java has gotten connected more and more to its typical business frameworks these days, so beware :)

Some of them died just with their platform as ObjC/Swift would die with Apple, Kotlin with Android these days.

It seems a split between language and environment/frameworks has proven to provide some stabilty at least.

Seldom (and funny) to see such a "consistent" list, though :) There might be something like "consulting work" as the recurring theme in it. As a product/system/platform developer one might have had (and would have been forced to) put more effort in selecting the tools for long term availability where they are not forced upon you by the platform or time-to-market considerations.

mpeg• 3 years ago

I've only been programming professionally for 15~ years and I fully agree with the article.

In my career I've gone through so many tech stacks, most of which are dead or dying today. A lot of my projects you could today replace with a couple API calls or an AWS product.

At least I like to think I learnt a few things along the way that make me a better developer, I never know what to say when recruiters or interviewers ask me about my tech stack experience expecting some sort of very specific answer – to me it makes as much sense as asking whether I have firefox experience, or just chrome.

knorker3• 3 years ago

I made a whole bunch of things that have not been deprecated or tech debt. It's about which technologies you use.

C is not deprecated. Maybe in a 100 years it will be, but it seems unlikely.

It's very rare to find someone who has C as their favourite language, but it's incredibly persistent.

C is the opposite of the latest JS framework.

I regularly fix bugs in open source, where when checking when the bug was introduced the trail often runs cold in the mid to early 90s, as it predates that project's use of source control.

But yeah, if you have a 20 year career of following what is clearly the latest fad, then you'll have that experience.

Java applets were never "big". They were a fad, and promise of big. But they always sucked, even by the standards at the time.

Jorengarenar7• 3 years ago

It's very rare to find someone who has C as their favourite language

Hello, I visit here every day. Nice to meet you

knorker3• 3 years ago

You should make friends with Steve Gibson (https://www.grc.com/). He writes all his code is assembly. :-)

samhuk• 3 years ago

My entire career is now technical debt, or the code has been deprecated.

Contrary to the author, for me, over my entire career, I feel like I have been relatively incredibly lucky with my choices of 1) What (web) technologies to invest lots of time into, and 2) Therefore what tools I use in my own projects and at companies I have worked for.

I think that 50% of the reason is down to when I was born and therefore when I started my software engineering career (for example, therefore avoiding lots of bad alleyways that web dev went down), and 50% was just common sense (realizing early-on that X tool was obviously going to be superior to Y tool).

1. I was fortunate enough to be born at a time such that I just about missed the AngularJS --> Angular2 betrayal + debacle.

2. I realized, through playing around with the Angular2 beta around 2014 (IIRC), that it was going to be inferior to React. I remember that at the time React was this tiny thing that had existed for around a year or so, but it was clearly conceptually superior, with more talented Facebook developers behind it vs the Google developers behind the early Angular2.

Not to be too disparaging or direspectful, but at least in the early days, it felt like Angular2 was made by a team of your usual C++ Google engineers who didn't have a lot of experience with web dev. Just being honest here...

This lead me to A) selecting React for my personal projects, and B) advising to pick React at companies I worked for. This meant that there are React codebases that I contributed to ~8 years ago that are still active at companies today.

3. Through sheer luck, I started my true web dev career after the "random crazy insecure web technologies" era such as Flash, Java applets, and all that nonsense.

4. Through sheer luck, I started my true web dev career shortly after Typescript was created, and I just happened to use a framework (now non-existent) which used it, co-introducing it to me in ~2014. This meant that I have been able to create relatively maintainable Typescript codebases, mostly avoiding creating any quick-to-deprecate JS mess-heaps.

There are a couple more examples, but I think that captures why I feel so lucky. I feel bad for the engineers that, through a combination of bad luck (time born, time entering the field, etc.) and lack of foresight, were led down paths causing them to invest a tonne of time into technologies that were just never going to be around for the long-run.

My time will likely come where my luck runs out, and I end up investing a tonne of time into some nonsense tech that initially seems solid but ends up rubbish for whatever reason, but for now, I'm quite pleased :)

ChrisMarshallNY• 3 years ago

I would argue that any apps written in Objective C are probably technical debt now.

That would probably include the lions' share of system code in the Apple OS ecosystem.

I'll bet a lot of it hearkens back to the NextStep days.

