Yes, PHP has been "cleaned up" and you have always had the option to use clean, concise way of coding without language interfering or hindering you in any way.

There's no programming language out there that makes up for the sloppiness and inability of the person behind the screen.

str_replace(old, new) vs. stri_replace(new, old) kind of thing.

When q2 had shipped out I was so busy working I never had time to play it seriously.

Quake 4 felt far more engaging to me. And q3.. I had the tin box set for Linux. Remember that push to make retail Linux gaming a thing? Shame it never panned out.

Naturally, even though you can disregard the templating and resort to idiomatic JS, like one in React, you managed to develop an opinion after not using the features you like.

This just makes no sense honestly. I'm all for people having opinion to the point where you can blatantly say "I hate Vue because I like React more", there's literally no need for justification.

But spewing nonsense just to justify your preference is just bad. Are you a junior dev by any chance?

I've used both extensively and I can recommend Vue over React because React is a pile of mental manure. I never understood React hype, but then again - IT is a fashion business, and when "leaders" invent crap - flies tend to follow.

I don't know about the rest, but I really hate when someone makes a fool out of me. I'm a lazy person too, if a service that I like asked me bluntly "hey dude, wanna give us all your info and let us sniff your traffic so we can stick ads in, we're even gonna sell it" - I'd say - sure, you were honest enough, screw it - go ahead, I didn't have to navigate through a wall of text critting me for 9000000 to get that piece of info.

But no. No one behaves like that. Long user agreements, service agreements, catchy call-to-actions on websites that promise wonderland filled with unicorns shitting M&M's and what not just so they get those few bucks out of me...

Oh well, hello foobar2000 my old friend, seems like I'll un-lazy myself just to spite these prying assholes.

If you don’t like the ads, Spotify has a subscription plan. In my country that’s €5 / month.

Surely that’s less money spent than the effort it takes to pirate music for usage with foobar2000.

Also I'm very pissed off with people who say freeloading. It's not freeloading. I pay with my time to watch or listen to your stupid ad. I should not also pay with my personal data. An ad is just an ad it should not have evolved to the monstrosity of tracking you.

It has evolved in the same way copyright has until we find a way to kill both of them as they are not needed in our world.

Not if you're using an ad-blocker.

Perhaps the reason you're using an ad-blocker is because you don't want to be tracked, and the only way to do that is to block ads completely. I get it. But you're also using up Spotify's bandwidth and licensing fees (which in turn allow music to be created in the first place), without providing anything in return.

This is only possible because paying and ad-watching customers are subsidizing your behavior. It is the definition of freeloading.

The issue isn't one of arbitrary code execution. Lets not be hypocrites.

AdBlock Plus has over 200 million installs on the desktop alone. Are you going to tell me that those 200+ million users of AdBlock Plus are concerned with arbitrary code execution? What percentage of those users do even know what that even means?

Between 10% and 20% of Internet users are using ad-blockers. Lets do an imagination exercise and say that Spotify would only serve images for ads. How many of those 10 to 20% of Internet users would whitelist Spotify?

"None" would be my guess.

https://www.adblockradio.com/blog/2018/11/15/designing-audio...

I use adblockers to protect myself against malicious content masquerading as ads, which both the ad delivery networks and content platforms have proven unwilling or unable to address to an acceptable extent.

If you want to boycott Spotify for endangering people's computers, go ahead. Heck, if you want to attempt to use Spotify with an ad-blocker, go ahead. I don't feel morally comfortable using ad-blockers, but I won't fault others for using them.

You do not get to use Spotify's free tier, block their only potential revenue stream for that tier, and then turn around and cry fowl when Spotify notices and bans you.

I have this problem with websites, apps, social networks, etc. as well. I don't want to be tracked, retargeted and so on. Not because I think ads will influence me or anything but its about my trust in those companies and how they protect my data. When my data gets leaked because they are inadequate at security I don't get money back. I get a message saying "We take your privacy seriously"... And that data can then be used in various other ways to harm me.

Fuck the money, I’m not letting a site run arbitrary code on my machine, especially when they have a track record of spying and installing malware. They have a right to make a living, I have a right to own my property without having it damaged by casual greed.

Or don't. I've pirated music and movies. I just don't get too mad about it.

My point, put another way: I respect the desire to block JS ads, AND I respect the will a non-critical app in a competitive market to make stupid decisions with their ad policy. AND people who don't like that policy can move to Amazon/Google/Apple/other music platforms, or pay Spotify Premium.

Pardon my language, but it's a fucked up point to say pay a service money if you don't want their software to conduct clandestine operations on a device that probably contains all sorts of sensitive and private data that NOBODY has claim to but you, and the people you've expressly desired to share it with.

