Comment by dexwiz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dexwiz | Hacker News Reader

No it probably won't end. No you are not a dinosaur, but development has changed. Decades ago you could build an app from the ground up. This gave you a bunch of different layers to compose, and probably made the app overall simpler. Now most developers are given a box to create their feature in whether it's a Spring Bean, a React Component, or a serverless function, with an entire application stack under it. You could have each developer or team manager their own stack, and thus get microservices. But now you have just pushed your complexity from a single monolithic app to the space between all the individual apps.

At the end of the day, naked tech has no value. It's only the end-user features that make money. The industry has optimized for this, and that is what gives rise to all these seemingly insane practices. They aren't great from a pure tech perspective, but they help speed up feature development.

Paradoxically, the community still values naked tech much higher than end-user features. That is why the community heroes are those who write kernels and frameworks. So you have a million developers all trying to "make it big" with their bespoke framework. 99% of these go no where, but even that 1% that gain some traction just add to the constant churn of `inventing "revolutionary new ways" of doing the exact same thing.`

I sincerely doubt all that layered complexity helps push features faster. I left a next.js React job a couple of months ago where the team spent 90% of the time dicking around with the setup and wrangling with dependency issues instead of delivering any useful features. The amount of time they took to set up their "stack" and the number of issues they had with it was mind boggling. I left and swore to never again come near that mess of an ecosystem.

That's a great perspective, but are those peeps writing the unused frameworks just wasting their time to solve a question nobody has asked?

Take the D language, it's basically a poor man's Java, with a shoddy garbage collector and aspirations at being C/C++... Is that the work of heroes or the misguided?

Can't it be both? or none of the above? I don't know anything about D specifically, but effort spent here is likely to be valuable elsewhere. Either because of techniques learned, or approaches validated.

Even if D never catches on, folks will learn from what they've done. And the folks who did it, will likely be able to get jobs in the field. I doubt the effort is truly wasted.

Are they solving a question no one asked, or a question that already has an answer? If there is already a clear answer, then it's probably a waste of time. Your answer needs to be better, and that is rare. When your answer is better, then its a paradigm shift to some. To others the answer is no better, and then it's just the infinite reinvention.

It's even rarer to answer a question that no one has yet asked. Then you are a revolutionary.

Sorry, but D is a good idea and much closer to golang in my book, plus a lot earlier. They just didn't have the funding.

> Sorry, but D is a good idea and much closer to golang in my book

Wait, are you saying GPs description of D doesn't fit Go at least as well?

> Is that the work of heroes or the misguided?

Precisely both, since no one agrees. At least money can be used as a fitness function sometimes, with games and not with enterprise. The idea is that if D were that much better people would make more money by choosing it over Java.

I don't even know what to respond to the last assertion, because it's "not even wrong".

Like, just about the only thing D has in common with Java is their shared C syntactic heritage, and an object model with single inheritance. But that also describes numerous other languages.

D has interesting features like invariants

That's an interesting and valuable perspective. I'm definitely one of the people who keep reinventing things that have already been done before, even though I'm not very good. But since I don't use programming to put food on the table, maybe that's okay - it's more of a hobby/educational endeavor than anything important.

All the same, maybe if I spent less time writing, e.g., yet another dictionary/map, I could actually make something worthwhile.

> At the end of the day, naked tech has no value. It's only the end-user features that make money.

value != money

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