Since it is a UNIX OS (all of the OSes), then there's plenty of good ol' ANSI C, as well.

I'm almost positive that every AAA app is still a ObjC BoM (Ball of Mud).

kelnos2• 3 years ago

I kinda find the premise here to be flawed. To me, technical debt is stuff that you do intentionally that you know is bad and will have to be fixed at some point, but you've decided the trade off of shipping sooner is worth it.

Sure, all code rots, frameworks and even languages come and go. That's not technical debt, to me, though.

Put another way, if everything is tech debt, then there's really no point to having the term at all.

ur-whale• 3 years ago

When I look at the list of "technologies" the author invested in learning ... no surprise it's all technical debt or deprecated: all the things he lists are completely superficial and have obvious short-term, "I can make money now with this stuff" flavor to them.

Had the author invested in learning stuff like math, physics, cryptography, advanced data structures and algorithms, functional programming theory, 3d programming, compiler theory, database theory, etc...

None of it would be obsolete today, and all of it would be almost immediately applicable in any language that happens to be the flavor of the day at a given point in time.

Let that be a lesson to all of the folks who become extremely proficient in the latest react-like fad javascript framework: in 10 years time, all your knowledge will be useful for one thing: maintaining and patching old crumbling code piles that no one wants to touch.

Do yourself a favor instead and go learn timeless things that will still be completely relevant 20 years from now. Then spend a minimal amount of time learning how to apply it in whatever language/framework of the day is fashionable at your job.

sam_goody• 3 years ago

PHP.

Still works and the codebase is still being incrementally updated ~20 years in.

Stint with Laravel, which was a huge task to add, and an even huger task to eventually remove; After an update by Laravel that was not backwards compatible made us rethink the cost/value.

Javascript on the frontend, with no libraries as critical infra except for HTMX.

Was once a contributor to Mootools; now use quite a bit of homegrown funcs, and use libraries for spot instances (Alpine, Uppy, QuillJS - all of which are written modular with intention to be traded out.)

MySQL and eventually Postgres. "NoSQL" only when it was added (as JSONB) to Postgres.

All of those years of coding are an asset, not a liability.

Don't go chasing the new and shiny, it doesn't last. (And steer clear of Web3, will ya?)

EDIT: We use Tailwind - and time will tell if that is a mistake.

mediascreen• 3 years ago

Fast forward to today, and MVC has since fallen out of fashion. Everything is now done in React, Angular, Vue, and other frameworks.

I wouldn't be so sure about that. Fallen out of fashion perhaps, but still very stable, easy work with, predictable and with pretty clear best practices that don't change every three months.

VyseofArcadia• 3 years ago

I've been focusing lately on stepping off the new and shiny treadmill. While the kids and startups are chasing that new hotness, I can be incredibly productive in less fashionable tools that I already know.

rawoke083600• 3 years ago

Sooooo then LISP for growth, profit and staying power ?

Sorta like how LISP might be the "Guns & Roses" of coding; Not everyone like it, but in their hearts they know it has greatness on some level. And no one can argue with their staying power :D

austin-cheney• 3 years ago

I predict WebAssembly will eventually overtake how front-end development is today, and a whole new world will evolve.

I have heard this with great emotion for at least 6 years now and nothing. It’s starting to look like bitcoin: all these dreams and ideals that come to nothing in practice but a Ponzi scheme.

The funny thing is that it clearly indicates nobody know what they are doing. People advocating for WASM want DOM bindings because the DOM is great and JavaScript is the great evil. Most people who actually write JavaScript professionally feel equally about the DOM, a great evil, and so they are completely reliant on some massive framework to justify the their existence.

eimrine2• 3 years ago

All code rots or gets replaced
Over time, you can see how almost everything you create gets scrapped and replaced for various reasons or is now based on old technology.

Is this problem fixable by using some great technologies? React code does not rot and Common Lisp applications are famous as having the most time without getting rot among other programming languages.

Sarkie• 3 years ago

React code does not rot? How so?

eimrine2• 3 years ago

There are no significant changes in architecture AFAIK. I used it just for fun a long time ago and may not know everything.

frithsun• 3 years ago

This is why I stubbornly refuse to use Typescript.

Javascript is an ECMA standard. I'll just do the JSDoc hack and cheer for TC39 rather than waste my time with a technology that's great for now but will probably end up being technical debt.

