[mibbit]

Perhaps if more programmers were working on a solution to cancer, instead of a social webapp to allow people to share photos of their dogs...

Not to mention the number of programmers who waste their time creating new languages and frameworks. Then they spend years rewriting everything in node.js or whatever the fashion of the day is.

I'd say there's more than enough programmers.

[saturn]

> who waste their time creating new languages and frameworks

Well that's just laughable, and says more about yourself than any of these allegedly offending third parties. There has been tremendous progress in both frameworks and languages over the last decade. If you can't see that then, well, I don't really know what else to say, other than to perhaps get off your lawn.

[mibbit]

> There has been tremendous progress in both frameworks and languages over the last decade. If you can't see that then, well, I don't really know what else to say, other than to perhaps get off your lawn.

If that's true, can programmers today do things they couldn't do 10 years ago? Can they program faster than they could 10 years ago due to all these innovations in languages and frameworks? I'd say no on both counts.

[saturn]

> I'd say no on both counts.

Well, you're entitled to your opinion I suppose, but I don't know any professional programmer who would even come close to agreeing with you.

[pointyhat]

What about me? :) I agree with him.

So you're suggesting that the time to market of an ASP.Net MVC, NHibernate, Autofac, Razor, SQL Server application is going to be lower than a classic asp and SQL server application?

[saturn]

I thought you were a sockpuppet ..

I wouldn't know anything about the stack you describe. Seems to me the barriers there are all Enterprise related; framework innovation isn't the bottleneck. Big business software - perhaps that's something that hasn't improved much, if at all.

But this is a startups related site, in case you hadn't noticed. Web programmer here. Web frameworks have improved immeasurably. If you tried to tell a web programmer that nothing has improved since 2001 you would just be laughed at, and rightly so.

It's not just about the web though. Look at the new functional languages. Look at the message queues, the image libraries, computer vision, sound .. bloody everything. Tell me, is h264 better than mpg videos from 2001?

Step outside your bubble man. In fact, leave your bubble, it sounds pretty depressing in there. This is a very exciting time to be a programmer.

[pointyhat]

Hardly. I like it here.

And as for startups, I worked for one once. It's a big business now.

I build software which happens to reside on the web, not "web sites" or "web applications". Sometimes we have desktop applications deployed because they require real-time data. Sometimes we integrate with massive systems with millions of users. We don't use functional languages (they do not suit our workload and don't scale to our recruitment requirements), we use message queues (NServiceBus, zeromq), we use image libraries (GDI, reportlab), we use all the funky nosql stuff (Mongo), we use ORMs (NHibernate), we don't use computer vision or sound because we don't need it in our space.

Big, exciting things happen where I am.

It's the bubble you are in that I'd hate to be in. The superficial one which appears to be based on pushing social crap, novelty iPhone applications and glorified todo lists on the world.

My problem is that we did ALL OF THIS in 2001. The process hasn't changed, but the tools have and the time to market is the same.

[pointyhat]

But 99.9% of these innovations don't help the world. They help a small subset of a small subset of a small subset of problems from a small subset of a small subset of a small subset of society.

Compare to if someone worked out how to stop Neurofibromatosis dead in its tracks for example (a condition my youngest daughter has), they'd give 1 in 3000 people a better chance.

People get a Jesus complex because they build a tool that a vocal minority uses.

[saturn]

Even if we accept your claim that only 1 in 1000 inventions help the world, which I think is pessimistic, that's still progress. What would you rather people do? Not invent?

A programmer writing a new framework might not directly help cure Neurofibromatosis but they might make it slightly easier for another programmer, which is then inspired to work on his program, which saves a medical researcher a few minutes and gives him the time he needs to have his breakthrough. Or maybe a better search result gave him what he needs. Technology is cumulative. Criticising people because they're not working on your favoured project is pretty lame.

[pointyhat]

I agree with your sentiment but I see the other side of it. Technology is cumulative but noise slows down decision making and fragments knowledge.

The world does not need 200 programming languages, 1000 javascript frameworks, 500 different web servers and 20-odd social platforms which exist only to boost the ego of the originator who can market their idea better than othersr. It needs some concise, un-fancy-looking tools that are fit for purpose and can be used as a common ground for communicating ideas. There is so much fragmentation it's unbelievable.

Everyone thinks they can do better, yet no-one delivers any real efficiency improvement.

TBH going back in time, I can still deliver the same output as node.js with classic ASP/Jscript from 1998 arguably with less code and time spent.

Back on the subject of med research; they tend to still use Perl, bits of sticky tape and TI89/92 calculators a lot apparently (word of mouth from a friend who works in tissue sample analysis).

[saturn]

> The world does not need 200 programming languages, 1000 javascript frameworks, 500 different web servers and 20-odd social platforms

But .. that is the way we find the way forward. It's like evolution. We may not need 500 different web servers but .. that's a lot of different ideas, a lot of variation, and in the long run, a lot of innovation. Eventually the "best" way is chosen and we go to the next generation.

I actually think the proliferation of programming languages and frameworks, especially open source, is one of the purest meritocracies you can find. They live or die by their quality, innovation, new features. And the whole community is dragged forward. What you are advocating is basically central planning. Did you realise that?

> I can still deliver the same output as node.js with classic ASP/Jscript from 1998 arguably with less code and time spent.

LOL. Dude. No way.

Something you said earlier was instructive as to the mistake you are making with this line of thought. You said that "programmers can't do anything more today than they could in 2001" - or something similar. Or that other guy said it and you agreed, whatever.

Look, that's literally true. In fact it's literally true to say that any programmer can do anything as long as they use a turing complete language. This has been true since the days of ENIAC.

What has advanced, massively, is the knowledge of the best ways of doing things. Design. Efficiency. Elegance, maintainability, scalability. That is what has mainly improved. Knowledge. The laws of the universe have not changed, everyone agrees with that, but we have worked out, a little more, what works and what doesn't.

And I'm afraid your ASP/Jscript falls into the latter category. I'm sure you could mimic some tiny subset of node.js using that toolset. But it would be a hideous mess of spaghetti code. Unless, of course, you used the knowledge you gained over the last 10 years to basically reimplement node.js in ASP, presumably gaining express pre-approved VIP entry to Hell in the process. So things have advanced, haven't they?

[pointyhat]

Tell me two characteristics or features of node.js that cannot be built (in an old-fashioned circa 2001 way) with either ASP/JScript, Perl/mod_perl or PHP 4?

I'm not interested in "scalability" as that's moot - hardware is cheap.

[pointyhat]

Give this man a medal. This is exactly the problem with this planet.