The Magpie Developer (2008) | Hacker News Reader

The Magpie Developer (2008)

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43 pointsbrudgers12 comments

There's a lot of truth in this post... however I would add a step to David Megginson's "programming language cycle":

5a. Some of the regular developers resent a new language being forced upon them, so the public opinion on the language becomes more negative.

I would say Go is currently already in phase 5a/6, while Rust is still in 3/4 - however I have to add that I think both languages are here to stay, so there's more to them than just the hype...

> If you consider that, statistically, the vast majority of programmers have yet to experience a dynamic language of any kind – much less Ruby – the absurdity here is sublime.

Was that really anywhere close to true in 2008? I would have thought that most developers would have known at least one of Perl, Python, Javascript, or Ruby (or Bash; not sure if he'd count that one).

Am I mistaken about the history there?

Back then Perl and JS were only really used in web dev, Ruby wasn't really used at all, and Python was still fairly niche (although gaining ground). There were a LOT of C, C++, Java developers back then, especially in the enterprise space, who'd never touched any of the above.

> Back then Perl and JS were only really used in web dev

Wasn't Perl used pretty extensively for sysadmin tasks, too? It's a dependency of a lot of Unix tools (e.g., git) and I thought that dated to around that time or a bit before.

For what it's worth, this video[0] gives the following percentages for some dynamic languages in 2008:

  JavaScript....21%
  PHP...........21%
  Python.........8%
  Ruby...........4%
  Perl...........4%
  Matlab.........3%
  =================
  TOTAL.........60%

(I totally forgot about PHP earlier. Oops!)

So I stand my my initial claim that it wasn't the case that the _vast_ majority of programmers had yet to experience a dynamic language. Though I can understand it seeming that way to Atwood; didn't he mostly do application development?

[0]: Most Popular Programming Languages 1965 - 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Og847HVwRSI

Fair call on Perl and sysadmin tasks. As for the others I just went from memory so clearly others had more exposure than I was aware of. (Whether interpreted languages were "real" programming languages is another debate to be had between the quiche-eaters and the hairy-chested stereotypes.)

These are what I call CV projects. Technology is chosen because it looks good on someone's CV rather than the suitability of the technology to the given problem

If you want your resume to look good you have two options. Either you work on prestigious projects (or do boring stuff at a prestigious company like Google) or you use the latest shiniest tools. Most projects in enterprises are very mundane and unimpressive so your next best option is to always jump on the latest and shiniest. It’s a very rational choice. If you always do what’s best and most efficient for the company you run the risk of not being employable in the future.

When I look at the job ads my company puts out, most devs who work there at the moment would not get hired because they don’t use the tech the company is asking for.

RDD - Resume Driven Development

http://radar.oreilly.com/2014/10/resume-driven-development.h...

Funnily I find that the new and the shiny is a rebranding of the old and the stable. The difference is a new language + name + platform. I think this is an endless cycle as we see new developers come in and discover old concepts in new frameworks.

Once you've been through a few of these cycles it's easy to get jaded and burnt out, which is when older Devs may push back on the new. I don't think it's because they're changed adverse, just that they doubt the benefit of doing something they already know in the flavour of the month framework/language.

I'm guilty of all of this and have been through several burn outs. Nowadays I accept that everything will always be changing, and to keep an open mind to avoid dismissing things that are truly revolutionary.

One of the realizations I think comes with age, or experience, is that what most of us do isn't that special.

When you're young, or new to the world of IT, it's easy to look to Google, Netflix, Twitter and other tech giants and be fascinated by the challenges they face and the tools they develop of cope with those challenges.

While I continued to be fascinated by new solution, new frameworks and whatnot, I also try to set it into the context for which is was developed. For instance, I had a customer who had chosen Cassandra as their database, but the total size of the dataset was never going to be more than a few hundred MB. It's not that Cassandra is bad or even wrong, it was just developed for something different and was only picked because it was new and exciting.

Ops team are in my experience better at rejecting the new shiny, because it's often not really ready to be properly managed. The operations side of are often takes years to mature and no one wants to get up a 3AM to debug some bonkers system that was picked only because some developer thought it would be interesting.

Funny to see the comments bashing the new and shiny Ruby on Rails. Now Rails is boring and proven.

New Years 2008 is when Zed Shaw published “Rails is a Ghetto”. We know that a lot of soul searching happened in the community after that and it got a lot stronger since then.

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