Comment by Daril | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Daril | Hacker News Reader

Well ... I think we have many problems in these modern IT times ... The first is that we are drowning in new IT technologies that are released every day and it is impossible to keep up with them ... Many languages, frameworks, tools ... After 25 years in this field, I am very sceptical when I read a CV on LinkedIn of a person who is an "expert" in 10 or 20 different technologies or languages (it is simply impossible). On the other hand, we have companies looking for "gurus" in several areas with many years of experience... just unrealistic expectations. Apart from a limited minority of true geniuses, all of us mere mortals need time and projects and work and a lot of failures to develop expertise in any field. On the other hand, in the 'real' world of work, it is not enough just to be technically competent. You need a lot of other skills that are equally if not more important: willingness to learn, ability to evaluate technologies based on requirements and constraints, integrity, honesty, self-organisation, curiosity, ingenuity ... logic. At the end of the day, it is a balancing act between technology, resources, money, time constraints and human relations, not just writing code or knowing everything about one or more tools that may become obsolete in a week.

It does feel kinda overwhelming. You really need to run to stay in place, and it is more and more about setting up a brittle chain of config files than having deep knowledge of a single languages best practices.

Well, the worst thing in my opinion is that (often for ideological reasons or egocentric positions) we don't accept or don't want to improve the existing tools or languages, but we create a new one ... so we had C, C++, Object Pascal and now we also have Python, PHP, Ruby, Go, Rust, Nim, Zig, D, Objective C, C#, Java, Kotlin, Haskell, Erlang, Ada, to name a few ... and this is the easy side ... Now there is the bandwagon of javascript frameworks: React, Vue, Svelte, Next, Nuxt and so on. It is impossible to keep up and it is also impossible that all these new technologies will be maintained in the long term. I remember the rise of Java years ago ... Java everywhere: Java applets on the web, Java on the desktop, Java as an application server and how it ended? Java is, in my opinion, one of the most convoluted and impenetrable languages ever created, but when you work alone as a freelancer, as in my case, you don't have the time and the resources to embrace and follow every new technology that is marketed as a revolution and the future, because at the end of the month you have to send the invoices to your clients to earn and live, and you have to have produced some results that work for them in the "real" world. I have used Drupal for a few projects in the past: the main problem? Every major release that broke the API backwards compatibility and this means you have to refactor all your plugins and custom code, many times without any new direct benefit to the end user who, of course, was not available to spend money because some internals change every year and, for him, on the surface nothing changed.

You realize that Ada and Objective C predate Object Pascal, and Erlang came out in the same year as it, right?

I would worry less about new ways of doing the same thing and more about client generation/retention. Plenty of companies are willing to pay top dollar for boring technology.

It wasn't a chronological order, of course... But if before the languages were more or less field specific, now with each language you can build any kind of application and it became very difficult to make a choice or simply keep up with the daily updates.

It's a squeeze on us workers because it's profitable, not because businesses are coordinated on healthy society

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