[grishka]

As a software developer since my early days, I wholeheartedly agree with you. It's honestly ridiculous to see how people invent "revolutionary new ways" of doing the exact same thing that could be done in a dozen ways already. And they invent those by piling more and more unnecessary complexity on top of existing technology stacks.

Electron is a revolutionary new way of making desktop apps. Except they look like they're something else and take up all the RAM you have and ask for more. But nah, you don't understand, it's the future, native desktop apps are dead.

Kotlin is a revolutionary new JVM language that will solve all the problems you had with Java... Except I haven't had any. Java is simple and predictable. Kotlin is not. To me, Kotlin feels like an abstraction layer that gets in the way. But people will be defending it relentlessly because that's what Google says is The Future™ for Android development.

Web development... That's just nasty. "Revolutions" happen every day, so now your news article takes 5 seconds to load on a 100-megabit connection just because someone absolutely had to make it a react app instead of a server-rendered page with just text and maybe some pictures.

This overall trend of abstracting the platform (the operating system, the web browser) away is abysmal. It does no good. And lowering the barrier to entry to programming? Honestly, I'd rather prefer it to remain high. Programming is meant to be an engineering job, not the kind where you throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks and just assume that browsers and operating systems are made of unicorn jizz.

[monsieurbanana]

Half the threads on hn mention that software engineering was never engineering, so which is it? Or maybe you're the exception to the rule?

Sarcasm aside, that ship has sailed You can't have internet as widespread as it is today while keeping programming in the hands of the very few "true engineers". So either you're arguing the past 20 years of internet progress was a mistake (fair enough point of view) or you're deluding yourself.

[grishka]

I'm not sure I want the internet to be as widespread as it is today. I certainly don't want it as commercialized and as centralized as it is today.

I also take issue with this whole dumbing down of technology that's been happening over at least the last 10 years and shows no signs of stopping. It's understandable that there are certain business entities that would prefer to be in possession of as much money as technically possible, and to achieve that, they need to give their products into as many hands as possible, which means said products have to be "easy to use", aka don't require reading manuals and understanding what the damn thing is actually doing.

Computers and other computer-like devices like smartphones are, ultimately, tools. As are the programs they run. And tools are meant to serve and empower their end user. 99% of the IT industry, unfortunately, would rather like them not, because that clashes with their own interests they for some reason are allowed by the society to have. That's all I have to say.

[deanCommie]

You made some bold statements without any details.

Kotlin to me solves most of my Java pain points. In what sense is it not predictable?

Electron allows a company with web developers to be able to build cross platform desktop clients without hiring desktop developers. That's incredibly compelling and powerful regardless of the compromises with the final product for the end user. (which are not guaranteed. Something like VSCode is indistinguishable from a rich desktop client)