Hacker News Reader

Comment by justbaker | Hacker News Reader

It means the underlying problem is not the tooling, but the use of the tooling.

In other words, "I can choose the correct tool but still fail from poor approach of problem."

If the tool allows you to shoot yourself in the face without warning, and has a reputation/history of doing it to a lot of other people, then the tooling is indeed the problem.

Most tools out there allow you to shoot yourself in the face. In this case, the guy replaced client-side JavaScript (very notorious for its amazing face shooting abilities) with server-side PHP (also, a very notorious face shooter).

The real metric of quality is does it do what you expected. PHP is a gun that sometimes shoots backwards with no sensible reason where as rust has a gyroscope that can work out when the gun is pointing at your face and requires that you turn off the safety first.

Entire classes of bugs simply don't exist in better languages.

Well, yes. You can write a web application in Haskell and enjoy the beautiful and flexible type system, first order functions, monads and all the other wonderful things. But you shouldn't. Because when you leave, the client will never be able to find someone to maintain the damn thing and chances are they will hire someone else to rewrite it yet again in PHP. And possibly hire someone to make a voodoo doll of you and stick pins up its ass.

You can also write your application in Ruby or Python or Java or Go

Nobody is building anything unique with the same tool. I get your point though. The more handholding these frameworks do, the less we learn it seems.

There's no guarantee that good approaches in 2019 will still be good approaches in 2029 and beyond. OOP was considered a good approach many years ago, and now in many circles it is derided and bashed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com