The Biggest Difference Between Coding Today and When I Started in the 80s

Re:The Biggest Difference Between Coding Today and When I St... by dheera on Tuesday March 21, 2017 @03:15PM (#13925271)

I disagree. A lot of times it still makes sense to write your own code from the ground up. There are so many instances where a lot of stuff out there is way too overcomplicated for the task at hand and takes more time to configure and resolve dependencies than it takes to just code the part you actually need from scratch.

A lot of times, if I'm looking at some random github repo out there and its dependencies aren't apt-gettable or pippable or npmable, I just say "screw it" and write it from the ground up using only things that are apt-gettable, pippable, or npmable.

Except OpenCV 3.1. I'm willing to deal with that one. But I have a script to install it that's 55 lines long. (How ridiculous is that -- we need 55 lines of code to install things these days. Can't we just tell our computers to install stuff and aggressively figure out how to install it, no questions asked?)

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Re:The Biggest Difference Between Coding Today and When I St... by zemo on Tuesday March 21, 2017 @03:45PM (#13925521)

sure but you often have to fight tooth and nail for the right to invent anything yourself in a lot of modern web-based environments. The idea of actually inventing something yourself is seen as crazy and dangerous in a lot of places.

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Re:The Biggest Difference Between Coding Today and When I St... by SCHiM on Tuesday March 21, 2017 @05:21PM (#13926361)

That's because there's some truth in that. Remember the time when searching for ' would spit out a detailed error message containing the database name and query that failed? Or adding <h1> to your profile page would break everything for everyone?

That was because everybody was writing their own stuff instead of relying on frameworks that handle fuzzy things like user input for you. Many webpages have gotten more secure, but no without a cost for creative programmers everywhere.

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Re:The Biggest Difference Between Coding Today and When I St... by wvenable on Tuesday March 21, 2017 @10:09PM (#13928006)

If you're going to code something yourself, you have to be skilled enough to do it. Admittedly, one of the benefits of frameworks is that they allow low-skilled developers to produce reasonable and safe results quickly.

But if you are skilled, you can easily produce code equivalent or better than the average framework out there. And it will likely be simpler because you're only coding for your own use case and not every case that exists.

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Re:The Biggest Difference Between Coding Today and When I St... by dheera on Tuesday March 21, 2017 @09:25PM (#13927847)

There are ways to write your own code and not be stupid. Parametrize SQL queries, use libraries to strip HTML, and so on. Unit test your stuff. Have your server software throw a generic 500 for anything that isn't a 200 from your upstream socket.

I am not saying write everything from scratch. Just use only the stuff you have to.

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Re:The Biggest Difference Between Coding Today and When I St... by busterarm on Tuesday March 21, 2017 @05:27PM (#13926420)

I can't even get OpenCV to install properly on my Mac, so there's that. That or GQRX/libsdr. Yay Python. If you have, please share!

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Re:The Biggest Difference Between Coding Today and When I St... by acdha on Tuesday March 21, 2017 @05:30PM (#13926446)

Unless you have a really, really good reason, use Homebrew (https://brew.sh/) and it's a simple "brew install opencv" or "brew install opencv3".

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Re:The Biggest Difference Between Coding Today and When I St... by busterarm on Tuesday March 21, 2017 @09:28PM (#13927858)

that failed for me last year when I tried, but it was after I tried and failed with gqrx which probably screwed things up. Will try again.

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