1,008 karma · joined June 18, 2022
People got so stuck on JS for decades that they've forgot that HyperText in HTML is there for a reason. It was always supposed to be more than just UI descriptor markup.
It is JS who is out of place in web. A little script in form of DHTML that grew into becoming a cancer that it is now.
The internal incentives in hierarchical organizations is to balloon the management, which suffocates the bottom of the pyramid. That's just how the world works, for most people, not just SWE. The Agile is horrible because corporate management makes everything horrible.
If you don't like it work in a small, carefully selected startup, or make your own company. Otherwise just accept that you're just a corporate drone and you have to endure the shitty corporate system to pay your bills. At least you get paid decently, because there's not that many people to replace you like in other professions.
I agree however that while Pijul is technically very interesting, it doesn't seem to have any killer features that would overcome the cost of switching to a niche version control.
Is it? Because AFAICT people censorship themselves online all the time for the fear of repercussion. It's like being on tape 27/7 where anyone that doesn't like you can watch your old tapes and loook for problems.
I have 99 big problems developing software, and not being able to read it from start to end ain't one.
I'm a bit jealous for people advocating such things, being able to work on software tiny enough to even be able to think this is practical. Literate programming could work for tiny software that can be approximately flattened to a 1d "story": "beginning -> end" with only minor detours.
Most of projects I worked with was large enough that things are optimized precisely for not having to understand large parts that were abstracted away (and the problem is to try to do it without introducing too much complexity).
First, who has time to read a project from start to beginning. Second, as the time changes the dependencies between parts will change as well.
SWEs might benefit from some help from experienced technical leadership - someone to consult, get feedback from etc. and from bureaucratic assistance (help get paperwork out of the way), but typically "SWE manager" position is akin to fast-food chain manager in a SWE shop.
Someone somewhere said "the end is near", so let's ignore all the counter-arguments and counter-examples, human ingenuity and technological capability and weep instead.
As performance of a system is being optimized, the relative size of un-optimizable parts goes up.
Sure, your banking app crashes sometimes and annoys you. How about you delete it and instead take a bus to a postal office to pay your bills this way - no annoying apps involved, it will just take 1h instead of 1m.
The abstraction is either good or it isn't. Some stuff just does not abstract well. A function or an API is not necessarily "an abstraction".
Even in allegedly super-stable and backward compatible languages, in a large enough codebase you'll keep hitting issues when you change deps/compiler versions. If I could get $1 every time a C++ package refuses to compile due to some weird compilation issue...
Yes, corporations are greedy, but that's not new. What's new is money printers working even faster.