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Comment by geff82 | Hacker News Reader

The problem with programming nowadays is not so much the programming language or the algorithm. The problem is the ecosystem. "In the old world" (as an example) you bought Turbo Pascal, installed it on your MS-DOS and practiced and explored the system, one step at a time. Nowadays, aside the OS, the IDE and the language, you have to deep-dive into different frameworks, different tools that all do the same thing in the end and understand how the pipeline works that, in the end and due to some magic produces something.

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To make an analogy here—all programming used to be at most as complex as making a shed in your backyard. Now a lot of programmers are designing and implementing the equivalent of high-rise buildings. The existence of the large-scale programming tools creates the sense that you have to use them for your backyard shed projects.

The thing is, you don't! Nowadays you don't even have to go out and buy Turbo Pascal in order to practice, you can just create an HTML file on your desktop and open it in your favorite web browser! Heck, if creating a file is too complicated you can press F12 and start scripting right away. Most operating systems come with Python preinstalled, so you can just drop into a REPL at any time, or write a script and run it.

Programming hasn't become more complicated to get into, it's just that software engineering is growing up and people are given the false impression that they need to start with the professional tooling. We in the industry should be reminding people how truly simple it is to get started with something small, not bemoaning the existence of the large, complex and nearly interchangeable tools that we have to choose between to work at scale.

If you don't start with the professional tooling, you may have good fun, but nobody will hire you. When I entered the industry 20 years ago, "software development" generally meant desktop application development (Visual C++, Delphi) and "server-side web development" (PHP talking to MySQL, spitting out HTML). By just knowing how to upload files to an FTP server, you could do your own address book application or CD catalogue, and get hired.

Now you need to fool non-technical people into demonstrating "industry" knowledge of a specific combination of Tool A/B/C.

> If you don't start with the professional tooling, you may have good fun, but nobody will hire you.

You're right, though some people want to learn to program to either have fun, or to make simple tools for themselves (see e.g. the discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38877423; disclaimer: I only read a small fragment, but it seemed very interesting)

too right. i am too bored with modern tools and frameworks hence i do not work as a programmer. i wish i could, but i cant get interested in it. not knowing modern tools and frameworks directly makes me unhireable. i always ask people who want to learn. do you want to learn programming, or want to be a programmer? (the later implying hirablility)

I really want to create a series of tutorials on getting started with programming, but with this kind of focus. The biggest risk as a beginner is getting (a) distracted and (b) overwhelmed.

By filtering out the noise and starting out small and simple, we'll make it much easier for newcomers to grasp the basics before learning about modern toolchains.

> Now a lot of programmers are designing and implementing the equivalent of high-rise buildings.

I get your point, but I think it's a bit of a myth. I work on mainframe applications and when you look at the actual business logic, there is a comparable amount of it in the apps that are 20, 30, 40 years old. I would even say that the modern methods of building software are to the detriment because there is a lot of incidental complexity coming from the tooling.

It seems that creation and maintenance of business logic for a given domain isn't really much helped with modern tooling, so it takes about the same time to develop. On the other hand, businesses today are demanding things to be done cheaper with more UX polish. This means that actual software capabilities (which require domain knowledge) are made less general and take more time to develop. I would say today, many applications are simpler in terms of features than 20 years ago.

If by "features" you mean "business logic", you might be right. But UX polish that makes the application accessible to ordinary people who are going to give the app 2-3 minutes to prove itself is a feature, and one that can take an overwhelming amount of engineering to get right.

Dismissing that engineering because your mainframe applications do more "work" with less code is shortsighted, a continuation of the "frontend developers aren't real engineers" meme that has finally started to die.

It's a feature if you are in the buisness of selling software to end users that need or want that, but that isn't the customer base of mainframe programmers or similar kinds of deep backend work.

If all your customers care about is that the paperwork crunching and adding up the numbers gets done right and on time every day (and after that, as cheaply as possible) then it's actively counterproductive to spend resources on a nice frontend.

I don't think anybody is implying that there is no market for frontend engineering, just that resources spent on frontend are necessarily resources not spent elsewhere, and that different teams naturally have different priorities.

I wasn't really dissing UX or frontends, that wasn't my intent. It's more about the approaches than validity of these fields.

I'll illustrate what I mean by less features on desktop application. 30 years ago, there was a text editor called Ami Pro. You as a user were completely free to redefine its UI. You could also define keyboard shortcuts.

Today, people use, say, Google Docs which doesn't have these features. Users are supposed to use common UX, designed by experts. But which one had better UX, really?

