Comment by Crinus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Crinus | Hacker News Reader

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If a developer cannot use these tools themselves they wont know them, in turn they wont promote them to others, they wont propose them to companies, the companies wont need them and they wont seek developers with knowledge of those tools and as a result knowledge of those tools wont be "tasty" to many companies.

The only way to break this dependency loop is to convince non-developers (executives, etc) to use those tools but at that point the incentive shifts from making those tools good for use by developers to making those tools good in convincing non-developers to buy them.

The only "big buys club" i see working on here is one of people who couldn't learn something else.

You should already have seen this with Turbo Pascal and Delphi and how these products moved from cheap $50-$100 products even students could afford and focused providing a simple yet comprehensive package to grossly priced overbloated, hype-driven, bullet-point executive-presentation-friendly monsters with tons of bugs and an over-reliance on bundling 3rd party components. And how this sort of move made their products instead of being widely known and loved by developers to become relics that only stay alive because their owners are preying on those who at the past chose them (because they were good at the time) and cannot move off.

I have used OutSystems for almost a year, I think it is almost the best in this area. But I still don’t like it in many ways. Its normal paradigm is simple imperative programming, and usually over abstraction. Some simple logic flow just easier to be read in text.

I can conclude OutSystems is not a completed solution for general purpose development, it is just a platform which provides simple template, components, programming. For systems which are data entry (what they call digital transformation), it is ok with an crazy license. However, if you want to implement some business logic, you are better to implement them in general programming language.

The components system really show what is leaky abstraction. For some plugin I have to understand what is doing behind. For native Cordova plugin, it is crazy to debug.

In a short run, it saves time, however, in a long run, it don’t have any advantages due to two reason: Its development speed will not able to catch up with technology trend, therefore, sometimes of its advantage is no longer an advantage, for example it have components, but frontend framework also have many components. (Its component framework just copied from the open source, it is hard to find the documentation of the embedded version)

The eco-system just sucks, very few plugins because its plugins are not easy to make, and many of them are not supported by the Outsystems so most likely the plugin author will answer your question on the forum.

True I have seen it happen with Turbo Pacal/Delphi, but the biggest issue there was Borland almost going broke and continuous change of hands, which destroyed the trust on the product.

There aren't "toy" versions of Cisco, Oracle, DB2, SQL Server OLAP, Sitecore, AEM, LifeRay, WebSphere, SAP, Hybris, PTC, Aicas, Ricoh JVM, Gemalto M2M, ....

And yet there are plenty of projects available to work on with those stacks, including green field projects in companies adopting them.

Borland was going broke because they abandoned their core target market for chasing after the enterprise - and that was during a time before open source even got its name and developers expecting tools for free was a thing.

And have you seen the reputation these systems you mention have among developers (assuming they know about them, after all my original point was that the "enterprise pockets" requirements lead to obscurity - with the obvious exception of those that have been around for a very long time) and how clunky they are? Turbo Pascal and early Delphi never had the reputation that Oracle has nowadays.

And sure, you can find works with them but these systems are a minority and when they are used they are practically never chosen by developers themselves.

The reputation among FOSS devs sure.

I have been working in enterprise world since 1999, where most folks don't even know that HN exists.

They don't even think twice about buying something like Oracle.

I'm not sure i follow, you mean that only FOSS devs dislike stuff like Oracle's?

Mostly.

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