Honestly, the person should spend their time of fixing their shit instead of writing blog posts.
I find intellij a great IDE, modern frameworks are fun to use, ai helps me doing things i don't want to do or things i just need (like generate a good README.md for the other people).
Containers are great and mine build fast.
My Startup has a ha setup with self healing tx to k8s and everything is in code so i don't need to worry to backup some random config files.
Hardware has never been that cheap. NVMs, RAM and Compute. A modern laptop today has a brilliant display, quite, can run everything, long batterytime.
Traffic? No brainer.
Websphere was a monster with shitty features. I remember when finally all the JEE Servers had a startup time of just a few seconds instead of minutes. RAM got finally cheap enough that you were able to run eclipse, webserver etc. locally.
This article in different forms keeps making the rounds and it's just so tiring. Yeah, let's remember everything that was great about 25 years ago and forget everything that sucked. Juxtapose it with everything that sucks about today but omit everything that's great. Come on man.
If you think things suck now, just make it better! The world is your playground. Nobody makes you use YAML and Docker and VS Code or whatever your beef is. Eclipse is still around! There's still a data center around your corner! Walk over and hang a server in the rack, put your hardly-typechecked Java 1.4 code on there and off you go!
Sure, you can do that for your hobby projects. But "at work" you generally have these decisions made for you. And these decisions have changed over time for the wrong reasons.
As an aside: if we say k8s, we should also say j8t.
> But "at work" you generally have these decisions made for you.
The idea that most employers make terrible decisions now, and amazing decisions back in the day, is plainly false. The author vividly recollects working at a decent Java shop. Even there I strongly doubt everything was amazing as they describe, but it sounds decent indeed. But plenty businesses at the time used C++, for no good reason other than inertia, usually in Windows-only Visual C++ 6-specific dialects. Their "build server" ran overnight, you'd check in your code in the late afternoon and get your compile errors back in the morning. The "source control" worked with company-wide file locks, and you'd get phoned your ass back to the office if you forgot to check in a file before leaving. Meanwhile, half the web was written in epic spaghetti plates of Perl. PHP was a joy to deploy, as it is now, but it was also a pain to debug.
If you care deeply about this stuff, find an employer who cares too. They existed back then and they exist now.
You'll get old too one day and it will look a whole lot different watching the younguns stumble through completely avoidable mistakes and forget the long lessons of your life that weren't properly taught or were just ignored.
We have records from many periods in history of old men crowing about how society is collapsing because of the weak new generations. Thing is, maybe they were always right, and the new generations just had to grow up and take responsibility? And then again, maybe sometimes they were little too right and society did in fact collapse, but locally.
“Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”
On the one hand: yes, this dev has clearly chosen a career/language specialization that puts him knee-deep in the absolute worst tooling imaginable.. I cannot fathom a workflow this fucking miserable and if this was my day to day, I would be far, far more depressed than I already am.
AND, the fact that so very very much of our industry does run, perhaps not all of, but a significant amount of a workflow not awfully different from this is IMO, an indictment of our trade. To invoke the immortal sentiment of the hockey coach from Letterkenny, this shit is FUCKING embarrassing.
So much major software that ships in a web browser because writing for Windows, Mac and Linux is just too hard you guys, it's simply too much for a sweet little bean like Microsoft ($3.62 trillion) to manage as they burn billions on AI garbage, is FUCKING embarrassing.
Half the apps on my phone are written this way which is why they can barely manage 30hz on their animations, die entirely when S3 goes down, and when they are working, make my phone hot. To run an app that lets me control my thermostat from my desk. That's FUCKING embarrassing.
And my desktop is only saved by virtue of being magnitudes more powerful than my original one back in the 90's, yet it only seems a scant more capable. In the early 00's I was sitting on Empire Earth and chatting with people over TeamSpeak. My computer can still do this, and with the added benefit of Discord can stream my game so my friends can all watch each other, and that's cool, apart from I lose about 10 fps just by virtue of having Discord open, and when I'm traveling? Oh god forget it, Discord flounders to death on hotel wifi despite it being perfectly cromulent DSL speeds. Not BLAZING, surely, but TeamSpeak handled VOIP over an actual DSL connection, with DSL latency, in the 00's. That's FUCKING embarrassing.
