[kristopolous]

Incompetent people will create incompetent things regardless of the tool. Simpler tools lead to simpler messes while complicated tools lead to complicated messes.

I've seen an attitude that people think they can inoculate themselves from inept programming by using obtuse frameworks as if martin-fowler-speak acts as a drill sergeant making disciplined coders out of the herd.

But after 20 years of bouncing around startups I've never seen the intended results actually happen a single time. Not even close. Not once. Never.

Instead it leads to larger, less maintainable, more convoluted messes that have to be trashed quicker. Giant ceremonial cargo cult style monstrosities with huge circuitous logic - 4, 5, maybe 6 layers, a router calling a controller, calling a service, calling a provider, calling an event model, which runs a single if statement ... as if that's how we protect ourselves against incompetence.

These approaches just lead to wasteful projects where they end up rewriting the whole thing in whatever the framework/language de jour is instead of writing easily maintainable, quickly understandable code that's designed to work for the next 10 years. I've talked to many programmers who are embarrassed by the language they are using ... wtf is that?! They've turned programming into fast fashion.

Then people like to ask what someone's favorite language is, usually when they first meet them, as a social cue, as if we are a bunch of highschool kids following pop music. I mean what on earth... we're supposed to building the future here, not running around like a bunch of spastic fanboys from platform to platform, just to mess everything up all over again in bold new ways using slightly different syntax.

The best thing to do is give people the least abstract thing with the fewest conformity requirements ... essentially make it open ended and then the messes are easier to spot and easier to fix. You won't get 4 folders with 26 files handling simple tasks like uploading images to an S3 bucket (saw this huge mess just last week and guess what?! It's broken. I know, surprising right?)

Anyway, new shiny fancy tools with GoF buzzwords won't ever fix incompetence, it'll only make it worse.

[coldtea]

>Incompetent people will create incompetent things regardless of the tool

Which is neither here nor there.

For one, it ignores the pragmatic issue, that very competent people (the very people that built the foundations we all work on even) will still make lots of mistakes, even trivial ones, but with severe consequences (e.g. buffer overflows) when the languages don't prevent them.

If only it was just "incompetent people" that made mistakes...

>But after 20 years of bouncing around startups I've never seen the intended results actually happen a single time. Not even close. Not once. Never.

You weren't looking hard enough. Every day millions of programmers don't make "buffer overflow" errors for example, that otherwise they'd have made, because they work in languages that don't allow them.

And they'd have made those mistakes regardless of their programming chops. The best programmers, people that run circles around you and me, still make those mistakes.

[james_s_tayler]

Totally agree with this.

The way I think about it is if you think through the entire software stack and all the instructions that get executed across all the machines and their operating systems and programs running underneath before things even get to your code and then all of the standard library and framework code plus your code. For just a simple loading a web page that is a trillion piece jigsaw puzzle and every single piece has to line up or the whole thing just doesn't work.

We do the humbling and the remarkable every day and trillion piece jigsaw puzzles are no joke. It's the exception that you get it right. Given all the pieces required that's a lot of sources of potential entropy and the more it increases the more the system destabilizes and/or becomes unworkable. Things like languages, libraries, frameworks etc make certain decisions on your behalf with the goal to contain some of that entropy within their given abstraction.

[kristopolous]

Those mistakes aren't easy to spot or easy to fix.

It's about giving code sunlight so that action at a distance and other kinds of magic don't hide errors making them harder to find, get in your way of fixing them, making reproducibility a mess and confirmation simply guesswork.

Its the restrictive design trend of crippling languages which needlessly prevents the sunlight effect from happening along with "information hiding principle" gone completely amuck with the information successfully hidden in dozens of innocently named files with listeners, observers, watchers, triggers and who knows what else being mysteriously called based on reflective programming so not even grep will help you.

Static code analysis and seamless navigation is totally a thing of the past.

Instead, the errors will have the stack of the error handler and that's it. The debugger is useless because stepping through the code is 98% scaffolding.

All these fancy tools bludgeoning any introspection or diagnostic system so the only remaining workable debug system is printing debug variables and rerunning the code like I'm programming on a TI-81 (only that had debug and release run modes...features I can usually only dream of these days) Progress! Welcome to 2019!

It's crazy. This isn't how maintainable code is written

[svsucculents]

You are speaking to the inmates writing the asylum. Give it up. This is the 4chan of the enlightened.

[kristopolous]

The amateur-to-expert ratio of any topic is directly proportional to its popularity. It's why popular things are polluted with well-intentioned bogus information.

[scarface74]

You won't get 4 folders with 26 files handling simple tasks like uploading images to an S3 bucket (saw this huge mess just last week and guess what?! It's broken. I know, surprising right?)

You can see right here on HN anytime a post comes up about using a cloud provider someone advocating putting a layer of abstraction over the provider’s SDK to prevent “lock-in”. As if the CTO is going to one day move their entire infrastructure because a developer promises them they’ve abstracted their code perfectly.

So instead of just being able to read the docs of the SDK, you have a custom QueueManagerFactory that gives you an AWSQueueManager that wraps the Boto3 AWS SDK just so one day if the company decides to move to GCP, someone can write a GCPQueueManager.

See also, developers who think they can effortlessly move from their company’s six figure Oracle installation to Postgres because they used the repository pattern.

[kristopolous]

Suggesting to just manually go in and change the touchpoints over if the time comes is seen as uncouth, as if we're in an Oscar Wilde play and I'm some unwashed ruffian from the alley.

