Planned obsolescence
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For what it's worth, the frenzied churn appears to be by far the worst in the web/mobile application arena. Desktop, system, and embedded development has been fairly stable in comparison. You can argue that stability comes from lack of interest or revenue (and you're probably right), but I don't mind it at all. I envision being a web developer going for a job interview: Interviewer: How much experience do you have with MetaXYZ framework version 2.0? Candidate: Since it was only released a month ago, I've been working with it for a month. Interviewer: How about version 2.15? Candidate: I've not seen it. Interviewer: It was released 47 minutes ago, while you were talking to our HR person. Didn't you take a look between questions? Candidate: ...
Software Zen:
delete this;This! Whilst I am always a great one for the latest shiny thing, many years in software dev have taught me that you should research until you find the maturest tools you can that are the closest fit for the task you are trying to solve and then stick with them. There is a relatively little known web framework built around python that I now use almost exclusively for any web app stuff I have to do: web2py Why do I use it? Because - despite a steep learning curve and documentation (as almost always with FOSS stuff) that has been written by someone who is so familiar with how it works that the most basic things you need to now can be hard to pick out - it joins together a number of very mature technologies in a way that just works: Python 2.x - and now 3.x Bootstrap Framework 3, and now 4 - this has a huge deployment base so is unlikely to become irrelevant soon. A built in http server, but can be integrated with almost any other. A huge library of long-established Python tools that make it easy to integrate with just about any major database system, including the creation of complex interactive forms that can use/edit the data. It has built-in web-based app creation and editing and debugging tools so no external tools are required to build with it, but equally you can integrate it with Jetbrains IDEs etc. These built-in tools can be a lifesaver if a production system develops a problem not seen in dev because of an unexpected change in the environment, data streams etc. So, it takes a lot of work to learn, but none of its core technologies are likely to go unsupported in the near future and yet it is sufficiently up-to-date to do just about anything with any web browser/device. It doesn't require any specific OS and will run happily, without alteration or rebuilding, on Windows (any flavour just about) and linux (likewise) - if the environment will run Python, you can build with web2py on it without installing any other tools at all. Use it and you will be sneered at by the script kiddies using the latest React, Vue, Flask etc etc frameworks, but unlike them you have a completely self-contained dev and production environment that has no on-going dependencies. (Node.js single-dev maintained modules anyone?) Yet you can still use all the latest python modules etc if you wish. What's not to like? I'm sure there are other integrated frameworks out there that provide similar portability and functionality (almost certainly there are some PHP systems like this) but I found this one...
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Is it just me, or are we caught in some software/hardware planned obsolescence?:confused::confused: With several new languages, frameworks, and hardware coming out every day, it's got me wondering. Have the IT market software and hardware vendors saturated the market, and are trying to increase market share by bringing out minor and unneeded tweaks? I am not talking about the consumers of IT and the increasing demand for developers. On the language/framework front it seems like the "Tower of Babel". I used to be able to keep up by running as hard as I can. But not anymore.
I guess I am just getting old.
On the web, JavaScript needs to die and browser based work needs a compilation step, and an actual debugger. Meanwhile, transpiling, polyfilling, binding-frameworks, browser extensions for debugging.. all spring up to extend the lifespan of JavaScript, because JavaScript is still the king of the hill. But, ever since WASM got into the evergreen browsers, there has opened up an alternative path, and now a bunch of frameworks are trying to take the hill and kill the king. On the general UI front, people are trying to streamline UI workflows, so components actually work across platforms. Which is, ironically, something we almost solved 3x over, but because big corporations hate each other they keep sabotaging every attempt at unifying the UI stack. As a result, lot's of small initiatives spring up everywhere, which either die out over time, or get bought up and die out over time. On the scientific front, Julia has created a new programming paradigm, and it seems like those ideas still need to re-invent themselves a couple of times. On the low-level front, thread-safety is all the hype nowadays, because concurrent threads are a pain in C++, mostly because you need a lot of fault-free boilerplate code. And after writing state-machine after state-machine to manage your threads, you kinda get tired of going through all that for nothing.
