by kennethfriedman on 9/23/20, 9:36 PM with 60 comments
by tuatoru on 9/25/20, 8:39 AM
And yet the big boys just can't help themselves. I've been doing a bit of work with Google Sheets the last few months, and even in that time the user interface has changed a few times. Only in small ways, will be the offered excuse.
People are not just playing with this software, they're trying to use it. Usually as a minor component of some workflow where other things occupy working memory and attention.
by dgellow on 9/25/20, 7:26 AM
That's exactly how I see Go, and why I personally use it, even though it has clear limitations and can be frustrating at time. And the language get quite a lot of hate because of these choices and their consequences. Minimalistic often means that you have to implement your own solution for some common problems, and/or write a good amount of boilerplate. Stable means that you don't change things that much over time, even if trends are shifting and new patterns/paradigms are developed, so you're potentially losing people and/or powerful technics (you also avoid the ones that haven't been proven yet and will potentially be seen as harmful in the future).
On the other hand you have the real benefits of having something small that you can easily keep in your mind, a tool that won't impact your maintenance budget, you can learn it once and then can be good for years without feeling the need to catch up all the time with newest changes and ideas. That's quite relaxing IMHO.
by fergie on 9/25/20, 5:43 AM
...wait what?
by tannhaeuser on 9/25/20, 6:36 AM
by zokier on 9/25/20, 6:00 AM
I'm dreaming that by focusing on correctness one could reduce the maintenance churn that then can lead to various other spurious changes. But I don't know if any of those languages are really suitable to "real world" use, nor if they really provide such dramatic reduction of bugs that one would hope for.
by baylessj on 9/25/20, 1:31 PM
by megameter on 9/25/20, 10:19 PM
1. Sustainability
2. Chaos
3. Reorganization
Programming in the large has a natural ecosystems quality to it. It resists standardization and falls into patchworks easily. So I have come around to the idea that one should embrace the change and discover points of stability by accident. The sustainable part happens when the system survives chaos and is sufficiently flexible to be reorganized - i.e. there is a benchmark for passing the test.
Long story short, it doesn't come easily by design. Designing small and designing to retarget your output are good ideas, because that reduces two forms of change cost. But we trip over the problem of having immediate solutions at the cost of complexity and single-use implementation. Designing for extension turns your system into a platform, which gives it a definite kind of lifespan and ability to address new problems.
I worked with Go for a while and gradually got fed up with the accumulation of little issues. I have come to the conclusion that Haxe - and most transpiled languages - do the job of sustainability better than Wirthian languages, actually, because being retargetable allows your code some insulation from platform changes. The intent is preserved, and the bulk of breaking changes occur outside the compiler tooling. A cost is paid in having to debug multiple times and often at a distance from the original source, and in having imperfect access to platform features, but this is a much smaller thing than having a codebase with hidden dependencies, which is a thing that constantly sneaks into native code systems, and a thing that makes VM language runtimes grow over time.
by lmm on 9/25/20, 5:01 AM
by mark_l_watson on 9/25/20, 12:10 PM
[1] https://markwatson.com/blog/2005/08/04/ancient-software.html
by pjmlp on 9/25/20, 5:01 AM
by orestis on 9/25/20, 9:53 AM
Most, if not all, code from 5 years ago runs with no changes whatsoever.
The stewards of Clojure heavily advocate and practice “stable” development where backwards compatibility is a requirement. Combined with the famous JVM compatibility means that the whole enterprise is a very stable foundation for building stuff.