You have devs in here shrugging and saying "hey it works, no big deal" when it comes to a business process. But if it comes to svelte vs react vs whatever it's a butlerian jihad where everyone's accusing eachother of not even knowing how to program.
sometimes I wonder if most of us do the job to play with silly tools rather than actually make shit.
Yes? I thought this is common knowledge.
Here's a universal tool whose potential is limited only by one's imagination, and yet most of the jobs in our profession are at best boring - the high-paying ones usually involve making actively harmful things that shouldn't exist in the first place (see e.g. whole adtech for starters), and most of the rest are so mired in office politics or business constraints that the outcomes are guaranteed to be shit. A lot of strangeness in the dev culture can be viewed as coping mechanisms.
Meanwhile, after doing this work long enough, you end up realizing that disturbingly many SaaS tools offer much less utility and worse ergonomics than an Excel spreadsheet.
Often we see people claiming that "This new thing is the spreadsheet killer, like ai at the moment. People have been saying this forever but spreadsheets are still here. And there's a good reason for it.
The only way AI has a chance of killing spreadsheets is if it replaces a Real Programmers, by becoming a tool that lets anyone interactively build arbitrary apps, for free (on the margin), with near zero turnaround.
That's likely not down to the tool, more likely a complex requirement you understand but they don't. (And are you sure you're getting the right answer? IIRC an analysis showed 10% of spreadsheets have errors - devs do care about good results, and that does take extra time)
> Where a programme solution is static and needs tons more hours for every change needed.
Hmm. Sounds like there's something wrong here, with your guys or some aspect of the business (and sure, excel is not a bad tool, just to be clear).
AI sits at the "speed" corner. Excel, a fully dynamic interactive programming language with one type "cell", gives slightly better correctness and accountability. Coalescing process into program continues to move you to the other end. Once you start employing typechecking and later formal verification, you get more correctness and accountability - BUT at a cost of development time, AND generality. The correctness is achieved precisely by being tailored to the specifics and rejecting the general.
This can apply to entirely physical processes. Some "aerospace" grade parts are very similar to normal parts .. but with a huge overhead of accountability. Because getting the right outcome matters.
> Here's a universal tool whose potential is limited only by one's imagination
And it crashing, and it being limited in capacity, and not being as flexible as SQL (in areas SQL is good at). It's not a universal tool, good as it is.
> No. Most of us work to deliver
I mean, yes, of course - but "playing with silly tools" is one of many methods of delivering without losing your mind in the process.
IMO the arguments people make in frontend are similar to the infinite scaling requirements in back end that require 10X overpriced machine rental.
Whether or not the current site could ever be appropriate for all 10 billion users, a developer wants the universal skills tuned to the top end.
A university HR employee OTOH probably realizes they won't code themselves if they end up at the largest employer on Earth.
The biggest issue they had was not understanding that the data from one area (Wales) was in a different format from the others - an integer that represented rank (lowest being best) rather than a test score - that would probably still not been noticed if they'd used something else.
(there are also a number of HN commentators who are reliably noisily wrong about things, but not in such a blatant way that they get obliterated in downvotes, and one of them started that top level thread)
Major differences let you say "well that's just what THOSE people do". It's not a threat to your sense of self.
Minor differences challenge your own sense of self, and thus must be destroyed.