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“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. ” ― Alvin Toffler “By instructing students how to learn, unlearn and relearn, a powerful new dimension can be added to education. Psychologist Herbert Gerjuoy of the Human Resources Research Organization phrases it simply: ‘The new education must teach the individual how to classify and reclassify information, how to evaluate its veracity, how to change categories when necessary, how to move from the concrete to the abstract and back, how to look at problems from a new direction—how to teach himself. Tomorrow’s illiterate will not be the man who can’t read; he will be the man who has not learned how to learn.” ― Alvin Toffler Future Shock 271
Caveat Emptor. "Progress doesn't come from early risers – progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things." Lazarus Long
My most valuable skill: I can unlearn and relearn anything. Courtesy of my mother's genes and her terrible long-term recall. :cool:
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abmv - no argument from me about learning new things. My only point is there are new things and the current flood of this and that frameworks to the point of insanity. ymmv
Charlie Gilley <italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape... "Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783 “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
Be honest, how long does it take to learn a framework nowadays? In the most extreme case, a week. In the vast majority of cases, a day or two. As an example, let's look at Vue. Why would anyone use Vue? --> It contains data-binding boilerplate code, so you don't need to update every component manually when data changes. How do you learn it? --> You follow a 5 minute tutorial on their website. How do you master it? --> You take an hour to look at all of the user-reported issues on github and you avoid the parts that don't work. **The More You Know**
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Is it just me, or are we caught in some software/hardware planned obsolescence?:confused::confused: With several new languages, frameworks, and hardware coming out every day, it's got me wondering. Have the IT market software and hardware vendors saturated the market, and are trying to increase market share by bringing out minor and unneeded tweaks? I am not talking about the consumers of IT and the increasing demand for developers. On the language/framework front it seems like the "Tower of Babel". I used to be able to keep up by running as hard as I can. But not anymore.
I guess I am just getting old.
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This! Whilst I am always a great one for the latest shiny thing, many years in software dev have taught me that you should research until you find the maturest tools you can that are the closest fit for the task you are trying to solve and then stick with them. There is a relatively little known web framework built around python that I now use almost exclusively for any web app stuff I have to do: web2py Why do I use it? Because - despite a steep learning curve and documentation (as almost always with FOSS stuff) that has been written by someone who is so familiar with how it works that the most basic things you need to now can be hard to pick out - it joins together a number of very mature technologies in a way that just works: Python 2.x - and now 3.x Bootstrap Framework 3, and now 4 - this has a huge deployment base so is unlikely to become irrelevant soon. A built in http server, but can be integrated with almost any other. A huge library of long-established Python tools that make it easy to integrate with just about any major database system, including the creation of complex interactive forms that can use/edit the data. It has built-in web-based app creation and editing and debugging tools so no external tools are required to build with it, but equally you can integrate it with Jetbrains IDEs etc. These built-in tools can be a lifesaver if a production system develops a problem not seen in dev because of an unexpected change in the environment, data streams etc. So, it takes a lot of work to learn, but none of its core technologies are likely to go unsupported in the near future and yet it is sufficiently up-to-date to do just about anything with any web browser/device. It doesn't require any specific OS and will run happily, without alteration or rebuilding, on Windows (any flavour just about) and linux (likewise) - if the environment will run Python, you can build with web2py on it without installing any other tools at all. Use it and you will be sneered at by the script kiddies using the latest React, Vue, Flask etc etc frameworks, but unlike them you have a completely self-contained dev and production environment that has no on-going dependencies. (Node.js single-dev maintained modules anyone?) Yet you can still use all the latest python modules etc if you wish. What's not to like? I'm sure there are other integrated frameworks out there that provide similar portability and functionality (almost certainly there are some PHP systems like this) but I found this one...
Significant white space is not acceptable to me.
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This is a man (Mr. Toffler, not abmv) who clearly does not need to accomplish anything. For any progress to be made, man puts effort into defeating chaos, decrease entropy, order the world. By constantly changing frameworks and the insanity of current web development, I see neither order nor a win against the inevitableness of software rot. Example: Ruby on Rails - I know many shops who made huge investments, but since technology has "moved on", they now have technical debt which no one wants to work on now that it's not the latest and greatest. Sure, I'm okay with coming up with better mousetraps. So, abmv, are you suggesting investing on constantly learning the latest thing (get over it)? With the perpetual rolling out of framework after framework, things have gotten so crazy that we've circled back to "anyone can be a developer" the new phrase is low code environment. Another buzzword failure in the making.
Charlie Gilley <italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape... "Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783 “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
I would work on COBOL or FORTRAN systems in my semi-retirement, but never an old, slow framework having lots of better competitors.
