Simpler times.
Quoting[0]:
"The entropy of a system can in fact be shown to be a measure of its disorder and of the unavailability of energy to do work."
I rather like that - where "work" is the time spent solving first order business problems, and "disorder" is a measure of the energy spent not directly solving the business problem. AKA dealing with accidental complexity.
[0] https://www.coursehero.com/study-guides/physics/15-6-entropy...
(though seriously, in my dorm room in the 90s, my pentium 90 desktop at the end of my bed had a fixed IP address and was the server...)
There were some cowboy-level engineering practices for sure, to the point that I'm not sure you could call it 'software engineering', but there was definitely some beauty in the simplicity of that setup compared to what we typically have to do these days. At least after you set up the box and the access to it, anyway.
By the way, we need to add another feature to our page, would you mind looking through that file so there are no class collisions? What do you mean its too long? 50k lines? Pfft.. But at least it 'gets transferred to the browser pretty fast'
Do not awaken the Ancients for only the pure of heart will survive such an encounter.
I swear you js haters never fail to make me laugh with all the ignorant lamentations.
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Let us not sink into unproductive musings of the intellect, but meditate on the nature of the pendulum swing.
I would be careful assuming too much about us, who are wise in the ways of the world and, dare I say, exceedingly goodlooking.
Wouldn't the same be true of "JS era" developers who never learned the basics of a static website or a templated server-side app? If the issue is being too lazy to have more than one tool in your toolbox, then it applies to everyone.
Could they have been joking that, maybe, there’s a lot of folks who are a little too tunnel visioned on the newest most modern js metaframeworks that they have little or limited knowledge of the foundations of their ecosystem? Given that you know something about html files and basic web servers, was your position necessarily the original subject of the joke/point here? Surely it was! Gruff old school devs are so obstinate and short sighted haha.
You opened, intending to construct an argument on your genuine position, with a massive strawman, on a lighthearted commentary over a line from the article that was purposefully taken slightly out of context- not even remotely a tirade on “js hating.” You’re not having an argument in this comment thread with anyone, because no one was even discussing anything to begin with.
I think there’s things to laugh at here (like the original joke) that aren’t how genuinely stupid you think the commenter who is ironically replying to every of your comments in a vague and mystical tone.
Seriously though, I saw someone described as a 22 yr old software engineer in an article. There is a better term: "Software Engineering Apprentice"
It's not just about wage, it's about assigning appropriate work to peoples level and having them progress through the most efficient steps to mastery while also completing billable hours
that's the opposite of what a union does. A union rewards seniority and nothing else.
In particular, it's the assignment of work to the union and then the union is responsible for pairing workers with the assignments which enables the union to create a training funnel where different requirements of the same job can be split among different workers of varying seniority such that apprentices are able to work on the easier items even when there are things beyond their skill involved in the overall work assigned to the union.
Typically a union does primarily exist to create CBAs for wages but this is another function of them which I think would be very helpful for SE and future protection.
So maybe not a traditional union is necessary, but I think there are some functions more or less exclusive to unions right now that would be beneficial to apply to SE. Hopefully that makes sense
The problem is the dogmatism of it all. If you point to a simpler and a more obvious solution, your coworkers will ridicule you and turn you into an old man pariah.
He talks about using WASM for applications and HTML/CSS/JS for basic websites.
What does he suggest we do about the UI layer? Draw pixels on a canvas from WASM?
Yes he says to use a language that compiles to WASM for the UI parts to draw pixels on the screen.
It really seems like WASM will be the write once run everywhere runtime that was touted in the past. Java almost got us there but was too dependent on Java, whereas WASM is for any language. I've been using Flutter with their experimental web WASM support and it's very fast.
I hope it doesn't replace the lowest common denominator of HTML for generic apps, though, if only because it would dramatically raise the barrier to entry (not that your typical React app is particularly readable in the inspector...).
I personally use Flutter for a lot of my apps, as well as React/NextJS for SEO based apps, the combo works pretty well.
Whelps. Time to learn C++ again!
I noticed this too. You can put a plaintext file on the server and it gets transferred to the browser pretty fast. You can also put another plaintext file ending with .css on the server and it can make things on the first page move and look really nice just because the browser knows what to do with it.
It’s a neat trick but still second to useful content on the first page (that is the page you get to read, if it lets you).