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Comment by xlii | Hacker News Reader

Maybe it is (mine is for sure) but that's a "bitten by the dog once" case.

You got bitten and everyone around you assures you won't get bitten again, but the pain was real and you still have a scar from the event. Why bother or invest risking another bite if there are other places to be which had never bitten before.

Over my career I hated technology 3 times. First was PHP, second was Python during Python 2/3 fiasco and third was CoffeeScript.

Edit: till this day one of my favorite meme is titled "PHP: Training wheels without a bike"

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A few years ago, I used BTRFS on a laptop. Single disk, no RAID of any kind, OpenSUSE (which favored BTRFS, so I expected it to be as well supported as could be had), nothing fancy. After losing the root filesystem twice, I decided that maybe I shouldn't trust BTRFS. Since then, I've been told that it's totally better now, that all the problems are with bad RAID setups, and it's safe and won't lose my data. Anyways, as I type this from a laptop running on ZFS, I remain somewhat cautious.

> Since then, I've been told that it's totally better now

I've read through some bug reports, and I assure you that BTRFS remains a horror show.

Saying that comments from the dev team "don't inspire confidence" is putting it mildly.

ZFS is the diametric opposite of this, where blog posts from the team working on it made me realise that they're moving the state of the art into new territory.

I really want to try bcachefs, I wonder if anyone has used it (with encryption, and if their encryption supports plausible deniability or not).

BTW, is ZFS on Linux good now?

Bcachfs has been removed from Linux.

https://forums.truenas.com/t/bcachefs-dropped-from-linux-6-1...

ZFS is an install option on Ubuntu. Running it taints the kernel.

ZFS on linux native encryption is kinda unmaintained at this point, so I would not recommend it.

from my experience the primary problem with PHP was not the language itself (although the design was/is somewhat quirky/inconsistent) but with the large influx of inexperienced programmers using it, creating low quality code and thus affecting the reputation of the language. same with javascript today.

i haven't heard any issues about coffeescript.

with that in mind, i'd love to hear your stories. how did you get bitten?

As someone that used Coffeescript a bunch, the problem is it's designed to make it very easy to write code, but has very little thought given to being able to understand that code again in 6 months time.

This means it's very easy to knock out an entire project in record time, but subsequently very difficult to debug/maintain/update the same project when you come back to it. It's essentially a technical debt generator.

This is why I have DEVELOPER.md. It explains why I chose X over Y, among many other things. Someone wrote a nice list: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44581069.

That's a nice idea, but the problem more comes from using a language designed to help you get ideas from your head into production using the fewest possible characters results in extremely terse code.

You can say all sorts of things around "write better documentation" and so on, but step 1 really is "don't use a code golfing language"

I do not disagree. In DEVELOPER.md you are not supposed to have an intro to the language you picked.

It wasn't a horror story but a simple fact that it was layer of complexity that wasn't really helpful at all.

When code volume was small, nobody noticed, and hey "it looks nice". Some time after though, when volume increased it started to get really burdensome. I used this as a part of Rails pipeline, so it was like: write some coffeescript, compile, run - something failed - usual process.

However the code was already mangled, often source code mapping didn't want to work. When source code was found it wasn't uncommon that it caused by operator precedence or code not transpiled in a way it was intended and requiring debugging transpilation process.

At some point I suggested to migrate away from CoffeeScript toward (almost plain) JavaScript and most developers happily agreed to that. We were able to migrate big chunk automatically, rest took only few weeks to clean up. Velocity increased and people were happy they don't have to deal with it anymore.

Ultimatelly it is the truth with most of the transpilers - sooner or later you get into idiosyncracies that - if technology is not popular enough - you're left alone to solve.

ah, yes, i agree, in the end it is still javascript under the hood, and you'll reach the limit with transpilers. what about your php and python stories? :-)

PHP I worked on from v4 for couple of years. My main gripe was that it was full of idiosyncrasies, implicit knowledge, heavily inconsistent and heavy on the boilerplate. After moving to Django I felt I could finally think about logic, and not checking if this one dude didn't use non MB prefixed function on string (which - for unaware - could end up splitting utf8 char into two).

As for Python3 there was this thing that at some point Python was supposed to move from 2 to 3. This change was to bring plenty of incompatible changes, and in a way that migration was outright impossible in normal sized projects. Then community split into two parts, some said "F-- it" and held on to Python2 and some said "F-- it" and moved to other technologies. In the end Python2 was sustained for many years (originally sunset period was short) but those who moved out didn't consider it "stable tech" anymore.

I went through your exact same hate timeline. The CoffeeScript one was so bad that I was REALLY hesitant about TypeScript, but the whole "it's a superset of JS" thing won me over in the end.

I still hate PHP the most, and I very much mean PHP 5 when I say that, and have no idea what happened beyond that, and honestly the scars are so deep I don't care to find out.

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