Think of how little somebody who uses C, bash, vim, and javascript has had to adapt in the past several decades, all because they avoided technologies where the buck stops with a community rather than a corporation.

Corporations are cool and all. I'm not a dirty hippie. But at the end of the day they don't make money when things don't change.

chasd00• 3 years ago

I’m assuming your paychecks didn’t bounce over those 20 years so who cares?

kohlerm• 3 years ago

After 20 years (for me) Java is still kind of alive

papito• 3 years ago

Don't get attached to your code, ever. You are not building the Pyramids of Giza, no one will study your work 3000 years from now, or 15, for that matter.

ALL of your code will be dead in a few years. The company goes under, or some punk CTO comes in and commands a "full rewrite ASAP!". Even with normal evolution and refactoring, your original work will be unrecognizable.

Either way, you take experience and friendships from your employment, you are not going to be the Picasso of software engineering.

Jorengarenar7• 3 years ago

You forgot to put "\s" here.

But I appreciate the Picasso joke. Too many devs try applying over-engineered abstraction to simple problems.

------

From this place I want to greet one such "Picasso" whose code from over 20 years ago I was debugging last week... I know your name...

joemasilotti• 3 years ago

Ruby on Rails is in jeopardy of being added to this list. It has fallen out of favor, and it is tough to find developers for it. What once made it unique is now available in other languages.

I beg to differ. There are 1000+ Rails developers actively looking for work on railsdevs.com

rco87863• 3 years ago

Yea Rails seems to be having a bit of a renaissance moment right now

rco87863• 3 years ago

Agree with the premise. I currently work with a PM that is simply terrified of introducing any technical debt or "throwaway work". Mind you, he isn't writing or maintaining any of the code himself. It's like pulling teeth getting him to realize that we have to ship some product in order to learn, and some of what we will learn will be what is WRONG with our product and needs to change (aka throwaway work) and that every codebase eventually becomes a legacy codebase (aka technical debt).

I think we've done ourselves a very big disservice as an industry by focusing on this boogeyman.

kunley• 3 years ago

By the way (not to diss author's involvement in windows-related technologies) I am very happy to still use many of the inventions of Mr Ken Thompson that did not become technical debt and it's unlikely they will (apart from being rewritten/transformed).

antomeie• 3 years ago

I still maintain apps in Objective-C, but I don't view them as technical debt. I find it mostly fun to maintain the knowledge.

One day the apps (products) may themselves become technical debt, but that is not the fault of the language they were written in.

MadSudaca• 3 years ago

it’s paradoxical but the opposite might be true as well… code you’d be happy to hear was replaced because you were not particularly proud of it, turns out to live on for a long time having people maintaining it without understanding it very well long after you’ve left the organization

cookieperson3• 3 years ago

I wish more mid career devs understood this. All those PR review battles over commas in comments are mostly wastes of time. Entropy comes, it's one of the few guarantees we have. Your legacy will not be the software you wrote, but the impact that software had.

p0w3n3d• 3 years ago

Flaaash! shouting in Will Shatner voice

gadders• 3 years ago

Interesting article. I wonder how, say, builders or architects feel when a building of theirs is demolished.

hudsonhs• 3 years ago

I use an open-source version of ColdFusion at the company I work for that was founded 10 years ago.

I mean, I don't like it but...

markb139• 3 years ago

Some of the stuff I’ve worked on (Nokia phones) have been museum pieces for some time

Jeff_Brown• 3 years ago

The guy is still coding for money, right? So clearly he managed to absorb something that's still valuable.

nologic01• 3 years ago

In the future there won't be any technical debt. You were lucky to live early.

Code, most code, will eventually turn into some sort of sanitised applied maths corpus (with a heavy overlay of "AI" analytical tools).

In applied mathematics you have cultural obsolescence (stuff that we no longer find interesting or relevant, like an asymptotic formula for the Airy function [0]) but the corpus is intrinsically add-only. Once something is solved it does not have be solved again. Its essence is eternal, so to speak.

Think about code development in such as mature state. It will mostly work by pulling together (using AI prompts) logical units from the future version of Rosetta [1].

When we get to that stage it will be hard to add something truly new. Just like it takes a long incubation and a PhD to add some marginal new thing to applied mathematics, it will take effectively trained applied mathematicians to add something minor to the evolving code corpus.

Coding for the common folk will be mostly compositing. It might be productive and even fun, but not quite the same.