All our software now updates automatically by default, and it's notable when that's a GOOD thing. Usually what it actually means is the layout of known features changes for seemingly arbitrary reasons. Other times more dark patterns are injected. And Discord, not to pick on them, but they're the absolute fucking worst for this. I swear they push an "update" every time one of their devs sneezes, I usually have to install 18 such updates on each launch, and I run it very regularly! And for all that churn, I couldn't tell you one goddamn thing they actually added recently. FUCKING embarrassing.
And people will say "oh they could be better," "we know we can do it better," "these aren't the best companies or apps" okay but they are BIG ones. If the mean average car in America got awful fuel economy, needed constant service, was ill-designed for it's purpose and cost insane amounts of money...
Oh, that happened too. I think I just made my metaphor more embarrassing for another industry.
Java is usable now, but in 2013 it was the worst debugging experience one could have. I would rather work with PHP5 than with Java (unless I started a project from scratch). Also auto-refactoring was clearly worse, because well, Java. It was around that time that I tried Scala then Clojure, and even if debugging the JVM was still an experience (to avoid as much as possible), at least limited side effects reduced the issues.
If programming peaked, it certainly wasn't in 2010.
> Funnily enough, everything ran at about the same speed as it does now.
Actually, where I was sitting on a decent PC with broadband Internet at the time, everything was much, much faster. I remember seeing a video on here where someone actually booted up a computer from the 2000's and showed how snappy everything was, including Visual Studio, but when I search YouTube for it, it ignores most of my keywords and returns a bunch of "how to speed up your computer" spam. And I can't find it in my bookmarks. Oh well.
The author is writing like Java was outlawed or something. There are tons of shitty enterprise Java jobs out there for those who want them. Personally, I worked one of those jobs a decade ago, and the article's description of the "golden age" didn't bring back good memories.
It's easy enough to avoid the NPM circus as well. Just don't put JavaScript on your resume and don't get anywhere near frontend development.
Javascript wins by keeping the costs down. Companies today want to do more with less, which is how it should be and you are still free to choose from a myriad of technologies. When you pair this setup with LLMs, it's actually the best it has ever been IMO.
I get it. I agree with most of this article. But also like, nothing went away.
If you pine for the days of Java and Maven, you can still do that. It’s all still there (Eclipse and NetBeans, too!)
If you don’t like using Node and NPM, that’s totally valid, don’t use them. You can spin up a new mobile app, desktop app, and even a SaaS-style web app without touching NPM. (Even on fancy modern latest-version web frameworks like Hanami or Phoenix)
If you don’t want everyone to use JS and NPM and React without thinking, be the pushback on a project at work, to not start there.
If the author doesn't want to work with NPM and the JavaScript ecosystem he could just get a job writing Spring/Boot, which makes up probably 90% of the jobs at large enterprise companies. I don't agree that this world has disappeared...
This feels very much like the tired "the modern internet sucks - the old web with old websites was better!" trope that appears on here regularly.
You can still code the old way just like you can still put up your old website. No one is forcing you to use AI or VS Code or even JavaScript.
Of course you.might not getting those choices at work, but that is entirely different since your paid to do a job that benefits your employer, not paid to do something you enjoy.
There's something to this. I recently shipped a music curation site and deliberately avoided React/Next/etc - just HTML, CSS, vanilla JS. The cognitive load difference is stark. The 'peak' might be less about capability and more about us rediscovering that simpler tools often suffice.
It's all about picking the right tools for the job. The "cognitive load" might be larger in a vanilla project compared to React when your interface is more complex and interactive.
Same. I build stuff for local businesses in my area with nothing but boring old HTML, PHP, CSS and JS. I guess my shit isn't "web scale" but it works, and it works consistently, with minimal downtime, and it worked during both Amazon and Cloudflare's latest outages.
I don't need my software to eat the world, I'm perfectly content with it just solving someone's problems.
Honestly, the person should spend their time of fixing their shit instead of writing blog posts.
I find intellij a great IDE, modern frameworks are fun to use, ai helps me doing things i don't want to do or things i just need (like generate a good README.md for the other people).
Containers are great and mine build fast.
My Startup has a ha setup with self healing tx to k8s and everything is in code so i don't need to worry to backup some random config files.
Hardware has never been that cheap. NVMs, RAM and Compute. A modern laptop today has a brilliant display, quite, can run everything, long batterytime.
Traffic? No brainer.
Websphere was a monster with shitty features. I remember when finally all the JEE Servers had a startup time of just a few seconds instead of minutes. RAM got finally cheap enough that you were able to run eclipse, webserver etc. locally.