That's the point it would seem to me reading these comments; I realize paying gets rid of the ads, but it's pretty messed up to sit back and think that you're ostensibly paying for "good behavior" from Spotify w/rt to ad tech and what that technology enables on our devices.

It's easy to say pay or don't use the service, why isn't as easy to say "Spotify, don't be dicks with your ad technology on MY phone"?

If I pay a kid $.25 for lemonade, I'm paying for lemonade. If he says "hey, enjoy a free sample of my lemonade while I tell you how I made it", that's a fair trade-off. It is NOT a fair trade-off for his dad to spike my lemonade with a sedative so I'll want to sit down and give his kid an opening to blabber about his recipe while winking and saying "should paid us that quarter, chump".

If you sell yourself into slavery, you don't become a slave. If you use a product "in exchange for ads", you don't lose your right to protect yourself from them.

- Unspiked lemonade for $.25 - Spiked lemonade for free

Companies are free to sell what they want, for the amount they want. At least there's more than one option here.

Thst kid would be arrested, because it’s plain to see from a legal and moral perspective that it’s wrong. Besides, it’s not like that at all.

What it is like is a radio station threatening to cut off service to people who switch channels or turn down volume during ads. This is a problem with the business model, and using TOS tricks to try and twist people’s arm. If they want to be sub only then by all means, but if they want to use an ad model as well then they incur some risks with that. I’m also not clear that it stops with the “free” service only.

Personally I don’t use Spotify, because I like to own my music, and I trust in their business model’s longevity about as much as I believe in fairies. When companies have to threaten their customers to make a business model work, the model is already fucked beyond repair. Advertising on the internet isn’t compatible with the existence and proliferation of ad blockers, and I bristle when a company makes a move to try and undermine autonomy to shore that model up. Moreover if Spotify does it as people accept it, other companies will try to follow suit.

If a business is offering a product at terms you don't like, how exactly is that bad? Just don't use the product.

But this article is specifically about people using a product against the stipulated terms. Criticizing bad ads is valid in general, but people expect topical discussions to stick to the context. Either clarify you are speaking from a different context or you will get misinterpreted.

TV companies and print newspapers don't need third parties and invasive tracking to sell ads.

I tried to get a similar thing started for free software and it ran for a while https://www.fsf.org/news/ad-bard

If that requirement is freeloading then I disagree with that definition of the word. They enjoy the benefit of behavior which if it was offline would be illegal, and out competes those service which operate more ethically. Since society currently expect the users to be responsible if their machine get infected by malware, it is fully ethical if they use software like ad-blocks to protect themselves.

I agree. For the past two decades, companies have privatized immense swaths of the digital commons and paid nothing for it, freeloading on the work of the countless public institutions and hobbyists who both created it, and created the culture which attracted billions of "users" to it.

With Spotify it is even worse. They have taken music, a prehistoric participatory artform and characteristic behavior of our species, and are trying to gamify it into a product that is no longer just music and which they own.

For the record I am a musician, and I'm pleasantly well-off so I have a paid Spotify subscription though I rarely use it. I held out until mid-2018, and didn't listen to even a single track on the service before then. Not that there is the slightest moral issue with using an adblocker while consuming broadcasts that contain ads, which I also do.

I know this news doesn't affect me, but the principle is the important thing.

Can you state in clear terms the "principle" that Spotify is violating?

Everybody has the right to control what is displayed on their computer when they browse the Net, and Spotify has the right to cancel free accounts for whatever reason they want to. There is nothing wrong with running adblockers and anti-anti-adblocking scripts, etc., and there is nothing wrong with canceling free Spotify accounts. There is also no cognitive dissonance with running and ad-blocker and being angry when Spotify cancels your free account because of it, it's a perfectly reasonable and consistent attitude.

In the U.S., its $10 a month for your entire life. If you live another 100 years, thats $12k that could have bought top top top of the line speakers or enough cds to fill multiple bookcases. We have so many services like this now that are packaged monthly to hide the real cost of long term use. Its like rent to own all over again, except when you stop renting you do not own.

If you don't like that they have an ad based model, and personally want to boycott their subscription service because of it then do so and buy your own music.

It's not complicated. 'Not rewarding their behavior' is simple - don't use Spotify. Anything else is very transparent, after-the-fact justification of your desire for theft.

"Hey I really like this bike share service, but I don't think it's safe, so I'm gonna steal the bike, improve the safety and then ride it whenever I want. I don't want to reward their behavior of renting bikes I feel aren't safe."

Imagine a grocery store has a promotion - you can get a loaf of bread for free if you listen to a twenty minute advertising presentation. Does this justify not going to the presentation, and just stealing the bread?