We lived through a period of widespread democratization of development. Cherish the freedom of reinventing the wheel in countless flawed ways :-)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airy_function

[1] https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Rosetta_Code

phkahler• 3 years ago

> Code, most code, will eventually turn into some sort of sanitised applied maths corpus > Think about code development in such as mature state.

I agree with you. That end state is of course all open source. Anyone not working toward that state is making money (understandably) as the higher priority.

I'm still not sure why businesses do so much proprietary customization as opposed to working in an upstream OSS project. I suppose the OSS foundation in those cases isn't solid enough yet.

mathgladiator3• 3 years ago

Developers jump ship quickly

this is probably the most damning thing about the field. We don't invest in developers, so why would they invest in the business?

efields• 3 years ago

Ruby on Rails is in jeopardy of being added to this list. It has fallen out of favor, and it is tough to find developers for it.

Hardly.

What once made it unique is now available in other languages.

Sure, yay open source.

You still can't get as much out of the box with one CLI command for a new rails app in node.js. I would love to be corrected on this.

FpUser5• 3 years ago

All my desktop GUI software since 90s was / still is done in Delphi (Lazarus for multiplatform). The language / IDE grew but remained compatible and I've never had to throw away the code.

C++ merrily carried my backend solutions over the same timeframe with the same results.

Same for C when writing firmware.

Same for JavaScript / HTML for browser based front ends.

In all of the above I used some domain specific libs but stayed away from big frameworks as those come and go pretty fast.

I consider neither as a tech debt as they let me concentrate on the product rather than dwell on what tech do I use. I've never felt inferior for not using this new and shiny doodad as I've always delivered superior products and that is what mattered for my clients.

Yes I had to program in whole bunch of other languages upon client requests but this was rather rare. I have good track record in creating new products from scratch and that is what my clients really want. They mostly do not care what I use for development.

So no. I do not feel that tech debt at all and I still play with other tech a little to stay current in case it is needed by client.

Mister_Snuggles• 3 years ago

Interestingly enough, I've got a thing for "ancient" technology.

My dream retirement job is to work at a tax agency, like CRA or IRS, and help maintain their mountain of COBOL. I don't know COBOL, I don't know the ecosystem around it, but I absolutely know that I would love to learn it.

My first job was in a similar environment, supporting a homegrown application (which had grown out of a long-defunct commercial application) running on a Pick-style database system (UniVerse). The whole thing could trace its roots back to a Prime mainframe. Reading the code, especially the older stuff, was such an adventure.

ScarletDME[0] is seriously scratching the itch to play in this world.

[0] https://github.com/geneb/ScarletDME

Avalaxy• 3 years ago

I'm a freelancer in data engineering / machine learning engineer. I've so far never held a role that I had the technical skills for (well... I do have the underlying knowledge, but not the particular frameworks/tools), because every time my freelance project ends and I'm looking for the next one, the tools have already changed to something else that is hip. Or the go-to architecture is now a different one. Or the way you deploy it all is completely different.

It's pretty frustrating. I keep trying to do courses to keep my skills up-to-date, but it doesn't matter. Those courses by themselves are already outdated a year later. The only things that have been solid in my career, is the CS knowledge and theoretical knowledge from books like 'designing data intensive applications'. That stuff rarely changes. The rest is like waves in a sea. They come and go.

metafunctor• 3 years ago

The stickiest code I ever wrote was an open source library released in 2000 or thereabouts. It’s still in use, and still new users are adopting it. Someone made a Wikipedia page for it. I think it’s embedded in most Apple products.

Other than that, yeah, most of what I’ve made is no longer used by any significant number of people.

Not sure if there’s any wisdom to draw from this anecdote, but I did spend a lot of cycles in trying to perfect that library!

agentultra• 3 years ago

That's a lot of fad-based tech in this article but you do what you have to do. The first language I used professionally is not the same language I use today. However any one of them certainly could have become "fad" tech... except maybe C, Lisp, and Haskell; those ones seem to be built on foundations (discovered or invented) that are repeated, rediscovered, or reinvented but rarely change.

I generally think of "fad" tech as frameworks and ecosystems that are built around a commercial interest or novel idea. They often fail to overcome network effects. And this leads them into obscurity to await deprecation.

There's a lot of churn that happens in the frothy red waters of "trying to make programming easier/faster/accessible-to-non-programmers".