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Is it just me, or are we caught in some software/hardware planned obsolescence?:confused::confused: With several new languages, frameworks, and hardware coming out every day, it's got me wondering. Have the IT market software and hardware vendors saturated the market, and are trying to increase market share by bringing out minor and unneeded tweaks? I am not talking about the consumers of IT and the increasing demand for developers. On the language/framework front it seems like the "Tower of Babel". I used to be able to keep up by running as hard as I can. But not anymore.
I guess I am just getting old.
Just need better shoes...
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Significant white space is not acceptable to me.
Fair enough! No tool suits everyone.
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For what it's worth, the frenzied churn appears to be by far the worst in the web/mobile application arena. Desktop, system, and embedded development has been fairly stable in comparison. You can argue that stability comes from lack of interest or revenue (and you're probably right), but I don't mind it at all. I envision being a web developer going for a job interview: Interviewer: How much experience do you have with MetaXYZ framework version 2.0? Candidate: Since it was only released a month ago, I've been working with it for a month. Interviewer: How about version 2.15? Candidate: I've not seen it. Interviewer: It was released 47 minutes ago, while you were talking to our HR person. Didn't you take a look between questions? Candidate: ...
Software Zen:
delete this;I stopped working with web development when I retired in 2014. After Microsoft released its version of MVC, this entire side of our profession went bat-s**t crazy with it subsequently creating the mess we see now. Instead of throwing out the WebForms paradigm, Microsoft should have continued to refine it while giving the finger to all the purists who insisted that MVC was the "correct" way to develop for the Internet. I still develop applications but they are purely for the desktop where few care if you are using the latest technologies...
Steve Naidamast Sr. Software Engineer Black Falcon Software, Inc. blackfalconsoftware@outlook.com
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Slacker007 wrote:
In technical terms, we would all still be using punch cards, I believe, if it were not for planned obsolescence.
Nope. The concept of punch cards was invented in the 1700's to control looms, and "modern" punch cards were used well over a century ago for tabulating the 1890 US census. Punch cards were replaced as a mechanism for data input, output, and storage because technological advances enabled the creation of better mechanisms. There was no planned obsolescence - it simply was progress. The current mess that Slow Eddie pointed out is far from being progress. If anything, it's numerous backwards steps. Part of the problem is due to a mass of folks believing they can do it better, so many make their own version of "X". Add to that global communications and talking heads, struggling for relevancy, promoting obscure technologies to make themselves sound useful. Add rabid fanbois and we get the current mess of numerous languages and frameworks that have no future planning and often no backwards compatibility. Let's look at C# -- 90% of each of the last 10 DotNet framework updates were unneeded "features". Compacting the code so people can type less characters at the expense of readability is worse than useless, as it takes those supporting the code more time to figure out what it's doing. One of my co-workers spent 2 hours figuring out what a function HE wrote 6 months before was actually doing. Microsoft is churning out updates to keep C# in the news and make it seem relevant. Keep Hanlon's Razor in mind: Never Attribute to Malice That Which Can be Adequately Explained By Stupidity. Planned obsolescence? While there is probably some, IMO it gives IT vendors far too much credit, as most appear to have a complete lack of vision beyond tomorrow's sales goal.
Well said! I always look at the new language features being released in upcoming Visual Studio upgrades. In recent years, I haven't seen a single one I would have used for fear of making my own development not only look like hieroglyphics but something I cannot understand if I leave the code for any length of time. and even though the relatively new List collection is inherently, internally superior to an ArrayList, I still don't even use it now since the data I store in my Arraylists is so minimal as to not affect performance.
Steve Naidamast Sr. Software Engineer Black Falcon Software, Inc. blackfalconsoftware@outlook.com
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Is it just me, or are we caught in some software/hardware planned obsolescence?:confused::confused: With several new languages, frameworks, and hardware coming out every day, it's got me wondering. Have the IT market software and hardware vendors saturated the market, and are trying to increase market share by bringing out minor and unneeded tweaks? I am not talking about the consumers of IT and the increasing demand for developers. On the language/framework front it seems like the "Tower of Babel". I used to be able to keep up by running as hard as I can. But not anymore.
