[brightball]

IMO people represent what they know.

People also overestimate what “the new” is, constantly. Otherwise, PHP would be dead by now rather than flourishing.

Serverless is essentially PHP in CGI mode, with a lot of marketing behind it. There are certainly places where it’s beneficial.

Servers and databases are not going away anytime soon. They are simply too effective for what they do.

The “everything is legacy crowd” hasn’t been correct about almost anything in my lifetime. Mainframes are still going strong. SQL databases are better than ever and the NoSQL crowd has largely died out.

90% of the cloud ecosystems of today are just doing what Java app servers were doing in the late 90s.

Erlang and the BEAM offer a set of trade offs that happen to be ideal for a lot of server based use cases to make hard things really simple. Probably not going to take over the world but if it fits what you do you probably won’t want to go back.

[deckard1]

> NoSQL crowd has largely died out.

yeah, that was rather curious. Similar to how XML died out. Not with a bang but with a whimper. Not that NoSQL or XML are completely gone today, just like PHP. But suddenly one day you recognize these topics are no longer appearing on HN or elsewhere. Then you realize you're getting old and... oh my god... we're actually stuck working in a fashion industry and nothing matters, life is meaningless, and all this is dumb dumb dumb.

When HN and other techies find a new hammer they end up beating that hammer against every problem they see. Right now it's SQLite. I love SQLite. But man. Can we quit talking about it for one fucking day already? This is probably how it felt to be an Erlang fan when Facebook bought WhatsApp. I remember the decades of Joe Armstrong talking about Erlang on Usenet and no one caring. It's just cargo cult with no thought behind it. WhatsApp was successful using X, so if we use X we must be successful. People have this perception that Python is new and modern despite being, relatively speaking, the same age as Perl. Erlang was cool long before WhatsApp. It's really quite old tech.

[rawoke083600]

>Then you realize you're getting old and... oh my god... we're actually stuck working in a fashion industry and nothing matters, life is meaningless, and all this is dumb dumb dumb

Yup I know what you mean ! There is no zen. As I mentioned some time ago, the 'final zen state' is coding on a mountain top for yourself in a LISP with Emacs on an ultra book charged by happy sun rays :D - only somewhat joking here...

[ungamedplayer]

If its any consolation, i pretty much do the same, on a T490s in the desert, its actually pretty neat.

[rawoke083600]

:) It is the way.

[pjmlp]

Between XML, JSON, YAML and TOML, I would rather my configuration files served in XML, with schema validation and graphical IDE tooling, thank you very much. :)

[innocentoldguy]

I personally prefer JSON to XML. I've seen XML abused in some pretty terrible ways. For example, I worked at an education start-up several years ago and the education company Pearson delivered bubble test questions to us in XML where half of the questions' text were in tag attributes and the other half was in the body of the tag. JSON (and YAML/TOML) make it a lot harder to do stupid things like that. They're also easier to parse, in my opinion.

[justbaker]

> SQL databases are better than ever and the NoSQL crowd has largely died out

Especially with json types in Postgres for example. I can store data that’s suboptimal to use traditional databases to access (think complicated and varying form data) but retrieve it and reference it from table relationships traditionally.