throwawaysbdi

Webforms is the newest thing. Most is far older

It's literally so ancient that we bought the remains of the company that designed the language when they went under

It was a lie of omission but I'm not sure if that makes it any better. I was hired to work on a new project but it wasn't disclosed that the project hadn't been started yet and has already been delayed for years

I have a theory that the company is for sale and the owners don't want their ancient stack to show up on Google search in job descriptions.

If it's not that you guess is as good as mine :)

I wasn't hired to work with old junk. if I would have known I never would have taken the job. I also don't have enough money to walk away or risk standing up to management.

The code isn't just old, it's very badly written and has zero documentation.

It's bad in a lot of specific ways but I'm trying not to out myself since it's a fairly small company.

The overarching problem is trying to reinvent the wheel because the management thinks we can do things better than the language designers.

The end result is a buggy and generally bad reimplementation of core libraries. ORM, math, dates, full text search. There's a half-baked custom version of everything.

Yes. The codebase is best described as a giant pile of hacks.

It's the culture more than the tech that causes this to happen. Every time I offer to refactor I'm told to fix it the fastest way and that's how we've been doing it for 10+years.

Some webforms but the majority is in a much more ancient and niche language I won't name because it's too specific to this company.

Damn that's relevant

My expenses are too high to walk away and there's nothing I can do about it for a couple years. Otherwise I would have walked out several times over.

Relo isn't a problem and I definitely want to stay in this town. I can't really mark it as time off because I already did that a while back, I don't want to end up with a lot of gaps :)

I was thinking I could just apply to other places and be honest with them... But some may also frown upon me saying bad things about my current employer

It's too small a company to maintain my anonymity. Small enough that it's unlikely to burn any fellow HN readers if that makes it any better

Some of it is so obsolete and unique it would probably identify the company :) . The rest is slightly less old, MS webforms.

The webforms stuff isn't much better because the code quality is the worst I've ever seen. Adding features and fixing bugs is a stochastic process because you never know what will break.

Usually fixing a bug will expose an old fix that was done improperly for the original even older bug, forcing you to undo multiple levels of hacks to implement your own. It's nightmarish

I should clarify that's over 20 deep of our code , not counting all the framework stuff.

It's difficult to be proud of anything I'm doing :). Whenever I propose a design for something, I'm told to do it the fastest way which is usually a bad hack.

I'm amazed the code works at all. The stack traces are more than twenty deep sometimes. I can't stand to look at it for more than 20 minutes without a break.

I need to be more careful next time I'm looking for a job

Ahhh this is the moment I've been waiting for. Hype has officially hit stratospheric proportions.

Time to add the words "deep" or "learn" to your startup name and reap in the dough!

Why replace him? He's publicly unpopular but the company is worth more than ever, and the investors care most about money.

Why get rid of him when they're plenty of ways to spin the narrative. Like making unrelated but scandalous sounding press releases, and finding an occasional fall guy

Along the same lines, probably the easiest way to get quality in almost every type of product is to buy the commercial version. The people using these products are very familiar with them, so nobody sells garbage.

Businesses are also generally more conservative in future projections and less price sensitive than consumers.

I personally started doing this a few years ago. I even have a throwaway LLC that sounds nebulously like a contractor so I can sign up for "industry only" marketplaces. Since I can usually get wholesale prices doing this, I pay only maybe 30% more than for crap consumer level throwaway stuff.

The major downside is the time it takes, but the upside is that none of my stuff ever breaks.

That's the crux backers are lying to themselves about. The game doesn't exist and has already made more money than most blockbusters. Why waste profit developing it when you've already had your payday?

The best thing to do from a business perspective is just enough "development" to keep lawsuits at bay. In the meantime you start throwing as much money as you can off the train and jump clear right before it flies off the tracks.

Wow. Okay that guys is nuts.

Still, star citizen is a train wreck. Wasn't the big thing last year to "rewrite all the net code".

They're just rearranging the deck chairs over and over waiting for the company to go under

Sure, if you think the idea is worth it

It's not possible unless you have enough money to pay a good developer salary. I've been a part of one once, and the only reason I dealt with the clueless founders was because they paid me better than a regular coding job.

So yeah, it's possible, if you're rich or can get funding before you've got a product.

I've also been approached by countless guys asking me to work on their startup for free or something like 10% equity. Bitch please. I've been a consultant and run all sides of a business, what could you possibly bring to the table besides a nebulous and nearly worthless idea?

To those guys I've started asking for 60% equity and they usually walk away as if it was an insult.

Let me be clear about it. You can run a business with engineers alone and write software. Even one single engineer can run his own software business. If was running a start-up that makes software with two founders do I want one of them to make 0% of the product?

The rose tinting of HTML should also be taken into account. Java was maybe 10x slower in those days, but more importantly internet was 100x slower and computers 500x slower.

Java ran pretty damn good for what it pulled off back then. It would have been orders of magnitude easier to make Java into what we have today than it was to bastardize HTML and JS to be usable.

Java these days uses native UI which looks nicer and is much faster than in-browser rending. Graceful degredation is only needed because some browsers are such crap. This was never a big problem in Java and still isn't. If a JVM supports JDK 8 you can expect it to run java 8 apps reliably

Java seems like a resource hog because it will use spare ram when you've got it, but most apps run fine on around 15mb of ram. Less if you use AOT compilation. Modern webapps use around 50-100.

I tried to install but I'm getting an error message: "undefined" is "undefined" on line 27361 in elipse.min.js . I'll send you the stacktrace because it's bigger than the message limit here. I see that you're transpiling typescript into ES2015 then down to ES5 in Babel, cool. Could I get a source map for the original file?

Yes! Go has a really small runtime I think a lot of us can't wait till Go is usable in browser.

Every developer I know hates JavaScript. I think the only ones that like it are honestly people that haven't used much else. Literally everything about the language including tooling and module systems around it is a garbage fire.

I tried to use Node and it gives stupid shitty error messages all the time and blows up if anything hangs for 200ms because it only supports a single thread. It's honestly pretty crap compared to more mature runtimes in C#, Java, Go, Python etc...

I think what's happened is that a bunch of front end HTML guys that only use JS have been introduced to fire water and they're going nuts about it

Upvoted for having actual information

:) if you'll notice maybe half of those are other languages adapted to the JVM to make them more usable, which should say something is redeeming about the JVM at least.

"micro" if you will

I prefer ReWheel. It's like RollCircle but they've reduced everything to a single wheel so it's easier to reason about. Some people still think you shouldn't have a single global wheel but it's definitely where things are headed.

Anyways you should take a look, it's a lot easier to pick up than RollCircle and nobody really uses Wheel.js anymore

And what are those exactly? JVM and CLR bytecode is totally platform agnostic and both support many languages without trouble.

Apparently they aren't cool anymore so we need to spend another few thousand man years building another system in their image