Bear in mind, this loaf can also only be eaten inside of the grocery store. You cannot leave the store with the bread, because it is welded to the infrastructure of the grocery.

Not paying for a gym membership would be a better example. You're using up available capacity without giving the gym a way to monetize your presence there.

I can tell you didn't read carefully what I wrote, but that's fine.

Here's what Spotify tells me: "Spotify gives you instant access to millions of songs – from old favorites to the latest hits. Just hit play to stream anything you like."

Where's "but we'll also monitor you and inject whatever code we can, we might allow our customers to do so too, we don't know what it might be but since we wasted $0.003 to acquire you, we need to make at least $5 off of you and we don't really care what happens to your device or if someone breaches our customer and does bad shit to you."

I believe in reciprocity - and the odds are worse at my side if I "freeload" :)

And even if Spotify had appended their marketing language with the "but we track you, never forget that", would that have somehow made you turn off the adblocker?

However, let's prove once more that languages evolve: http://php.net/manual/en/book.ds.php

The "classic" you're referring to is far from something objective. There will always be problems with languages. That's why we have the human factor who is supposed to be intelligent and work around the apparent issues and make the computer do useful work despite apparent tool glitches.

Sadly, we're just creating better idiots who are only getting better at whining.

Else we'd all be using assembly.

There's absolutely no pride or glory in doing things nicely and securely that the computer could have automated in the first place.

Anything the language allows that it could refuse while allowing devs to express the same features, and that results in bugs is a mistake in the language (e.g. the sorry state of strings in C).

I've seen an attitude that people think they can inoculate themselves from inept programming by using obtuse frameworks as if martin-fowler-speak acts as a drill sergeant making disciplined coders out of the herd.

But after 20 years of bouncing around startups I've never seen the intended results actually happen a single time. Not even close. Not once. Never.

Instead it leads to larger, less maintainable, more convoluted messes that have to be trashed quicker. Giant ceremonial cargo cult style monstrosities with huge circuitous logic - 4, 5, maybe 6 layers, a router calling a controller, calling a service, calling a provider, calling an event model, which runs a single if statement ... as if that's how we protect ourselves against incompetence.

These approaches just lead to wasteful projects where they end up rewriting the whole thing in whatever the framework/language de jour is instead of writing easily maintainable, quickly understandable code that's designed to work for the next 10 years. I've talked to many programmers who are embarrassed by the language they are using ... wtf is that?! They've turned programming into fast fashion.

Then people like to ask what someone's favorite language is, usually when they first meet them, as a social cue, as if we are a bunch of highschool kids following pop music. I mean what on earth... we're supposed to building the future here, not running around like a bunch of spastic fanboys from platform to platform, just to mess everything up all over again in bold new ways using slightly different syntax.

The best thing to do is give people the least abstract thing with the fewest conformity requirements ... essentially make it open ended and then the messes are easier to spot and easier to fix. You won't get 4 folders with 26 files handling simple tasks like uploading images to an S3 bucket (saw this huge mess just last week and guess what?! It's broken. I know, surprising right?)

Anyway, new shiny fancy tools with GoF buzzwords won't ever fix incompetence, it'll only make it worse.

Which is neither here nor there.

For one, it ignores the pragmatic issue, that very competent people (the very people that built the foundations we all work on even) will still make lots of mistakes, even trivial ones, but with severe consequences (e.g. buffer overflows) when the languages don't prevent them.

If only it was just "incompetent people" that made mistakes...

>But after 20 years of bouncing around startups I've never seen the intended results actually happen a single time. Not even close. Not once. Never.

You weren't looking hard enough. Every day millions of programmers don't make "buffer overflow" errors for example, that otherwise they'd have made, because they work in languages that don't allow them.

And they'd have made those mistakes regardless of their programming chops. The best programmers, people that run circles around you and me, still make those mistakes.

The way I think about it is if you think through the entire software stack and all the instructions that get executed across all the machines and their operating systems and programs running underneath before things even get to your code and then all of the standard library and framework code plus your code. For just a simple loading a web page that is a trillion piece jigsaw puzzle and every single piece has to line up or the whole thing just doesn't work.

We do the humbling and the remarkable every day and trillion piece jigsaw puzzles are no joke. It's the exception that you get it right. Given all the pieces required that's a lot of sources of potential entropy and the more it increases the more the system destabilizes and/or becomes unworkable. Things like languages, libraries, frameworks etc make certain decisions on your behalf with the goal to contain some of that entropy within their given abstraction.

It's about giving code sunlight so that action at a distance and other kinds of magic don't hide errors making them harder to find, get in your way of fixing them, making reproducibility a mess and confirmation simply guesswork.

