Comment by austincheney | Hacker News Reader

Comment by austincheney | Hacker News Reader

> Technology is not a goal. Nobody cares about which programming language you are using, nobody cares about which frameworks your team has chosen, nobody cares about how elegant your data structures are and nobody cares about how good is your code.

100% that!

> JS Fatigue happens when people use tools they don't need to solve problems they don't have.

Many JavaScript developers are scared (by scared I am paralyzed in the face of death catatonic scared to the most possible irrational extreme) to write original code when often times original code takes less time and is a better fit to the immediate problem. This is called Invented Here Syndrome and is internally coddled when developers are appeased by writing configurations opposed to logic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invented_here

It is so bad that at my current employer somebody recommended I use a different editor to write code, because it had this kiss ass extension called Atom Beautify. They were pretty forceful in their recommendation. I am a collaborator on that project and wrote one of its beautifiers. People are scared to death to write software themselves or use any software from people they know, but so long as they don't I wrote any of it its great (to them).

> Even though the ECMA spec is becoming more and more solid these days, we still need Babel.

I have always believed this is one of those not real problems the paper talks about immediately prior. Writing cross browser JS is like writing CSS. Everybody bitches about it but once you've nailed it you got it with ease forever.

> My first advice for anyone suffering from JS Fatigue...

Learn the standards. Code to the standards first. Then optimize your workflow to become more efficient. This is the very essence solving for premature optimization.

> Many JavaScript developers are scared (by scared I am paralyzed in the face of death catatonic scared to the most possible irrational extreme) to write original code when often times original code takes less time and is a better fit to the immediate problem. This is called Invented Here Syndrome and is internally coddled when developers are appeased by writing configurations opposed to logic.

I think this is true of a much larger category of developers than JS developers (though one could argue that defining yourself by a specific language is indicative of belonging to this category), that is developers who can't do more than plumbing, i.e. developers who can't actually solve problems properly on their own.

The flighty attraction to the new shiny is somewhat driven by a lack of understanding of how either the new or the old shiny actually work. If you understand the job you're setting out to do you're in a much better position to decide upon tools, frameworks, what to do in house, etc. If you don't you're stuck gluing black boxes together, because any actual code you write will be far worse.

JS being an "accessible" language and a mandatory part of practically all software companies with a front facing website makes this the most apparent in both the constant flow of new tools and libraries and the view that the new tools and libraries must be adopted. But any novice developer can fall prey to this behavior regardless of their choice of language, JS just makes it easier.

It depends.

Lets step away from the front end for a second, on the server side you use a reasonble MVC framework.

* You get to stop worrying about how to structure your code.

* The guidence should use Depency Injection, allowing you to easily Unit Test.

* You get a templating language that helps with XSS.

* You get a validation language that helps with input.

* You get session handling that projects you against jacking, etc.

* You get an ORM that makes SQL easy and projects you against SQL Injection.

* You get Security Headers, etc.

Typically, the junior developer needs the above help, the mid level developer thinks they can do it all himself, and the senior doesn't think it's worth reinveting the wheel.

JavaScript has arguably been the wild west, and if you're creating a SPA, a lot of the above is no longer your consideration, but it alos doesn't neccessairly mean we should all write everything from scratch.

Now there are counter arguments where you can DIY your own framework using community modules, and this is how the Golang community seems to work, but this seems better when you have something like PHPs PSRs ala https://www.php-fig.org/ defining how this should fit together.

I'm not arguing that one should write things from scratch. I think I may have poorly articulated my position, but that you and I actually share the same opinion here.

I don't think you should reinvent the wheel unless for some reason all available wheels are insufficient for your case. But knowing this requires that you have some understanding of how wheels work, how to compare them, and how to hew your own out of raw materials if the need arises.

I would say JS is partially a wild west due to title inflation and the relative numbers of lesser experienced developers in the space relative to, say, your pool of Erlang engineers.

Yup. And it’s hard to even evaluate these things sometimes (and I have 20 years experience to guide me now).

We’re doing some frontend stuff at the moment and we needed a nice way to wire up keyboard shortcuts. After a week of false starts with other people’s libraries we wrote our own in a day that a) works how we need and b) is so small that anyone can understand it.

Yeah, fair enough. I agree, there is an over reliance on libs that often don't do much. :)

>The flighty attraction to the new shiny is somewhat driven by a lack of understanding of how either the new or the old shiny actually work. If you understand the job you're setting out to do you're in a much better position to decide upon tools, frameworks, what to do in house, etc. If you don't you're stuck gluing black boxes together, because any actual code you write will be far worse.

Writing my own sort routine? Pointless but pretty harmless.

Writing my own docx parser? Sure, that will be one mythical man century of work.

Sometimes we are using black boxes because we have created so much accidental complexity that we can't do better than "this works, we don't know why and we dare not change it". The browsers js must target are some of the biggest black boxes even though they are open(ish) source.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with using black boxes, and I'm not arguing that it should be totally avoided. I'm arguing that a lack of understanding of how to solve your problem leads to only gluing black boxes together as you lack the understanding with which to make more nuanced decisions, and to solve any part of the problems you have yourself.

It's also not necessarily required that you understand all of what you're doing down to the logic gates, but if you don't (to crib your example) understand some of what docx parsing may entail, or can't actually write any sort function (nor understand how to compare them), you're stuck with black boxes at even the highest levels, and then you're very likely to be exposed to the article's defined fatigue as you continually jump to whatever looks shiniest, lacking the understanding with which to properly compare your options.

