I've written complicated stuff where an ORM isn't appropriate, but if I'm honest, a large fraction of what I've done in my career is just making boring software to automate menial clerical work, and ORMs are good enough for those kinds of projects.
212 karma · joined November 5, 2007
I've written complicated stuff where an ORM isn't appropriate, but if I'm honest, a large fraction of what I've done in my career is just making boring software to automate menial clerical work, and ORMs are good enough for those kinds of projects.
In the old days, I had a .fvwm2rc config file that I got from my boss in the university computing center. I had no idea how it worked! And neither did he -- he got it from a professor when he was in university.
Mine worked, but it was very simple and dog slow, running on my old laptop. Nothing was ever going to run fast on that thing, but I remember my RNN being substantially slower than a feed-forward network would have been.
I was so confident that this was dead technology -- an academic curiosity from the 1980s and 1990s. It was bizarre to see how quickly that changed.
The last time I needed to do that, I ended up crying "uncle" and writing manual SQL. I wasn't happy about doing it, but I was happy that the framework left me an escape hatch so that I could.
Even so, I kind of wish that most websites still used old-school server-rendered HTML. I still run into all kinds of glitches that just could not possibly happen on a server-rendered site. As an example, I like to visit the Deutsche Welle website to catch up on European news stories that don't make their way to the US, and sometimes their site just flat-out doesn't load, because of some caching problem that I don't care about, because it isn't my problem as someone who just wants to read the news. Since the best DW's SPA architecture can possibly do is to make it look like server-rendered HTML, it's just nothing but downside to me personally. It might make sense for Deutsche Welle itself, but I don't work for DW, and I don't get paid to care about their problems.
In the end, I think the overall message of the article still resonates in 2024, even if it doesn't resonate as strongly now as it did when it was written. I think SPAs are good technology when they are used in the right way for the right reasons. But there's a kind of dogma surrounding heavyweight JavaScript frameworks, and I think it pays to be a little skeptical as a result.
Edit: Two more personal favorites from back in the day:
1. I don't know, 2. It depends, 3. I'll get back to you.
If people don't accept that, I'll follow with some variation of "Do you want me to guess or do you want me to lie? Either way, I'd be feeding you bullshit, and you deserve better than that. Give me a little bit of time to collect my thoughts."
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I have an old NeXT machine that works and has NeXTstep running on it. How can I extract the ROM from it and use it to run this emulator?