> The world is your playground. Nobody makes you use YAML and Docker and VS Code or whatever your beef is

Nobody, except your future employment prospects.

There's good reasons and bad reasons for a lot of technical options; "can I hire people to do it?" is a very good reason, but it does directly lead to CV-driven-development, where we all chase whatever tech stack the people writing the job adverts have decided is good.

The same people who capitalise "MAC" in "MAC & PC", the same people who conflate Java with JavaScript, the same people who want 10 years experience in things only released 3 years ago.

Sure, you can do that for your hobby projects. But "at work" you generally have these decisions made for you. And these decisions have changed over time for the wrong reasons.

As an aside: if we say k8s, we should also say j8t.

> Yeah, let's remember everything that was great about 25 years ago and forget everything that sucked. Juxtapose it with everything that sucks about today but omit everything that's great. Come on man.

That's fair. When I see bad code today, and try to explain to myself what's bad about it, I realize that people totally did the same things 25 years ago.

Nowadays there is just so much more code, and we stand on taller piles of "architecture" trying to scale higher heaps of expectations. The thing is, the effect of the bad stuff seems to compound more readily than the effect of the good stuff. And meeting the demand for more code involves broadening the base of people doing the coding.

> If you think things suck now, just make it better! The world is your playground.

I agree with this. A lot of the modern expectation is artificial, emphasizing form over function. Even where it isn't, a lot of the modern technique is unnecessary cargo-culting. You can do a lot locally if you believe in your machine (https://thundergolfer.com/computers-are-fast ; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucWdfZoxsYo).

For PAPER I'm targeting Python 3.6+ (where they added `pathlib.Path` and f-strings, and upgraded the SSL version) with the intent to support it indefinitely (which involves forking certain dependencies).

Yea, my immediate reaction was, “Okay. Stop doing all the stupid stuff.” If you want to program like it’s 1999, go for it. I generally don’t use AI, for instance. I just haven’t found it to be a net-positive yet.

They don't want a cure, they want something they can bitch about.

> If you think things suck now, just make it better

This completely ignores the fact we're doing this for our boss, not for ourselves

Just yesterday a friend and I was talking about writing a clone of a popular website, using the technologies of yesteryear. There's absolutely no reason why we wouldn't be able to make a credible competitor using mod_perl and db2.

From a technological view, we're a point where your development stack doesn't matter all that much.

old man claims society collapsing; back in his day…

>Nobody makes you use YAML and Docker and VS Code or whatever your beef is.

Not VS Code, but maybe YAML and Docker if your company is trying to align what tools it uses. C# places might still force you to use Visual Studio proper. Everyone says use the right tool for the job, but for bog standard CRUD web development, we do have a shitload of tools that work and there's multiple ways to get to a fast, working product.

I still chuckle that my laptop is 3 times as fast as the cloud thing that serves our CRUD app and we pay many more times for it, but also knowing full well I do not ever want to be RDP'ing into a production box again and pouring through IIS or Windows logs.

What I definitely do see is a degradation in making choices about when to adopt a more complicated technology because of the incentives of the hiring market.

People have loudly beaten the drum to keep your skills up to date and so people choose stuff that's popular because it benefits them personally, even when the product doesn't need it. This in turn leads companies to only select people who know that stack, and the more that companies do that, the more people make technical choices to get them the best job that they can handle.

We absolutely, very much 100% see that happening now with LLM AI if you ever needed a bigger piece of proof. Pretty much everything that is happening now has just been a louder example of every bad practice since the run up to the dotcom bust.

Because of that, I'd frankly never suggest running on-prem or building a local-only app unless there was a much bigger reason (legal, security, whatever) especially if the other products in the company have chosen the cloud.

Why? Because convincing the next job that that would have been the right choice is too hard.

Edit: and to someone else's point, I made the choice to be in the Microsoft/Azure/Windows hell hole but digging myself out and moving to something else is practically working a second full-time job and holding 2 ecosystems in my head at once

The better tools are already there. It's not about making it better. It's about most programmers today choosing mediocrity.

Sometimes, you can avoid contact with this mediocrity, but often you don't and you're forced to play in this swamp.

I both agree and disagree with you.

On the one hand: yes, this dev has clearly chosen a career/language specialization that puts him knee-deep in the absolute worst tooling imaginable.. I cannot fathom a workflow this fucking miserable and if this was my day to day, I would be far, far more depressed than I already am.

AND, the fact that so very very much of our industry does run, perhaps not all of, but a significant amount of a workflow not awfully different from this is IMO, an indictment of our trade. To invoke the immortal sentiment of the hockey coach from Letterkenny, this shit is FUCKING embarrassing.

So much major software that ships in a web browser because writing for Windows, Mac and Linux is just too hard you guys, it's simply too much for a sweet little bean like Microsoft ($3.62 trillion) to manage as they burn billions on AI garbage, is FUCKING embarrassing.

Half the apps on my phone are written this way which is why they can barely manage 30hz on their animations, die entirely when S3 goes down, and when they are working, make my phone hot. To run an app that lets me control my thermostat from my desk. That's FUCKING embarrassing.

And my desktop is only saved by virtue of being magnitudes more powerful than my original one back in the 90's, yet it only seems a scant more capable. In the early 00's I was sitting on Empire Earth and chatting with people over TeamSpeak. My computer can still do this, and with the added benefit of Discord can stream my game so my friends can all watch each other, and that's cool, apart from I lose about 10 fps just by virtue of having Discord open, and when I'm traveling? Oh god forget it, Discord flounders to death on hotel wifi despite it being perfectly cromulent DSL speeds. Not BLAZING, surely, but TeamSpeak handled VOIP over an actual DSL connection, with DSL latency, in the 00's. That's FUCKING embarrassing.

All our software now updates automatically by default, and it's notable when that's a GOOD thing. Usually what it actually means is the layout of known features changes for seemingly arbitrary reasons. Other times more dark patterns are injected. And Discord, not to pick on them, but they're the absolute fucking worst for this. I swear they push an "update" every time one of their devs sneezes, I usually have to install 18 such updates on each launch, and I run it very regularly! And for all that churn, I couldn't tell you one goddamn thing they actually added recently. FUCKING embarrassing.

And people will say "oh they could be better," "we know we can do it better," "these aren't the best companies or apps" okay but they are BIG ones. If the mean average car in America got awful fuel economy, needed constant service, was ill-designed for it's purpose and cost insane amounts of money...

Oh, that happened too. I think I just made my metaphor more embarrassing for another industry.

Agreed. If folks want to write java in elipse they are more than welcome to do so... dont understand these yelling at clouds posts really