
You Too May Be a Victim of Developaralysis - BIackSwan
http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/18/you-too-may-be-a-victim-of-developaralysis/
======
Jupe
This has been, and continues to be a dangerous and disturbing trend.

And you dig a little deeper into so many of these "trendsetting" technologies
and you find strange perversions (I know these are a little dated, but bare
with me, please...)

1\. All the hype about no-sql databases ultimately lead to tradeoffs in the
CAP theorum. While it's true sometimes you don't need to guarantee
consistency, I've never had the luxury to work on such a system. And, why the
hell would I use a datastore if I didn't want my data to be consistent? If I
didn't care, I'd have used a file. (or dev/nul!)

2\. "Do all" frameworks (Spring, etc.) hide so much of the ecosystem, you end
up having to relearn the basics (i.e. you don't need to use the new() operator
anymore, the framework will create everything for you) What the hell was so
wrong with using "new()"? Next thing you know, using "if()" statement will be
bad because it binds your business rules and source code too tightly; you need
to use the latest BPM tool to do all your if statements...

3\. Maven simplified the build system so much, you have to essentially
"program by xml". Gradle comes along and saves all that, and now we're back to
writing build systems with code. Why the hell didn't I just write code in the
first place? That's what I would have done 20 years ago!

4\. .Net isn't the future language for Windows development, its, its... its...
Javascript?

WTF???

Come on, admit it, at one point you actually thought XML was going to change
the world.

Can you imagine being a software engineer in twenty years time? Not every
system gets re-written in the latest laguage-du-jour (e.g., there's still a
lot of COBOL out there). It's going to be hell... 20 languages on the backend,
10 frameworks on the front end, and that's just the first support call of the
day.

I'm very concerned about the future of this industry. Sure, we'll end up
inventing more meta-tools to manage the pile of older tools and their
variations, but that will just increase the bug and security hole attach
surface.

Ugh... I need a drink.

------
vorg
> _Developaralysis. Be afraid. There is no cure. The panoply of options
> available to developers today is ridiculous. We’re choking on a cornucopia.
> Over the last few years I’ve been paid to write Java, Objective-C, C, C++,
> Python, Ruby, JavaScript, PHP_

Those languages have different syntaxes and platforms but are almost all the
same thing (inheritance-based OO imperative programming). Because you've
basically learnt the _same_ language over and over again, you haven't
progressed. But there _is_ a cure...

> _I just feel guilty that I haven’t done anything with Erlang, Clojure, Rust,
> Go, C#, Scala, Haskell, Julia, Scheme, Swift, or OCaml_

Unlike the list of languages you've used, this list actually has more variety
of paradigms so learning many of these _will_ cure you:

    
    
        Erlang, Go - communicating processes
        Clojure, Scheme, Julia - user-defined macros
        Scala, Haskell, OCaml - functional paradigm
        Haskell, Clojure - immutability
    

You didn't use any of those paradigms in your previous list of languages.

------
mahe
What a coincidence, I am about to dive into self thought computer programming
period to start my startup and I just found this article. It raises the
question about the ideal path of computer programming learning..

