Are you a dinosaur? do you feel like one?

Tech related, web and content

[explorador]

Hi everyone, from time to time conversations take place with clients and other developers, I'm at the usual:

- great content
- customer (audience) focused
- add value
- use widely compatible technology (and yes I love Perl)

But people in general talk about TailWind, React, Node, AWS, Azzure, artificial intelligence, Wordpress, full stack developers, backend, front end, escalable webapps, integral strategies, social media, SOAP, REST, APIS, microservices, blah blah blah.

Then I sound like a dinosaur, they think or say "oh, old Perl, DB or flat files databases... writing content, hand made content!, and simple parts: server, code, assets", but to be honest, except from those working at banks or any financial institution, these people products and solutions are garbage, websites nobody visits, domains that must die after one year, absolutely unneeded complex conversations about 4, 5, 10 technologies just to make the ball bounce.

Sound to me like average attorney/lawyers: you need a, b, c, d, e, f.... etc, and all they need in reality is filling a form (that is mostly free) and present it signed at some institution.

Anyway, back to the question: do you feel or appear at times like a dinosaur?

* Yeah, sometimes they ask me how I manage to make my websites so far but they can't understand the answers.

[explorador]

The AWS topic: I don't know what everyone here sees on their countries, but while lots of people here (locally) say it's cheap and flexible... I don't buy it, and I'm beginning to associate AWS to lack or order, lack of discipline, structure and planning. Basically on any system, what you need/want dictates specific ways to do things (and potential escalations); I have always complained regarding local customers and companies lacking structure and saying they only need a system for something, only to demand changes once the system is finished requesting additional databases, tables, fields, etc. This is a highly local problem, and now I relate it to AWS because the clients/companies think they can ask for whatever... and grow/add/replace as they wish at any time. Certainly AWS facilitates a lot of things around the world, but for a stubborn undisciplined client/coder... it only promotes lack of structured plans (sure, they call it "flexible").

isitreal: one is IT mobility, from what I understand, it's considered now very old fashioned to stay with the same company or employer for decades, which leads to very fast exits and rehires to new places, which leads to a few key things, one being not designing systems as if you were going to be the one to maintain it in 10 to 20 years, or more.

True, so true. During local conversations with coders I often hear them saying things they can't sustain, I mean... they rarely spend more than 2 years at the same company!, and surely have no idea about long term planning. If the thing breaks? who cares! they will be long gone in about a year or 2. It seems only dinosaurs make solid plans today. I even remember people saying "it doesn't matter, because in about 2 years from how there will be something new and this whole thing will be taken down to build another". Talk to them about brick and mortar!

isitreal: By the way, rereading the above, which I actually edited a lot to make it readable, it strikes me it's almost a farewell to this work and career, since what attracted me to this area initially is now largely gone

So true.

isitreal: I agree learning more languages improves your code

Yes, I agree. But there is a "but". Somehow this line reminded me of "doctors", you know, human medicine. At least locally, the amount of doctors having their own office or clinic being able of diagnosing you and treating you is very low. What you see a lot today is a doctor saying you need A to Z tests and go here and there with my friends doctors. Each and every doctor will tell you the same, sending you to other doctors or clinics for tests. At some moment you don't remember who is the main doctor studying your case. Obviously techniques make thing diverse and better, but in most cases a good doctor should be able of dealing with the case... NOT 20 doctors!, it reminds me of that old Michael J. Fox film where he is a doctor and ends up stranded on some local town. Dude needed so many machines and tests failing to diagnose everything, but the local doctor managed pretty well with his solid knowledge. So now we have 1 doctor VS 20... just like 1 programmer using one or few languages... VS 20 coders using whatever they can imagine at random times.

[isitreal]

explorador, for me, this was always a precarious position, because when I started doing tech my approach was already obsolete, though I didn't fully realize it. The core notion is controlling the systems. This is why I almost immediately fled proprietary stuff like ASP, which had just broken itself on a major version update, LOL, and found a free/open source language, and never went back. Then I left the proprietary browser (anyone remember MSIE 4/5 nightmares, and the grateful move to Mozilla? which were prominent here back in the day) Then I left the proprietary operating system, when it totally broke itself (Windows 2000 > XP) for free operating systems (which are their own headache, of course), but the consistent theme is control, or lack thereof.

