Trust me, it's not a fake humility. I really have nothing to do with the development of software in my day to day life. And I wish I could agree with you on the "it's not a game" thing, but having used enterprise Windows software for most of my working life I really can't come to any other conclusion than a lot of the software out there running our day to day lives must be produced in settings not unlike your local McDonald's. Having said that, I've yet to come across a situation where I've shared code between a Node server and client code. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE writing processes in javascript but when I was starting out, the language wars really confused me.
It's false humility in the sense that you emphasize that you are not a professional, and then go on to precisely attack professionals for their judgement in what languages and frameworks to use and comment on.
I can't comment on enterprise Windows software in itself, since I'm not a big user and have never written it, but the Windows itself could never be compared to McDonalds. Incredible skill and expertise was needed to write Windows. As to the software written on Windows, are you qualified to judge it? Have you written something similar by yourself?
I've never used Node myself, I was just assuming that people really did share some code across server and client in practice (otherwise why not just use Python for the server).
1) I didn't compare the technological achievement of Windows to McDonald's. It was a personal anecdote about enterprise Windows software being so terrible that I'd imagine it wasn't written in an environment where user experience was a major concern. I never compared the OS itself to anything. Do I think I could write something better? As a matter of fact, yes, I think I could. Should I put my money where my mouth is? I suppose I should, but even if I don't certainly I should be allowed to criticize software that I use on a daily basis. After all, I'm the user, no? These are my own observations, surely I don't need to claim they're gospel or apologize for them?
2) Maybe I offended some people when I used the term "software game". Rest assured I was making a slangy generalized reference to the software industry itself, and in no way did I mean to trivialize those who do dev for a living. In fact, I applaud you.
as a profession programmer, i think there are loads of reinvented wheels, churn, bullshit, etc. i think your initial comment that spawned this back and forth is spot on. its an argument about the degree i guess.
Regarding enterprise software, as a user you can say what you thin about the software, but how can you make claims about how things might be better? You could only make that sort of claim if you understood something about what it was like to write that software. As an amateur you know more than the average user, but I would ask you consider that you don't know all the constraints faced by the person writing the actual software
>Maybe I offended some people when I used the term "software game"
Yes, you did offend me. And I appreciate your clarification. My main point was that it's easy to criticize, but until you get your hands dirty, you won't really know what it's like to write software for a large user base. And it doesn't have to be commercial. If you're working of open source software with 100,000 users, your experience is as real as with commercial software.
> Regarding enterprise software, as a user you can say what you thin about the software, but how can you make claims about how things might be better?
Because I'm the USER! If we're hitting a language barrier I apologize but enterprise software is for the user. Surely this cannot be disputed.
> You could only make that sort of claim if you understood something about what it was like to write that software.
NO! IMO, this is an insane way to think about client software! The user doesn't care about the technology nor the hardships involved in shipping said software! This is why software sucks! I can sympathize if you work at a shitty company with a shitty boss, believe me I can. But no, I feel your software should die if this is your ethos. Let a company who cares about its users take those reins!
> I apologize but enterprise software is for the user. Surely this cannot be disputed.
Nope. The reason enterprise software sucks is because it isn't worth making it not suck. And the reason for that is there is a huge disconnect (many layers of management) between the person who buys the software and those that use it. Thus the sucktitude of the software is largely irrelevant for purchasing decisions because the buyer never experiences the pain of using it. This is starting to change as people get more experience with quality consumer software, and such software (e.g. Dropbox) begins to invade the enterprise.
I'm not arguing against your right to complain that software is bad from the user's perspective. But that wasn't your point. You claimed there was something wrong with the software industry, that their failure to produce better software was in some way related to your original post regarding faddishness in the software industry.
That's what I'm arguing against. I'm saying that you can't know the reasons why software sucks unless you've worked as a programmer (or have some other equivalent way of knowing, e.g. being a product manager).
I don't really have a problem with anything he's saying. It's not even a secret that we culturally care only dimly, if at all, about the people who are receiving the photons we spew out of their screens, and we are the worse for it (look at how often people kvetch about PMs who want things that are hard but obviously better for the user). We're too busy looking inward and bragging about our build systems to muster any empathy for people outside our clique.
Your attempts to shut him down with "well you're not there, man" are offensive to me, and I do have the resume to hurdle your arbitrary no-complaints bar. I don't have to be the employee of an oil company to know that regulatory capture's a thing, he doesn't need to be writing a bunch of leet node.js to know that few people working on anything in tech gives a single solitary crap about him or anybody else using their stuff past the buying point.
He's right to be mad about what we, as a culture, foist on our users. It reflects poorly on us that we are not likewise angry. We should be angry about many things and we are not.
I wasn't initially attempting to shut the poster down because they weren't a professional. In later posts I did devolve into saying "well you're not there, man". What I was initially criticizing was the false humility that somehow made not being a professional into a kind of virtue, affording the poster a greater insight than actual professionals:
As a 'hobbyist' programmer who makes his money outside of the software game, ... the programming tech treadmill is one of the most cringe inducing phenomena I've ever witnessed - particularly in scripting languages...
I've since learned to use programming languages to solve problems I care about. If that makes me the forever-novice then I'm cool with that.
I am a professional and I totally second his position. It makes perfect sense to me and illustrates a large chunk of the frustration I feel every time I see the same old stuff in a new package trotted out like it is the greatest thing since sliced bread (only usually a lot less efficient).
Yup. I'll put my thumb on the scale, too. The amount of aggressive reimplementation of the entire universe is something that makes me pretty sad. I think it's most acutely visible in certain parts of the JavaScript ecosystem--Grunt? Gulp? RequireJS? Browserify? Webpack?--where the incremental improvements of a given tool are seen as license to rewrite the universe. Which isn't to say it doesn't exist elsewhere, that's just top-of-mind. And don't think that I'm not aware that there are benefits to those incremental improvements--but we spend so much time on them, on how so much better this is because teensy-change now everybody switch over...I don't think we do much caring about our users. That upsets me.
Saurik had a great post not too long ago[1] that made me think about how Github and the public nature of open source feels almost competitive now. I'm not at all immune to it; when I started running into teeth-pullingly irritating problems with Terraform (written in Go, which I, uh, "don't like" at a minimum), my first thought was "well screw it, I'll go rewrite it in $X and show them!". Fortunately, my good sense prevailed and I wrote a hat on top of Terraform to add some of what I would editorially consider "sanity"[2] on top, but a lot of what I see out there seems to be people succumbing to the siren song of "well, I'll do it myself and it'll be awesome and I'll get all the credit."
Reducing context switching when working on both, easier to hire people that are fluent in a particular language than people who are fluent in 2, performance, in that order.