Its the restrictive design trend of crippling languages which needlessly prevents the sunlight effect from happening along with "information hiding principle" gone completely amuck with the information successfully hidden in dozens of innocently named files with listeners, observers, watchers, triggers and who knows what else being mysteriously called based on reflective programming so not even grep will help you.

Static code analysis and seamless navigation is totally a thing of the past.

Instead, the errors will have the stack of the error handler and that's it. The debugger is useless because stepping through the code is 98% scaffolding.

All these fancy tools bludgeoning any introspection or diagnostic system so the only remaining workable debug system is printing debug variables and rerunning the code like I'm programming on a TI-81 (only that had debug and release run modes...features I can usually only dream of these days) Progress! Welcome to 2019!

It's crazy. This isn't how maintainable code is written

You can see right here on HN anytime a post comes up about using a cloud provider someone advocating putting a layer of abstraction over the provider’s SDK to prevent “lock-in”. As if the CTO is going to one day move their entire infrastructure because a developer promises them they’ve abstracted their code perfectly.

So instead of just being able to read the docs of the SDK, you have a custom QueueManagerFactory that gives you an AWSQueueManager that wraps the Boto3 AWS SDK just so one day if the company decides to move to GCP, someone can write a GCPQueueManager.

See also, developers who think they can effortlessly move from their company’s six figure Oracle installation to Postgres because they used the repository pattern.

This is despite the fact that if you do it it'll take 40 minutes manually versus 10 minutes if the Rube Goldberg abstraction machine works as planned (it won't).

Since there's only about a 5% chance (max) that going from say S3 to Azure will ever happen, the extra cathedral of abstraction saves an actuarial 1.5min of dev time.

All that only for 2-4 days of development to make it and the added runtime at every request for the convenience. Genius!

I'm not going to write raw HTTP requests to S3 in every place in my code that I need to read/write objects from there. What I'd rather have is a simple abstraction with methods like get(id) -> obj and put(obj) -> id.

Yeah I have been through that before where the architect of the company wrote his own bespoke ORM, logging framework, etc. and he was the only one who knew how it worked.

I think I'm justified in calling myself competent. Nevertheless, with the wrong tools, the things I build are definitely worse than the things I can build with proper tools.

I mean it's just a huge waste of time. These modern stacks (mostly js) are crap code all the way down.

It's made me want to return to Perl because honestly, it has everything and is somehow mostly idiot free. I probably should...

The moment you convey that sort of attitude, two things happen. The person you called a flunkie will not learn a goddamned thing from you. And, if they happen to be right, you won't learn a damned thing either. Great choices.

However, you can pursue a culture of excellence without being rude and toxic. You can be kind and humble without coddling.

Edit - I should have added that if teenagers with computers have a good attitude, feel engaged and feel cared about, they can be extremely productive members of a team. And they have a tendency to grow into really amazing engineers (and fine people).

It's 4am, I should sleep.

It's not binary. It's probabilities. Some environments make it harder to mess up, others make it easier. This is real.

It's art, fashion and politics.

Brands generally mean nothing to me, new consumer technology I'm generally not interested in, and I have no issues say, taking the bus and getting reading done instead of rolling around in say a Tesla (despite the fact that buying one is well within my financial reach). I honestly don't care in the slightest.

So yes, it's probably a larger personality disposition which manifests itself in this particular way moreso than it is a morsel of objective rational reality.

The people I lambast are the same ones with things like smart speakers and wifi connected refrigerators (I use an old minifridge and I prefer it). It's just a lifestyle; not some objectively poor use of money and time resources.

That's a nice perspective and it helps explain a lot, thanks.

It appears that we think about different terms when visualizing what "incompetent" means.

We create languages to tackle different sets of problems, and we want to minimize human error - that part, I believe, we can agree on.

However, if you perform "SELECT * FROM mytable" (table grows indefinitely) and then sort / limit in the language and not database - you're incompetent, you simply lack knowledge and you didn't even think abstractly what can happen by doing so. There's no language out there that can teach you "right tool for the job" or "keep it simple" or "should I do it, maybe there's another way, did someone else have this problem?", no matter what wizard creates it.

We will never weed out incompetent people by creating languages and a language shouldn't cater to a moron.

There is a reason most web sites don’t use C.

Humans are fallible. That is an immutable truth.

There’s no great wisdom in relying on human discipline alone to produce reliable software.

Guys who maintain Firefox - thank you. I hope I'll join the FF users once more in the near future.

Framework continues to evolve, for the better of course. With the introduction of PHP 7, I believe Laravel will get rid of magic eventually. Meanwhile, we've got tools to help ourselves.