What's striking is seeing how corporations that start being quite open start to close as they become increasingly corporate, Google is the shining example of that one, and to me was / is educational, because it reminds that openness when it comes to closed stuff is just a transitory state, see github and it's mass scale copyright infringement of all the code they had access to via copilot, yet another example of how foolhardy it is to trust anything you have no control over long term.

The fundamental move now as far as I can see is handing control to corporations and 3rd party vendors. I've seen one tech youtuber note how expensive AWS is vs some other cloud based database type solution, and I'm always thinking, wow, that's funny, for 20 years our and my database costs have been zero, they are part of our hosting plans.

This issue is growing so signficant that many prominent open source web based projects are starting to introduce 'business licensed' versions, like mariadb or mongodb, it's happening all over now, faster and faster.

One of the biggest ironies is the self serving hypocracy of these a-hole 'tech bros', I was really surprised for example to learn that github, built top to bottom on free software stack, ceo hated copy-left licensing, even though his entire business at core was built on it (linux servers etc). I'd allowed myself to make excuses why hosting code on github was a necessary evil, but then microsoft bought them, then bought OpenAI, then merged the two to create the biggest copyright violation in the code arena ever, and maybe the biggest since Google's google docs book scanning program.

It's not just AWS, that's just the most visible thing that everyone knows, it's the entire concept of not controlling any of your core tools.

A CMS we use for example was originally made by some really good developers, open source, but over the years, they were taken over by the next generation, who are almost certainly windows users. PHP also somewhat clearly has been increasingly influenced by Windows users due to certain syntax selections they made for new features that would never be done in *nix. PHP luckily has a very solid leadership / community and seems to respect RFC results, much like Perl 5., so these changes are being managed fine as far as I can tell.

But I was fully conscious of what a bad fit I was when I started because I made myself a business card noting I handcrafted my code and sites in the traditional style, it was slightly tongue in cheek, but it indicated that I clearly was aware that I was following a somewhat archaic approach to this tech even way back then.

I think where I question learning many languages etc is that it's kind of the case where a programming language that is not trivial is very hard to learn, and to get actually good at it I think takes somewhere between 3 and 5 years, assuming you are generating a lot of non trivial code and logic, and you are doing it all yourself, not just team stuff. I don't know what industry expects re LOC per developer per year at places like Tesla, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, Facebook, etc, but it can't be that much because they often have more than 10k developers and their stuff often does not work very well when compared to the vast resources they pour into generating their features and code.

Just finished Breaking Twitter, a book on Elon's ongoing destruction of Twitter, which I recommend despite its almost non existent technical/engineering stuff, but it's actually enough to see the culture before decimation and after, it's quite clear the pre takeover version was generating very little code per employee. If you have any remaining illusions about Elon and his 'team buliding genius' this insider look will cure you of those permanently. The main weakness is I think the author had no access to the engineering side of it, I think he mainly interviewed the marketing/filtering people, which is unfortunate because there's an entire different story that could have been told about the pre and post engineering side of things.

Anyway, like I said, if the tech world had been what it is now when I got into it, I would not have gotten into it, it's increasingly ugly, with greed dominating totally, to a level that is really starting to become worrisome because society is handing way too much power to these sociopaths, and they don't deserve it, their wealth was siphoned out of the societies that gave birth to them, and they haven't returned the favor.

[explorador]

Recently watched one of many videos by Fireship, a YT channel explaining coding languages and frameworks in 100 seconds. This one was about some JS framework (one of many), but the video made it clear it's not a framework: it is a library (something probably us dinosaurs know, while most of it's own fanbase get confused). Anyway, the most valuable bit (I think) said something along the lines of: it's INCOMPLETE... far from perfect, with bugs, just like other similar JS libraries, because the community (including the creators) were too focused on making the best big thing, and while it was still on development they all ran after the other best new thing, making a point that many new fancy tools today are in fact immature because within short periods there is something better-faster and many will jump to that ship (go ask an experienced React Native dev). Sure, many will disagree, but there is a difference between a language really tested by tons of users in many diff ways, vs people doing the same thing and introducing new functionality as they need it (sounds so good, it's not). I know someone will refute this, but they are wrong, because instant refusals around this go mostly around the feeling of rejection and not exactly considering the premises explained.

isitreal: Anyway, like I said, if the tech world had been what it is now when I got into it, I would not have gotten into it, it's increasingly ugly

This is where I'm currently standing. Most dev jobs today (at least locally) are things I won't even consider, and many who go after it often regret it. At times when I discuss with younger devs they fail to understand what I mean regarding "why are you using so many coding languages for this task?" (same goes to many job positions) and they talk non stop about modernity, changes, improving, updates, using the next big thing, or how many systems need communication between 5 languages.