Java was verbose, a lot more verbose than today.
JQuery was everywere.
This article in different forms keeps making the rounds and it's just so tiring. Yeah, let's remember everything that was great about 25 years ago and forget everything that sucked. Juxtapose it with everything that sucks about today but omit everything that's great. Come on man.
If you think things suck now, just make it better! The world is your playground. Nobody makes you use YAML and Docker and VS Code or whatever your beef is. Eclipse is still around! There's still a data center around your corner! Walk over and hang a server in the rack, put your hardly-typechecked Java 1.4 code on there and off you go!
Sure, you can do that for your hobby projects. But "at work" you generally have these decisions made for you. And these decisions have changed over time for the wrong reasons.
As an aside: if we say k8s, we should also say j8t.
> But "at work" you generally have these decisions made for you.
The idea that most employers make terrible decisions now, and amazing decisions back in the day, is plainly false. The author vividly recollects working at a decent Java shop. Even there I strongly doubt everything was amazing as they describe, but it sounds decent indeed. But plenty businesses at the time used C++, for no good reason other than inertia, usually in Windows-only Visual C++ 6-specific dialects. Their "build server" ran overnight, you'd check in your code in the late afternoon and get your compile errors back in the morning. The "source control" worked with company-wide file locks, and you'd get phoned your ass back to the office if you forgot to check in a file before leaving. Meanwhile, half the web was written in epic spaghetti plates of Perl. PHP was a joy to deploy, as it is now, but it was also a pain to debug.
If you care deeply about this stuff, find an employer who cares too. They existed back then and they exist now.
The "terrible decisions" of yore hold no comparison to today's "terrible decisions". It's not the same ballpark, it's not the same sport.
jubernetes?
jubernetet
> if we say k8s, we should also say j8t
It’s that one extra spoken syllable that pushes it into k8s I guess. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> And these decisions have changed over time for the wrong reasons.
Have you ever considered that you don’t understand why those decisions were made and that’s why you think they were made for the wrong reasons?
I simply don't agree with the reasons, while you seem to imply that all decisions made, are good.
The better tools are already there. It's not about making it better. It's about most programmers today choosing mediocrity.
Sometimes, you can avoid contact with this mediocrity, but often you don't and you're forced to play in this swamp.
old man claims society collapsing; back in his day…
You'll get old too one day and it will look a whole lot different watching the younguns stumble through completely avoidable mistakes and forget the long lessons of your life that weren't properly taught or were just ignored.
We have records from many periods in history of old men crowing about how society is collapsing because of the weak new generations. Thing is, maybe they were always right, and the new generations just had to grow up and take responsibility? And then again, maybe sometimes they were little too right and society did in fact collapse, but locally.
“Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”
― G. Michael Hopf, Those Who Remain
Old man yells at cloud native...
I both agree and disagree with you.
On the one hand: yes, this dev has clearly chosen a career/language specialization that puts him knee-deep in the absolute worst tooling imaginable.. I cannot fathom a workflow this fucking miserable and if this was my day to day, I would be far, far more depressed than I already am.
AND, the fact that so very very much of our industry does run, perhaps not all of, but a significant amount of a workflow not awfully different from this is IMO, an indictment of our trade. To invoke the immortal sentiment of the hockey coach from Letterkenny, this shit is FUCKING embarrassing.
So much major software that ships in a web browser because writing for Windows, Mac and Linux is just too hard you guys, it's simply too much for a sweet little bean like Microsoft ($3.62 trillion) to manage as they burn billions on AI garbage, is FUCKING embarrassing.
Half the apps on my phone are written this way which is why they can barely manage 30hz on their animations, die entirely when S3 goes down, and when they are working, make my phone hot. To run an app that lets me control my thermostat from my desk. That's FUCKING embarrassing.
And my desktop is only saved by virtue of being magnitudes more powerful than my original one back in the 90's, yet it only seems a scant more capable. In the early 00's I was sitting on Empire Earth and chatting with people over TeamSpeak. My computer can still do this, and with the added benefit of Discord can stream my game so my friends can all watch each other, and that's cool, apart from I lose about 10 fps just by virtue of having Discord open, and when I'm traveling? Oh god forget it, Discord flounders to death on hotel wifi despite it being perfectly cromulent DSL speeds. Not BLAZING, surely, but TeamSpeak handled VOIP over an actual DSL connection, with DSL latency, in the 00's. That's FUCKING embarrassing.