And we're not so great at maintaining our legacy, the state of the art, the pedagogy and history of our science. Over a twenty-plus year career I've seen people re-invent solutions to the same problems over and over. Each time it's a revolution. You don't want to dishearten the young and eager but at the same time seeing them run into the same problems, learning the same conclusions, etc means we've not been doing a great job at teaching and mentoring and all that.

knallfrosch• 3 years ago

All 5 years of my web software development, I've ported code to Angular. I've read your legacy code, and ported it to a framework that's already in decline. Of course it's all legacy.

mark_l_watson• 3 years ago

I don’t disagree with the author, but I don’t worry much about old tech that is no longer useful.

I have worked in the field of AI for 40 years, and we have had a huge trash heap of technologies that ended up being useless except for lessons learned from failure.

I have always been motivated to work for just two reasons: supporting myself and my family, and learning and using new tech. The great fun is in learning new things. That said, sometimes there is good short term work supporting old tech that companies still want to use.

PurpleRamen• 3 years ago

huge trash heap of technologies that ended up being useless except for lessons learned from failure.

The joke is, even the lessons will deprecate at some point, either when younger generations, who did not learn/understand them yet, will enter the playing field, or because the progress of technology will invalidate the lessons.

Nothing is really meant to stay.

bgirard• 3 years ago

This is why I'm particularly proud of my contributions to (web) standards. There's a good chance that they'll be my longest lasting contribution.

carapace• 3 years ago

I used to feel bad about how much of my career was waste. Then one day I met a retired hardware engineer, a old hand who had rubbed shoulders with Shockley, who told me that 80% of the projects he worked on never even made it to production. Four-fifths of his hardware career was waste!

If it's that bad in hardware land I don't feel so bad about this virtual detritus we software people spew. At least it's cheap, eh?

UncleOxidant• 3 years ago

All of our work is ephemeral. Software development is just more ephemeral than most work. 40 years ago when I first got into this biz I didn't notice this. Now I notice ephemerality everywhere. You need to make peace with it. The things you're working on now probably won't be used or useful in 5 years. An architect can drive by a building they designed and take pride in that building for decades... but even that building will eventually come down. It just happens a lot faster in tech.

spiffytech• 3 years ago

Even the goal of doing something that will outlive you is an arbitrary bar: you are "settling" for mere centuries.

Making something that really lasts is hard. My favorite example is the Clock of the Long Now, a timepiece designed to operate for the next 10,000 years:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_of_the_Long_Now

momirlan• 3 years ago

that is true for front end dev. not so much for back end. SQL, Oracle, Sql Server, Teradata, Data Warehousing are still used after more than 20 years. Skills are easily transferable to Snowflake, Big Query, Azure ...(whatever it's called at this moment)

AlwaysRock2• 3 years ago

Ruby on Rails is in jeopardy of being added to this list. It has fallen out of favor, and it is tough to find developers for it.

Ruby is the 8th most popular programming language. Ahead of C, C#, and a bunch of "cool" languages like Scala, Kotlin, and Rust.

Source: https://madnight.github.io/githut/#/pull_requests/2023/1

AlwaysRock2• 3 years ago

Kinda a weird article to be honest. It seems less like the author is annoyed at having to learn new languages or that their language specific knowledge because less useful as time goes on, and more that they are frustrated their code doesnt live on forever.

I guess I don't particularly care if my code lives on or not. I build something. It's hopefully useful for others or myself for some period of time, then its gone.

It's just lines I've written. Why would that be more important than other lines I've written? In other careers I never thought about how my work was eventually going to be forgotten. That's just how life goes.

pc86• 3 years ago

I felt the same way.

If you want to build something permanent and long-lasting, go build bridges. It does seem kind of silly to expect software to be around for a long time.

Cerpicio• 3 years ago

Don't be sad because your code is old. Smile because you got to write code. -- Me (paraphrasing Dr. Seuss)

amne• 3 years ago

From my few years in e-commerce I noticed this kind of pattern: - you(your company/employer/etc) have a problem.

- you solve said problem

- profit

- competitors catch up and hit the same problem

- 3rd party (or one of the 1st parties pivots) notices all of you have the same problem. implements solution to fix the generic version of the problem: a standard is born

- hubs appear that make it easy for your competitors to eat into your market share because they now use the 3rd party solution and are more agile.