> Writing my own docx parser? Sure, that will be one mythical man century of work.

I'm not sure that's actually a great example. I had a project a while ago where I needed to extract certain information from Word and Excel files, and it was less work to just write my own parser (it's just XML in a ZIP file) that got exactly the information I needed than to figure out all the complexity of using a full-blown docx/xlsx parser. It ended up being 100 lines of Haskell, and half of that was imports.

https://gist.githubusercontent.com/duairc/db3e99a7808668e84e...

Edit: The docx part of it is only 10 lines of code.

That's a pretty neat trick.

There's a slight difference between extracting a few tags from an xml file and building an manipulable ast of it.

There is, but if your problem requires just the former, it's faster and better to build it yourself than to pull in a heavy third-party dependency (of which you'll use 1% anyway).

Yes but if it requires the latter you end up with an uncontrollable mess of regular expressions which can accidentally parse the language needed to summon the great elder ones.

The media wiki parser is a perfect example of what can go wrong with simple solutions.

> sort routine? docx parser?

You immediately went for two examples that are precisely not the kind of thing the author is talking about. Consider leftpad.

> I think this is true of a much larger category of developers than JS developers (though one could argue that defining yourself by a specific language is indicative of belonging to this category), that is developers who can't do more than plumbing, i.e. developers who can't actually solve problems properly on their own.

> The flighty attraction to the new shiny is somewhat driven by a lack of understanding of how either the new or the old shiny actually work. If you understand the job you're setting out to do you're in a much better position to decide upon tools, frameworks, what to do in house, etc.

I agree with this. Many developers never think to ask clients "why do you want to do this?" also. Sticking boxes together, cleaning up code and coming up with clever coding tricks is fun and distracting; it's easy to lose sight of or never even learn of what high-level problem you're meant to be solving.

> nobody cares about how good is your code

the person who has to maintain it?

Yeah, somebody has to work super hard, to make somebody elses job super easy. Write it yourself, or maybe you cant, and blaming someone elses code is a distraction to take the attention away from yourself.

It is a poor carpenter who blames his tools. Why? Because a skilled carpenter has money to buy the best tools.

Tools matter.

Developer experience matters. Cognitive cost matters when tools are used by non-infinite brains. If you don’t believe that, then build a product with a confusing UI and try selling it.

New != good though.

It's rare that new ever equals good, even the best stuff takes time to mature into good.

It starts with interesting and then moves on to good later I think.

A skilled carpenter has the tools that are necessary for the job, their price doesn’t matter.

In a couple of industries I have worked in there is a tier of expensive tools that are basically ways of extracting free money from professionals (when someone else is paying) and rich amateurs who want to feel superior to their friends

> A skilled carpenter has the tools that are necessary for the job, their price doesn’t matter

Very true. A skilled carpenter is discerning about his tools and know where it matters to spend more money.

Or the business owner who is frustrated that their product still lists Czechoslovakia as a country.

(Yes, this is true of ADP)

When you walk into a restaurant, do you notice if they have an efficiently laid-out kitchen with mise-en-place, good relationships with their suppliers, or a refrigerator at the proper temperature? No. But you do notice when you food is slow to arrive, the food doesn't taste fresh, or the chicken gives you food poisoning.

——

You also probably notice if they are using roof tiles as plates, but that doesn’t make them good cutting boards in the kitchen.

Yes. I notice those things.

I notice if they have an A or B or C rating, which is a reflection of some of those. I notice if they are in business, which after 5-10 years, is a reflection of some of those. I notice if the employees seem happy or frazzled which is a reflection of some of those.

The same goes for software projects. It's not always clear to me what the code quality is beneath the products I use, but the products I use for the long-haul almost certainly either A.) have reasonably high quality code or B.) are reasonably complete, because they are well maintained and don't sink beneath the weight of technical debt, and they persist over the course of the years.

You can also rephrase that as a business concern. Instead of how ugly the code is or how challenging it is the more important factor is how long does it take to accomplish a given change.

The challenge there is if you have isolated yourself to a happy path you have no idea what the edge cases are, what the regulatory concerns are, or what prior business concerns have already been addressed. You really have no idea how long the task will take to complete or the scope of actual work. It is a big risk to leave your framework dream world and embrace reality.

By living in reality I know how to account for those various concerns. I can provide a more accurate estimate of effort and still get it done 8-12x faster. You don't get better at anything by closing off reality and hiding from failure.

The problem with using a bunch of unnecessary abstractions and tools is that you have to choose between two really horrid scenarios. Do you give up on speed of delivery and product quality to work within the tools in place? Or, do you account for all the business concerns and deliver quickly by creating a one-off and possibly fighting those existing tools to do it?

The best way to know what to add to a project (dependencies) are those things you known you will deliberately never maintain and that require a one time configuration. For example I use a linter to check my code. It is a dependency that I never modify, I never reconfigure, I never look into its code, and I almost never update. If I were forced to peer into the code and read all about how it works and really get intimate with it I might as well just write it myself, because you will be maintaining it just the same anyways.

It's also the same logic you can observe everywhere in business : pushing down responsabilities, outsource resources, leave a paper trail etc.

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