All our software now updates automatically by default, and it's notable when that's a GOOD thing. Usually what it actually means is the layout of known features changes for seemingly arbitrary reasons. Other times more dark patterns are injected. And Discord, not to pick on them, but they're the absolute fucking worst for this. I swear they push an "update" every time one of their devs sneezes, I usually have to install 18 such updates on each launch, and I run it very regularly! And for all that churn, I couldn't tell you one goddamn thing they actually added recently. FUCKING embarrassing.
And people will say "oh they could be better," "we know we can do it better," "these aren't the best companies or apps" okay but they are BIG ones. If the mean average car in America got awful fuel economy, needed constant service, was ill-designed for it's purpose and cost insane amounts of money...
Oh, that happened too. I think I just made my metaphor more embarrassing for another industry.
Java is usable now, but in 2013 it was the worst debugging experience one could have. I would rather work with PHP5 than with Java (unless I started a project from scratch). Also auto-refactoring was clearly worse, because well, Java. It was around that time that I tried Scala then Clojure, and even if debugging the JVM was still an experience (to avoid as much as possible), at least limited side effects reduced the issues.
If programming peaked, it certainly wasn't in 2010.
> Funnily enough, everything ran at about the same speed as it does now.
Actually, where I was sitting on a decent PC with broadband Internet at the time, everything was much, much faster. I remember seeing a video on here where someone actually booted up a computer from the 2000's and showed how snappy everything was, including Visual Studio, but when I search YouTube for it, it ignores most of my keywords and returns a bunch of "how to speed up your computer" spam. And I can't find it in my bookmarks. Oh well.
> I remember seeing a video on here where someone actually booted up a computer from the 2000's and showed how snappy everything was...
Was this what you were referring to?: https://jmmv.dev/2023/06/fast-machines-slow-machines.html
YouTube has become enshittified at a record clip. Search is useless and shorts have turned it into just another TikTok brain dopamine machine.
The author is writing like Java was outlawed or something. There are tons of shitty enterprise Java jobs out there for those who want them. Personally, I worked one of those jobs a decade ago, and the article's description of the "golden age" didn't bring back good memories.
It's easy enough to avoid the NPM circus as well. Just don't put JavaScript on your resume and don't get anywhere near frontend development.
Javascript wins by keeping the costs down. Companies today want to do more with less, which is how it should be and you are still free to choose from a myriad of technologies. When you pair this setup with LLMs, it's actually the best it has ever been IMO.
I get it. I agree with most of this article. But also like, nothing went away.
If you pine for the days of Java and Maven, you can still do that. It’s all still there (Eclipse and NetBeans, too!)
If you don’t like using Node and NPM, that’s totally valid, don’t use them. You can spin up a new mobile app, desktop app, and even a SaaS-style web app without touching NPM. (Even on fancy modern latest-version web frameworks like Hanami or Phoenix)
If you don’t want everyone to use JS and NPM and React without thinking, be the pushback on a project at work, to not start there.
If the author doesn't want to work with NPM and the JavaScript ecosystem he could just get a job writing Spring/Boot, which makes up probably 90% of the jobs at large enterprise companies. I don't agree that this world has disappeared...
This feels very much like the tired "the modern internet sucks - the old web with old websites was better!" trope that appears on here regularly.
You can still code the old way just like you can still put up your old website. No one is forcing you to use AI or VS Code or even JavaScript.
Of course you.might not getting those choices at work, but that is entirely different since your paid to do a job that benefits your employer, not paid to do something you enjoy.
Have fun.
There's something to this. I recently shipped a music curation site and deliberately avoided React/Next/etc - just HTML, CSS, vanilla JS. The cognitive load difference is stark. The 'peak' might be less about capability and more about us rediscovering that simpler tools often suffice.
It's all about picking the right tools for the job. The "cognitive load" might be larger in a vanilla project compared to React when your interface is more complex and interactive.
Same. I build stuff for local businesses in my area with nothing but boring old HTML, PHP, CSS and JS. I guess my shit isn't "web scale" but it works, and it works consistently, with minimal downtime, and it worked during both Amazon and Cloudflare's latest outages.
I don't need my software to eat the world, I'm perfectly content with it just solving someone's problems.
MY GOD THIS IS GOLD. Nothing but the truth here.
Programming was so much better 15 years ago, except for all the parts that sucked.