- you can't integrate because your solution is not complying to the new "standard"

- rewrite is needed

(edit: I hate HN formatting)

dep_b2• 3 years ago

Skills I learned and are still valid today:

- SQL - Terminal - OO programming travelled pretty well from C#/Java to Objective-C to Swift

Then there's stuff that is still called the same but completely unrecognizable compared to the time I was good at it like HTML / JS / CSS

g9yuayon• 3 years ago

Is it just me or somehow programming languages and frameworks are not my focus any more? I'm still interested in programming language designs and implementations, but I'm quite neutral on what language/framework to use in my work. There are just too many other things to take priority: organizational structures, system architectures, emerging technologies, new hardware, algorithms, insights in a domain, and etc. Choice of languages barely moves the needle.

TheRealDunkirk• 3 years ago

I've been down on myself about this. I've been at it for coming up on 30 years. I've written scores of programs and applications. There are only a couple still in use. Rather than be upset about it, I find that it's more helpful to think of coding as tooling. As in, actual tooling that machine shops make: dies, jigs, gauges, etc. You know, the stuff that's used to make the actual stuff. Tools go out of date. Tools get upgraded. Product lines change. Tools get scrapped. It's all ephemeral. It's just the nature of it. And this applies to "the bigs" as well, like Facebook or Google. The individual components and services are just tooling in service of the overall product, and rollover and change as time goes on. The only coding that ossifies into archeological strata is COBOL on mainframes.

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF2• 3 years ago

Over time I've come to realize that the various "IT things" in business which retain the most value are databases. Not because they never become outdated or redundant but because the data in them can always be migrated to a new schema to be used by a new application. Usually the "tooling" to do this is exactly the kind of work I might do which becomes something that is no longer in use.

(I guess here I should mention the context that I'm not coming up on 30 years; instead it's a little over 10.)

The "no longer in use" part is something I think I ultimately disagree with. It's kind of an "application of Theseus" situation. Where did this data really come from? If it was an older application, did that application ever really go away or did it just become what replaced it? Anyway, I guess I just have to hope I still have this outlook in ~20 years.

bdhndnd• 3 years ago

Today’s best practice is tomorrow’s technical debt.

Paint that shed.

orsenthil• 3 years ago

The point this piece is missing is, the defining tech as how marketing defines product. Customer needs evolve and products need to change to cater to that. It is just evolution. The work that under powers the solutions (C Programming language for instance), hasn't changed.

kazinator2• 3 years ago

Years before this guy got started, I was working in C. Then I moved onto more C, C++, then back to C. Today I'm working in a C++ codebase that compiles to C.

Lisp on the side, plus the Unix cruft that goes with build systems: shell, awk, make, ...

I went through the language churn as a kid. BASIC, assembly languages, Pascal, Modula-2. Studying CS pulled me into C world; all the upper level coursework at that time was systems programming in C on Unix, whether it be compilers, networking, distributed systems, operating systems or computer graphics or what have you.

I didn't think I'd be cranking out C for another 30 years after that, but I also didn't think of any reasons I wouldn't be.

Not everything I worked on is around; but the skills left behind are entirely relevant. There is hardly any technique I ever used that is inapplicable.

ironmagma• 3 years ago

Not anymore, now we have JavaScript and that stuff will simply run until the apocalypse.

kangaroozach• 3 years ago

So what are the current languages and frameworks that are least likely to soon become “technical debt”? We use Python, Django, Node JS, Next JS, React JS. How do those fare?

lofaszvanitt• 3 years ago

Use jQuery. Let others jump on these speeding, then derailing trains and collect their broken bodies at the crash sites years later.

sershe• 3 years ago

I left a company once due to some reorg/internal politics while we were in the middle of developing a new system from scratch. 6 years later, I was going to leave my then-current job and I got some interest from my old team (that was by that point made up of almost entirely different people) where part of my job would be... decommissioning and migrating tons of people off the system I was developing 6 years ago! I also had expertise in the new stuff they needed but I thought that was funny and also I think it helped me negotiate a good offer...

berkeshire• 3 years ago

The idea of leaving behind a lasting legacy of work is vanity squared. The ones who do selfless work for open-source do not necessarily do it for a place in history. The point of choosing a purely materialistic software career was to have the ego humbling of watching one's work get decimated or trivialized in due course.

My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

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