Comment by beyondcompute | Hacker News Reader

Comment by beyondcompute | Hacker News Reader

● The two most successful and widely used to solve everyday problems paradigms/environments: spreadsheets and shell scripting (with pipes, etc.) are the ones that have the least attention from “industrial” and academic programmers. Lessons and strong points from those systems are being ignored.

● There are “clusters of bugs”, i.e., finding a bug in a certain module increases a chance to find a subsequent bug in the same module. This is understood intuitively by most people yet very few act on it, discarding modules that have too many bugs (and rewriting them from scratch) instead of continuing to sink resources into maintenance.

● While professionals in other industries use professional tools, programmers use commodity hardware and software (the kind a homemaker would use to google a guacamole recipe). :(

● Managers and programmers think that personality traits and team members' individualities do not matter and there's no role “human factor” plays in development. Ditto for self-organization vs constantly “organizing”/policing employees.

● There were pretty cool systems back in the day (with orthogonal persistence, ability to inspect and modify any object on-the-fly, etc.). The modern ones are not “bad” either but some lessons could still be learned.

● Sometimes there are notions that bad software is created due to sales people/economic pressure but analysis of, say, build tools shows that it is not the case. ;)

>While professionals in other industries use professional tools, programmers use commodity hardware and software (the kind a homemaker would use to google a guacamole recipe). :(

i have to disagree with you here. most of the tools we use as programmers are so precise, adaptable and refined for the job that would make your average industry professional cry.

having those tools run on a guacamole-recipe machine is only a testimony to their power.

it's not just the software either; through services like AWS we have access to some of the most sophisticated and optimized computation and storage hardware on the planet.

So how many programmers you know use a professional keyboard, say? I don't want to provide free advertisement here so I won't mention any brands. But the ones that have hands separated and keys placed in recessions for comfortable wrist position and modifier keys under thumbs? And those that are fully programmable, the ones that cost from 300 euro and up? I don't know about you but I have (on my mechanical 100+ euro keyboard) 'Ctrl(Caps Lock)-Command(Alt)-Enter' remapped to 'Alt-Backspace' (in parentheses — the original key) using a Lua-scripted software. If it's your idea of “refined” and “precise” then that's fine :) Moreover most of programmers I know (hundreds and hundreds) use a “minimalist slick” keyboard from a Californian company. It's a good keyboard for googling a guacamole recipe and a nice example of a “good-looking“ industrial design. But it's not a professional tool by any means.

I don't really want to get started about those slow laptops (that have “Pro” labels on them). I don't know about you but for me their performance is disappointing. (By the way, I use a 2010 Macbook Air as my home machine so no need to call me “picky”). Yet those “Pro” machines seem to be “default” ones in so many organizations I know. They are a good trade-off indeed between looks, portability, versatility and price. But they are nowhere near “pay whatever it takes to scrape every last drop of performance and reliability from your tools” approach that to me seems to designate the choice of tools by professionals.

About software. There's the brilliant, inspirational and slightly sad article: https://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff . Where, I remember, was a comment with a person asking, “do you want to pay hundreds of dollars for a text processor written with the level of quality described?” And my reaction was, “Hell, yes! If it's a professional tool and I earn tens of thousands using it, I should be able to pay accordingly for my main equipment”. In web development industry there's an apparent trend now to switch to “hipster” (I mostly like things hipster) text editors. Won't specify the names here but they are usually written in Javascript and HTML and are “highly customizable” but I rarely see them made to perform functions my IDE does out of the box. In the meantime, IDEs for web development are a few (are there any besides the Prague-made ones?) and are not very customizable by my needs (compared even to aforementioned lightweight editors).

Anyway, thank you for your answer and I am glad, that you do focus on the positive side of things!

>In the meantime, IDEs for web development are a few and are not very customizable by my needs

i'm a full stack web dev myself, whatever that means nowadays. i consider languages, the os, dbms, version control, virtualization, browsers, webservers, automation servers etc etc, to be my tools. not merely the the IDE or text editor. personally i hardly need anything beside emacs and zsh terminal on my 7y/o thinkpad t410. that said i do understand that different people need different tools. hope you find what you need.

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