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by apotheon 2256 days ago
Oh, yeah, and if I have to learn a whole new fucking sub-ecosystem and new version of the language itself with a bunch of breaking changes every two to five years, I don't have any time to spend learning fun things like a whole new language designed around a whole new paradigm.

ECMAScript and everything that touches it has become an actually focused bane for the joy of programming. It was fun just writing some clean plumbing for JavaScript applications in the past, but everything else about the process always ended up involving a bunch of scrambling to catch up with rapidly changing technology, planted on shifting sands even while I'm working with it, any time I start on a new project, where all I'm learning is a new set of persnickety conventions that will punish me if my approach is "wrong", force new work-arounds on me, and generally suck up all my time learning new rules to follow instead of interesting new ways of thinking about things that make me a better programmer and software designer.

Learning the interesting stuff, and figuring out new approaches to new problems based on the needs of those problems (and not the whims of the community), is a lot of what makes programming fun for many of us.

Linux exhausts me similarly.

* ALSA; esound; PulseAudio; etc. Just give me updated OSS or sndio on a BSD Unix system. That shit is stable, well-maintained, and not arbitrarily different every few years.

* SysV; upstart; systemd; etc. Just give me BSD RC. Maybe it's not ideal, but shit, it isn't swallowing 80% of userland with eventual ambitions of conquering the kernel and some of the worst defaults I've ever seen.

I'll just stop now, but I could go on for days in this vein. Maybe some of these tools are great, but I don't expect any of them to remain ascendant for more than five years in a form that is effectively recognizable by any significant measure but its name. The churn drives me insane. One of the reasons I aimed for software development in my professional life, abandoning the system and network administration (aka "ops") side of thing, was to escape all that crap. I want to write quality code, build new things and improve existing things, not participate in a rat-race to remain relevant just to have acquired nothing enduring from decades of effort other than stock options and a nice car.