slotrans · HackerLangs

The AI code takeover will not free engineers up to do craftsmanship. It will annihilate the last vestiges of craftsmanship forever.

slotrans

8 mesi fadiscuss

> that doesn't mean they're not useful

yeah actually it does mean that

slotrans

anno scorsodiscuss

> I will completely forget why I wrote it that way.

This is the main reason for comments. The code can never tell you "why".

Code is inherently about "what" and "how". The "why" must be expressed in prose.

slotrans

3 anni fadiscuss

Relational modeling. 40+ years old, effective, simple, backed by math. No one wants to learn it anymore though.

(I only wish I was being sarcastic.)

slotrans

3 anni fadiscuss

Hot takes: SQL is good. Great, in fact.

Not just in what it's capable of doing, but in form. It has warts, yeah, but over the years I've been writing it I've realized most of them are there for a reason. To me it's more than useful, it's beautiful. It's the absolute last thing I want a replacement for.

slotrans

3 anni fadiscuss

death before trailing commas

slotrans

4 anni fadiscuss

Office upgrades were never forced.

I pay for an Office365 subscription so I can have it on Mac, but on my Windows PC I use Office 2010, which I paid for when it was current. It is lightning fast compared to the current release of Office, and has all the features I could ever want.

The company I worked for '05-'12 used Office 2003 that whole time. It was fine!

slotrans

4 anni fadiscuss

when Google killed Reader it (should have) taught us that the interests of software developers and users are misaligned

everything that's happened since just further reinforces that lesson

but it wasn't always that way

when software was a product, that you sold, your relationship to the user/buyer was different

if you put out an upgrade it had to be worth the money and the faff of installing it

subscriptions (and free-with-ads) and auto-updates destroy that, devs no longer have to add value to keep getting paid.

We mostly don't see this in games, which continue to be sold on the old model.

I argue that "ad-supported" and "subscription", as software business models, eventually but inevitably turn developer and user into enemies.

So if you want to avoid becoming your users' enemy, you should actually SELL software to them, rather than leasing or giving it away + selling ads.

-- (transcription of a recent twitter thread)

To that I'll add: if you doubt that subscription/ad-supported software companies are your enemy, just think about

  - Salesforce
  - Facebook
  - Slack's constant futzing with the UI that always makes things worse
  - Chrome constantly threatening to lock out ad blockers
  - Docker Desktop forcing you to upgrade to a newer version *that is broken*

It's universal. (edit: formatting)