Comment by matlock | Hacker News Reader

Comment by matlock | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

While I don't disagree that we shouldn't strive for maintainbility, things like medical software, airplane software or similar highly tested mission critical pieces are specifically built to last for that long. Nobody is going to pay us to build a WebShop to last for 20 years, thats just not a necessity when getting it out quick is so much more important from a business perspective than making it last forever.

> That’s often unobtainable with modern software development because we rely so much on things that change too often, but it doesn’t have to be that way

The reason we rely on things that change often is because we want to leverage them to get products out faster. Many different layers of that (as every tech stack is essentially a product by someone) and we have lots of updates to deal with. The flipside of slow moving projects is bugs might not be fixed or new helpful features might not be coming in, meaning you have to build it yourself.

As a community we know and have known how to build mission critical software for decades, but we actively often decide not to do it because it isn't that important compared to other factors.

So interestingly - the web shops you’re talking about do want to maintain their client data, and do expect it to be available “forever,” somewhere. The payment processors absolutely do at a minimum. Some of those layers are highly hardened.

While the particular Etsy clone or t-shirt of the day, or customized shower curtain site will certainly come and go, it’d be an entirely different problem if visa, PayPal, stripe, swipe, or whatever payment processor packed it up and went home at random.

We need the foundations/infrastructure to be built to last. People need to identify which kind of software they're making and treat the infrastructure as unchanging. Changes in the basement need to be carefully considered with a default stance of rejecting them unless justified by reasoning that has a time horizon of many years.

Tell that to the number of shops setting up factory IoT based on Node.js...

I have to be honest I do believe Node.js will be around for a long time. The improvements over the past few years have been vast thanks to the ever improving standards and all the major cloud companies are heavily invested. It has the world's largest public package registry as well (not that the sheer quantity means you can always find a high quality library).

I've only recently switched after years of scepticism but for the sort of stuff I do it's more than good enough. It has its warts but so does every language that's stuck around.

I don't necessarily think that the the language or the core thing won't stick around. But unless you force people to really decide which packages they require, you end up with an unaudited mess of packages (basically with every package - or is anyone really creating portable, stable apps of a relevant size based on the core node environment ...)

Yeah for sure the language definitely makes it easy to build something that won't last. I misunderstood your comment so sorry about that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com