from Hacker News

Ask HN: Are you ashamed to have experience with a certain stack?

by codingclaws on 10/27/24, 9:03 PM with 4 comments

• by Terr_ on 10/27/24, 9:34 PM

  Not so far. I think it depends on whether you think you learned valuable lessons about what not to do, or whether the experience created bad habits that need to be fixed.

  Perhaps the least-sexy would be some PHP 4/5 and MySQL stuff, but I also got some good war stories out of them.

  I think I'd worry more about shame from being in (or thriving in) toxic workplace/corporate cultures.

• by rossdavidh on 10/27/24, 9:35 PM

  No! Even if the stack is horrible, it is likely (perhaps because of that very fact) that it teaches you a lot about how/why a good stack is built. Heck, I started programming on a mainframe (in 2004) and I wouldn't choose to do that now but there were interesting perspectives and lessons to be gained from that.

• by uberman on 10/27/24, 9:49 PM

  Coming from a c background, I was initially mortified to be told we were going to switch our stack to be python based because python had great NLP libraries and investors wanted to hear that we were using python.

  The thought of using a scripting language with no type safely and significant whitespace made me nauseous.

  That said, having suffered through it, python is easy to learn and even our pm could manage a config oriented commit now and then.

• by sfmz on 10/27/24, 9:57 PM

  Some stacks are career dead-ends. Flash, VB.NET, VBA, ASP.NET 2.0, WPF. Not shame per se, but it kinda feels like losing a football match; can't boast about it and wish you had been on the winning team.