I mean it's easy to say that medieval people built huts and now we build skyscrapers, and so the technology brought undeniable progress. But they also built cathedrals (note I am NOT using "cathedral" here in contrast with "bazaar"). Skyscraper building techniques don't really help you build cathedrals faster, because one of the attraction of the cathedral is that each of them is heavily customized and unique. The problem is, since it's easier to build skyscrapers with the same amount of material, nobody wants to build a cathedral anymore. And it's perhaps a loss.

I was pointing out the cathedrals of software do exist, built with perhaps cruder tools, but more actual business logic and features. So in some strange way, having more productive tools to build applications also boxed our thinking into how things should be done, and I don't think it has to be that way.

(Another perspective is that a medieval church used to be a sort of communal project more than a skyscraper is today. Commercial software used to be lot more moddable 20 or 40 years ago than it is today - MVS is a nice example. And out of these modding capabilities many features have been built - often by users - that would never make business sense today.)

At the same time, it used to be expected you would learn to program a computer you bought. So much so, that operating systems shipped with BASIC and a language manual. That is not the case today, but I guess software doesn't ship in the same ways it used to either.

You are right - Frameworks make building Skyscrapers easier. But it also means that you somehow first have to understand how to build them and THEN you have to understand what you don't need. Sure, starting out with some Python or Javascript interpreter is incredibly cheap and easy. But actually getting into serious programming is.... complicated. It feels like every shed now requires the foundation of the skyscraper.

This is why I like doing desktop dev (I imagine gamedev is simimlar). I grew up with turbopascal and similar. Doing desktop dev today is very similar. You have ONE repo. It has ONE tree of code, producing ONE project in ONE compilation. Your IDE has a play button which launches 100% of the product, on your local machine, in ONE process, exactly as it would work and look at the end user. Being able to break the entire process of the product and step, knowing that there isn't some other process somewhere else (a db, a web server) that keeps its own state is bliss. Highly recommended. Sure it's still lots of abstraction and you'll use a couple of frameworks. But a 10-20 year old framework in the desktop business is still a young one so there isn't that element of framework fatigue that you have in the web ecosystem.

> you have to deep-dive into different frameworks, different tools that all do the same thing in the end

you aren't forced to use these frameworks and tools. You can chuck a NIH syndrome, and just write everything from scratch.

The only reason you wouldn't is because you aren't interested in programming as a craft in itself, but is only interested in the output and productivity.

> "The only reason you wouldn't is because you aren't interested in programming"

Niklaus Wirth said writing an RDBMS was too hard for him.[1] Where does that fit into your "only" reason?

[1] in the Questions/Answers section at the end of this presentation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXY78gPMvl0

It also depends on the language and ecosystem. I've found that with Go or F#, they typically use smaller task oriented libraries, the largest of which might be an http router, client, config reader, and db driver. There may also be larger more framework style libraries but tend to be less often used.

Yes. When people ask why I prefer Go over Rust (as a solo dev in web-adjacent space) it’s mainly two things:

- std lib that does some really heavy lifting. (Dep tree is maybe 10 libs total, 2-3 layers deep for mid-sized projects).

- concurrency is simpler and less boilerplate. Data races is a non-issue with good hygiene + race detector

I would normally throw in the Go toolchain as a plus but I think Rusts tooling is very good as well, in some cases maybe even better. It’s much more of a problem with other languages.

maybe what you need to practice is figuring out how to locate, evaluate, and use new libraries and tools?

if not, then that means those libraries and tools save you less time than it would appear, and you might as well write your own code

it took me like 5-7 years to find my way back to the old ways from within the muck of frameworks and high level maze/jungle that is there now. just to explore and learn my system... but i do recognize, programming itself has changed. less people are programming computers or devices, more are hooking in to frameworks, both are programming and creating cool stuff. i hate the jungle though, its a hot mess with lots of mosquitos and other bugs that constantly bite u!

i am rather in the desert, where there is nothing and the few bugs you encounter are avoidable, but super fatal at the same time when not avoides or handled with care :')

> you have to deep-dive into different frameworks, different tools that all do the same thing

You can also just choose one language/tool/framework and do _everything_ in it. I know this might get snubbed, but you can do almost anything these days with TypeScript. It can be as typed or dynamic as you want it (well sort of), plays well with UI/web/react, server with node, has pretty good performance these days, and you can even easily run CLI scripts with tsx. `#!/usr/bin/env tsx` (https://github.com/privatenumber/tsx)

Oh boy. I would love to dedicate my entire working hours to the pure joy of programming (talking with customers and understanding their requirements, included). Instead I have to deal with tons of BS and accidental complexity in the form of:

- k8s

- ci/cd

- containers

- gradle/npm/poetry/composer/etc

- ORMs

- aws/gcp

- jira/scrum

- swagger/grpc

- kafka/sns/rabbitmq

and tons of yaml.

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