I guess I am just getting old.
you're not wrong; things are changing stupid fast, and I'm not exactly seeing the benefit of it. I feel that frameworks get updated (too quickly) to try to stay ahead of all the other competition to keep their market share, but at the cost of developers getting burned out. New languages are fun, when you have enough time to play with them and fully understand the concepts that that new language offers and how it can be best used. When you get bombarded with "here's 6 languages you need to know this year" articles, it's pure BS. You might have the time to take a quick course on all 6, but you won't really know them or be able to put them to good practice. When I got started professionally, Java was brand new, classic VB was the go to for desktop, C++ was for the hard core crowd, and C was the old friend. With C you could memorize most of the standard libraries and a few purchased ones, and work happily all day occasionally checking a reference book. There were other languages out there, but pretty fringe and would only show up in magazines once in a while. Today, when jumping through a few languages to just get the daily work done, I find that a good portion of the day is just spent looking things up online, for what framework -> version -> feature you are trying to use, or the weird compiler/runtime error that's breaking everything, or what was all the options you can put in this type of configuration file? The list goes on. In the older days you could know almost everything about your environment and language of choice and be able to use the leftover brain power to get creative to work around the short comings of that language. Now you have to know at least 10x the amount of information to just get started, and you will never have the time to truly dig deep in to a language. Sorry for the rant, feeling my age this morning.
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Is it just me, or are we caught in some software/hardware planned obsolescence?:confused::confused: With several new languages, frameworks, and hardware coming out every day, it's got me wondering. Have the IT market software and hardware vendors saturated the market, and are trying to increase market share by bringing out minor and unneeded tweaks? I am not talking about the consumers of IT and the increasing demand for developers. On the language/framework front it seems like the "Tower of Babel". I used to be able to keep up by running as hard as I can. But not anymore.
I guess I am just getting old.
Well If I ever have to develop for web, at least it looks like typescript corrects most of the mistakes of ecmascript (javascript) but best of all, we have webassembly and you'd hardly have to leave the holy ASM/C/C++ trinity to code seriously for the web. Otherwise there's nothing new under the sun. Young people are anxious for C++ 20 but I've been coding in version '94 (and a bit of the one after that) since always and I mix a lot of C into it (mind you I write them in .c files, not .cpp)
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you're not wrong; things are changing stupid fast, and I'm not exactly seeing the benefit of it. I feel that frameworks get updated (too quickly) to try to stay ahead of all the other competition to keep their market share, but at the cost of developers getting burned out. New languages are fun, when you have enough time to play with them and fully understand the concepts that that new language offers and how it can be best used. When you get bombarded with "here's 6 languages you need to know this year" articles, it's pure BS. You might have the time to take a quick course on all 6, but you won't really know them or be able to put them to good practice. When I got started professionally, Java was brand new, classic VB was the go to for desktop, C++ was for the hard core crowd, and C was the old friend. With C you could memorize most of the standard libraries and a few purchased ones, and work happily all day occasionally checking a reference book. There were other languages out there, but pretty fringe and would only show up in magazines once in a while. Today, when jumping through a few languages to just get the daily work done, I find that a good portion of the day is just spent looking things up online, for what framework -> version -> feature you are trying to use, or the weird compiler/runtime error that's breaking everything, or what was all the options you can put in this type of configuration file? The list goes on. In the older days you could know almost everything about your environment and language of choice and be able to use the leftover brain power to get creative to work around the short comings of that language. Now you have to know at least 10x the amount of information to just get started, and you will never have the time to truly dig deep in to a language. Sorry for the rant, feeling my age this morning.
Matt McGuire wrote:
When you get bombarded with "here's 6 languages you need to know this year" articles, it's pure BS.
I agree. As a young developer in the consulting/contracting market in the late 80's/early 90's, I got shoved into project after project, learning new technologies several times each year. It was fun and exciting! I rode that bleeding edge! After 15 years of professional work, I had a huge breadth of experience but relatively little depth with the exception of C, SQL, and VB 4/5/6. And I was exhausted by the churn. I've seen tool after tool rise and fall, sometimes within just a couple of years. Sure, I learned new stuff faster than most, but learning something only to drop it for the next one got very old. Now? My decision to learn a new language depends on market share and the local availability of jobs using that skillset. If I don't see a long-term use for a skillset, I pass on it. I don't have the enthusiasm I had and gained the wisdom to focus on what will benefit me in the long run. And my employer in the short term. I read the "6 new languages to learn!" articles, then check the local jobs. Unless a language is trending, I ignore it. I'm ok with letting others ride that bleeding edge ...