This is despite the fact that if you do it it'll take 40 minutes manually versus 10 minutes if the Rube Goldberg abstraction machine works as planned (it won't).

Since there's only about a 5% chance (max) that going from say S3 to Azure will ever happen, the extra cathedral of abstraction saves an actuarial 1.5min of dev time.

All that only for 2-4 days of development to make it and the added runtime at every request for the convenience. Genius!

[hderms]

I think it depends on whether the library you're using is well designed and doesn't require contorting code around it. If it's a simple integration I don't see much of a point in abstracting it but if dealing with the library is painful on some level you'd maybe get some benefit from doing so. That being said this is somewhat orthogonal to the issue you're describing

[scarface74]

I do have a *Utils module to wrap some calls to the AWS SDK but it’s not to protect from “lock-in” it’s a classic DRY principal of putting a code snippet in a function so I don’t have to remember how to do it every time.

[admax88q]

A poor abstraction is always a poor abstraction, but a good abstraction can not only isolate your components from change but also provide a better interface.

I'm not going to write raw HTTP requests to S3 in every place in my code that I need to read/write objects from there. What I'd rather have is a simple abstraction with methods like get(id) -> obj and put(obj) -> id.

[scarface74]

Seeing that you can still use the same SQS API from 2006 and that in 2018 AWS still supports SOAP of all things for S3 (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/API/APISoap.html) , I would much rather be able to just look at the SDK to see how something is used than having to try to debug through an abstraction that the “architect” who was at the company years ago, put in a custom Nuget package trying to abstract the API and imposed s “standard”.

Yeah I have been through that before where the architect of the company wrote his own bespoke ORM, logging framework, etc. and he was the only one who knew how it worked.

[Vinnl]

> Incompetent people will create incompetent things regardless of the tool.

I think I'm justified in calling myself competent. Nevertheless, with the wrong tools, the things I build are definitely worse than the things I can build with proper tools.

[kristopolous]

You've never had the reaction of "what on Earth is this crap doing?" And looked at the tool and been like "omg what kind of flunkie wrote this" and then end up forking the project, doing negative coding, fixing the issues, and then having to address the issues threads on GitHub yourself because the "maintainer" stopped responding a year ago?

I mean it's just a huge waste of time. These modern stacks (mostly js) are crap code all the way down.

It's made me want to return to Perl because honestly, it has everything and is somehow mostly idiot free. I probably should...

[hluska]

I have never had that reaction because frankly, I don't think it's appropriate to call people who know less than I do 'flunkies'. Sometimes, I like to approach the situation with humility and ask questions. Other times, I quietly ignore the situation. And other times, if it's a particularly egregious error, I'll write code and explain why I think it is better. But I never call someone a flunkie because words and attitudes like that are incredibly rude and toxic.

The moment you convey that sort of attitude, two things happen. The person you called a flunkie will not learn a goddamned thing from you. And, if they happen to be right, you won't learn a damned thing either. Great choices.

[kristopolous]

Using failure as infrastructure at a fast paced startups with shoestring budgets and then taking the resources to afford the luxury of a nurturing and caring mentorship for every teenager with a computer is a disaster.

[hluska]

That is true.

However, you can pursue a culture of excellence without being rude and toxic. You can be kind and humble without coddling.

Edit - I should have added that if teenagers with computers have a good attitude, feel engaged and feel cared about, they can be extremely productive members of a team. And they have a tendency to grow into really amazing engineers (and fine people).

[Vinnl]

Hmm, I'm sorry... I'm having trouble understanding your point, and specifically how it relates to my comment.

[kristopolous]

I parsed it wrong. I thought you essentially said "the things I build are definitely worse then relying on a collection of random internet dudes code through npm." But yes, GNU make, emacs, yacc, lex, bison, ar, nm, there's lots of great tools.

It's 4am, I should sleep.

[Vinnl]

Oh, haha no worries - sleep well :)

[barrkel]

Incompetent people will create incompetent things regardless of the tool

It's not binary. It's probabilities. Some environments make it harder to mess up, others make it easier. This is real.

[james_s_tayler]

Well let's not pretend software is an engineering discipline.

It's art, fashion and politics.

[mmsimanga]

I agree with you 100%. I just want to add that this over complication of things is not just an IT thing. Try taking up a new hobby whether it is cycling or surfing. In no time you will have the "experts" telling you that a $200 bike is useless and is a waste of time. You need to spend at least $5000 to be part of the club. Now if you are a "professional" cyclist then spending a lot of money on a bike makes sense. For the rest of us, just getting on a bike for exercise is enough. I think some people just need to show they are better and know more. This is where some of these complications come from. Sometimes, of course, it is just plain incompetence.

[kristopolous]

It is much more of a lifestyle thing, you're right! With all things, I'll get the functional adequate version and use it until it no longer functions. Sometimes I'll buy multiple so as not to be bothered to repeat the shopping process when one wears out (I own many unopened identical pairs of shoes and glasses for instance)

Brands generally mean nothing to me, new consumer technology I'm generally not interested in, and I have no issues say, taking the bus and getting reading done instead of rolling around in say a Tesla (despite the fact that buying one is well within my financial reach). I honestly don't care in the slightest.

So yes, it's probably a larger personality disposition which manifests itself in this particular way moreso than it is a morsel of objective rational reality.

The people I lambast are the same ones with things like smart speakers and wifi connected refrigerators (I use an old minifridge and I prefer it). It's just a lifestyle; not some objectively poor use of money and time resources.

That's a nice perspective and it helps explain a lot, thanks.