And that's stupid. I see the case, but we are not talking about a huge company... most times it's a freaking library, a simple store, and their insistence on using so many languages mostly sounds as being unable of using one language correctly. Also, most times they think that my personal expression around this means I can't code such solutions (where obviously I can). This is where they loose contact... they focus way more on using 5 languages to glue something together, where I wonder why they can't use one and use it well. To me it's not so much about a company asking me if I can do something, it's more about "why do you want to do that?" <- I mean, very twisted plans for something simple.

At least, locally, regardless of the disagreements with other coders: they can't give me an example where their systems beat mine in terms of speed and durability over the years. So, who is the dinosaur going extinct?

[graeme_p]

Re HTML, I think you're forgetting that Perl was the first real web language, it has tons of modules, CPAN is packed with them, HTML stuff is obviously heavily represented. The main issue CPAN modules have is lack of maintainance due to lack of man-hours, and a I think a poorly designed issue tracker.

I was asking that question with regard to performance of tasks outside regular expressions.

If you take the two very different things I mentioned, the first has a module in the Python standard library (written in C) and the other can be done using a very popular library (that uses C or Fortran for the performance critical bits). So fast and no worries about maintanance.

This issue is growing so signficant that many prominent open source web based projects are starting to introduce 'business licensed' versions, like mariadb or mongodb, it's happening all over now, faster and faster.

Business licensing has always been a thing - adding either support or permission to mix with closed source cod. The problem with some (e.g. MongoDB) is they change their licences so they are no longer true open source which is a bait and switch.

I was really surprised for example to learn that github, built top to bottom on free software stack, ceo hated copy-left licensing, even though his entire business at core was built on it (linux servers etc).

Also git itself is copy left.

The fundamental move now as far as I can see is handing control to corporations and 3rd party vendors. I've seen one tech youtuber note how expensive AWS is vs some other cloud based database type solution, and I'm always thinking, wow, that's funny, for 20 years our and my database costs have been zero, they are part of our hosting plans.

.

That annoys me too. A lot of it is branding and pushing it to management. Also a workaround for bad internal systems. There was an interesting discussion about this on Hacker News (a site I think you will like - run by a tech VC company) a while back. One reason someone gave (and a lot agreed) for recommending things like AWS was that they could just spin up extra resources, whereas internal IT would ask for forms to be filled in and justifications.

their stuff often does not work very well when compared to the vast resources they pour into generating their features and code.

I think the vast resources are a large part of the problem. Huge team, everyone wants to do their bit, so code becomes very bloated. The problem is far too many LOC - its bloated bad code. Look at the download size of the FB or Uber mobile apps. People used to write smaller windowing operating systems. There was a leak of the FB mobile app and it had something like 20 thousand classes.

where a programming language that is not trivial is very hard to learn, and to get actually good at it I think takes somewhere between 3 and 5 years,

I disagree. The fundamentals are hard to learn, but the more languages you learn the easier they are to learn. The most difficult thing I have found is learning the tooling and ecosystem.

But one thing I can say for sure, nobody who uses a lot of regex, always, everywhere, would rpefer python

Using regex for particular tasks is good. Using regex everywhere is bad code in my opinion. I use a regex a few times in the course of a few thousand lines of code.

This is where they loose contact... they focus way more on using 5 languages to glue something together, where I wonder why they can't use one and use it well.

For a huge project, maybe you need lots of languages. However, almost all of Google's products are written in a single digit number of languages.

For what I do, I generally use Python for backend, and a bit of JS in browsers (because there is no real choice) and SQL in databases. I think there is a case for adding another language with different characteristics. Python + C, for example, for speed. Maybe Python + Rust or OCaml would be better. In an ideal world I would use something like Erlang + Rust.