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The creator of some framework was recently turned down for a job application because he didn't have at least five years of experience with his own framework. The reason was that he created it three years ago. He tweeted about it, so it must be true. Can't remember who it was or what the framework was though.
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Is it just me, or are we caught in some software/hardware planned obsolescence?:confused::confused: With several new languages, frameworks, and hardware coming out every day, it's got me wondering. Have the IT market software and hardware vendors saturated the market, and are trying to increase market share by bringing out minor and unneeded tweaks? I am not talking about the consumers of IT and the increasing demand for developers. On the language/framework front it seems like the "Tower of Babel". I used to be able to keep up by running as hard as I can. But not anymore.
I guess I am just getting old.
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Is it just me, or are we caught in some software/hardware planned obsolescence?:confused::confused: With several new languages, frameworks, and hardware coming out every day, it's got me wondering. Have the IT market software and hardware vendors saturated the market, and are trying to increase market share by bringing out minor and unneeded tweaks? I am not talking about the consumers of IT and the increasing demand for developers. On the language/framework front it seems like the "Tower of Babel". I used to be able to keep up by running as hard as I can. But not anymore.
I guess I am just getting old.
Well, the real joke is that in the end, it is all assembly or turned into machine code. What I don't like is that in a lot of cases, most of the "new, cool kid things" are created by people that don't want to learn how to use the existing tools that actually work far better on the long term. Example? People that think LINQ is freaking awesome and refuse to learn SQL. Someone showed me LINQ and I just chuckled. (Keep in mind that I am a corporate internal apps and DB developer; full stack) C and the primary C variants have been around for a VERY long time and deserve to keep on keeping on. Approaches like that taken with Java or Python are interesting and do have some degree of place but I stand by my position that most of these trendy things over the last 20 years are from people that just don't want to learn something or can't so they concoct something that does what was already amply doable in existing languages.
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Is it just me, or are we caught in some software/hardware planned obsolescence?:confused::confused: With several new languages, frameworks, and hardware coming out every day, it's got me wondering. Have the IT market software and hardware vendors saturated the market, and are trying to increase market share by bringing out minor and unneeded tweaks? I am not talking about the consumers of IT and the increasing demand for developers. On the language/framework front it seems like the "Tower of Babel". I used to be able to keep up by running as hard as I can. But not anymore.
I guess I am just getting old.
I bet you've never said "I won't learn it" about any technology required for any task that's been shoved your way. So let's not hear anything about getting old ...etc. And for that matter - not everything is something that even should be kept up with, rather fashionable chaff blown away by the wind generated by the next perceived cash-in opportunity. And furthermore Get off my lawn :)
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I believe one cannot experience change unless their is a certain degree of planned obsolescence. If that was not the case then we would all still be cave people, if that. In technical terms, we would all still be using punch cards, I believe, if it were not for planned obsolescence.
We would be using abacus, if there were no lazy people. Since there are lazy people, someone came up with a way to stop using punch cards, not because someone planned to make them obsolescent. Planned obsolescence is actually a force that is working against progress. It wastes resources on things, that are cuter and shorter lived, than the ones replaced instead of making them more functional and longer lasting (therefore redirecting efforts and resources from making cheap appliances to making say interplanetary spaceships).
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I bet you've never said "I won't learn it" about any technology required for any task that's been shoved your way. So let's not hear anything about getting old ...etc. And for that matter - not everything is something that even should be kept up with, rather fashionable chaff blown away by the wind generated by the next perceived cash-in opportunity. And furthermore Get off my lawn :)
In fact I had a course in BASIC in college (business school). You worked on a teletype machine logged in to the University's main computer. I worked in Apple BASIC on an Apple2e clone computer and did an accounting application (Payroll and Inventory control) for the company I worked for. Next, after moving to Charlotte, I wrote a check printing application in Microsoft VB 1.0. I believe you are starting to see the trend here. I've moved through every version of VB since, up to and including VB6 ('84 to current supporting legacy apps for customers) and VB.Net (developing a website). I looked a C once for a monthor so and decided that you had to be a masochist :omg: to use it (way to low level). I rejected it out of hand. I have looked at C# but don't see any advantages over VB.net. On the data side went from flat file, to MS Access, to SQL server. So you see I have rejected all of them.
Stella!
