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by mamcx 1571 days ago
Is easy to blame the wish of people for this (and IS true), but the major point is this:

A enterprise NEEDS ALL.

I work in this niche (mostly for small companies), and what I see for this past +25 years is that even the most "small" of all companies have a HUGE array of needs, apps, data to work, laws to comply, demands of suppliers AND their customers (that RECURSIVELY add bloat!), both ancient, current, modern, and next-gen tech in their stacks.

Is like a developer that instead of being only "LAMP" + editor, is one that:

- Support Mysql, Postgres, Sql Server, Sqlite, FoxPro, Firebase, DBISAM, redis and in terrible days mongo

- N-variations of csv and alikes, json, toml, yalm, .ini, binaries formats...

- Talk to cobol, web services (SOAP, JSON, RPC, GraphQL), pipes of commands

- Deal with python, java, swift, obj-c, .net, c, c++, c#,, f#, go, rust, js, typescript, css, html

- Test on chrome, safari, firefox, ie (OLD ie)

- Windows, Linux, Mac, iOS, Android, Web

- bash, cmd, powershell

- VS Studio toolchain, LLVM toolchain, OSX toolchain, Android toolchain

- Docker, normal deploy, CI

- Sublime, VS Code, Xcode, IntelliJ, Notepad++, Notepad (as-is), nano and in very bad days, vim

- Have Hardware: M1 laptop, Lenovo Windows machine, iPhone, iPad, Android phone

WHO can be the lunatic that deals with all of this?

ME.

(if you wanna understand why I so grumpy about C, C++, Js, Android, the state of shells, terminals, rdbms, nosql, now you know)

I don't mean I fully deep dive to ALL of this, but I need to at least HAVE it or install, or touch it here and there. Is like I say:

Not matter how SMALL a "company" is, it

NEEDS ALL.

2 comments

> Test on chrome, safari, firefox, ie (OLD ie)

I have seen the opposite: Test only on IE6, and when it turns out that the stuff doesn't work on any other browser and it's too much work to fix everything, make IE6 the only supported browser.

Why don’t devs and management try to consciously trim that list?
For more than one enterprise I've seen, your mergers and acquisitions are bringing in new technologies (and incompatible systems that need integration) faster than you can trim the list.
I WANNA. You bet on it.

But I need to install that stuff so I can run the integration, do the tests, see how they work, add a little code of it, etc.

For example, I need to install https://www.elevatesoft.com/products?category=dbisam because just ONE of my customer use it.

Then I need to add ODBC to OSX.

Then I need to install FreePascal, and make some DLL on it so I can decode just ONE field that whole depend on the binary representation that exist there. More fun? That field is where is store the "price" of the product.

Why the heck that developers decide to dump unportable binary, from a certain version of FPC, on that field, hell I know...

Because the precise costs and benefits of each technology are invisible to them.