
Ask HN: What are the most timeless development tools, etc., and why? - gdubs
Curious to see what people think are the most “timeless” tools, languages, frameworks. How old something needs to be to be “timeless” is subjective. Would be interesting to see if there’s convergence on particular areas. Might provide a nice overview of tools (or even processes, methodologies) for a younger developer to focus on.
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ThePhysicist
I recently picked up game development again as a hobby and was pleasantly
surprised that SDL still is around and hasn’t changed much in 10 years (which
is a long time in game development).

Browser-based JavaScript is also very stable if you stay away from the
frameworks in the sense that stuff which worked 20 years ago mostly still
works today (although much stuff has been added of course).

Frameworks like Flask are also an anchor of stability and thankfully haven’t
changed much, at least in terms of API stability.

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mattmanser
I programmed javascript 15 years ago, while you're technically correct,
practically speaking today's JavaScript looks _nothing_ like that written even
10 years ago.

Like Crockford's "Javascript: The good parts", which is when people really
started using it without utterly despising it, was published in 2008.

Also, before V8 came out, JavaScript performance was a joke, a loop of 100
items could hang your page for a second. Think that was around 2008/9 too.

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tmaly
I still have javascript running on an internal app that was written in 2006.
It is still working on current browsers.

~~~
mattmanser
That's not what I was saying though, if you rewrote it for some reason, it
probably wouldn't look the same at all.

The easiest example is that you used to have to create and add every single
node of a table, for example, modify all the properties line by line, create a
tbody, add that to the table, create a tr element, add that to the body, add a
td element, etc., etc.

I can do all that in one line now.

And 20 years ago, XMLHttpRequest had only just been released and you were more
likely to be doing dynamic updating with crazy stuff in iframes.

Let's not even get started on divs vs tables for layout...

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joezydeco
All project management eventually ends up in Excel. So I'll say Excel.

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s1t5
Both C and SQL are ancient on a tech-time scale and are still widely used.

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Someone
Pencils, keyboards, magnetic tape, System/360.

I’m not sure those are things for a younger developer to focus on, though.

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tmaly
I am going to have to say the vi editor. I was using it over a vt100 terminal
in 2001. I am still using it as vim for my dev work in WFH over vpn.

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textread
Emacs was first released 44 years back

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itronitron
whiteboards date back to at least the 1980's

