No need for paint when you create art with words.

Might end up with more humanity in business decisions by replacing the empathy-devoid CEOs currently running things with something trained on a larger sample of people.

Like all things in life there is balance that must be maintained. A language with few features but super detailed documentation is ultimately going to be less useful than a language with more features but not as strong documentation.

Obviously you want perfect documentation and full features but it just isn’t realistic so you have to balance things to your requirements. So I went with 5 because the balance between language features and documentation is going to change based on requirements.

Yeah, it’s like going to a restaurant and only judging the food by the restaurant’s decor. It is arguing something that doesn’t matter and most people get over it after they’ve worked in a number of languages.

It just doesn’t matter and instead adds noise to the language feedback loop for something that isn’t changing and isn’t a problem to begin with.

The main point I took away from your comment, and the thing that I think is missing in most of the other comments, is application of this concept to the real world. You nailed it. Always read the manual is a nice sound bite and something that can be flippantly thrown around to feel superior but that is terrible advice without any context.

What it should say is: Always refer to the manual.

Part of being a human is prioritizing tasks based on need and/or want. Another part is understanding your personal needs to accomplish a task. Reading a manual may provide value. Spending the 2 hours with family also provides value. If I choose the latter I can still refer to the manual when needed.

It drives me crazy when people double-down on some distinct thing (always read the manual) and then preach that it should always be the case or apply to all situations. There is a concept of diminishing returns and people should teach how to figure that out rather than blast out a good sound bite. Let people identify what works for them and be respectful of that. I’m not sure why that is such a hard concept for people.

We talked about this in my software engineering course back in 2001. Surely we can start acting on these finding a quarter century later right? Right?? Joking (I guess?) aside, this really should be taken more seriously.

For the most part it is just soul crushing to constantly be interrupted but people legit die because of software errors due to these kinds of things. You think someone who has 30 minutes free a day to do code reviews for a whole team is going to do a good job, regardless of their intention?

Software is driving cars, flying planes, scheduling trains, pretty much everything in modern life. Yet we are fragmenting our codebases, micromanaging to the point of focus and productivity loss, and to make up for that we are trying to leverage ai tools that were rushed to market. Buckle up folks, we are in for a bumpy ride.

This and justifying the cost of office space are the reasons.

Just because we can do everything in C and Assembly doesn’t mean it is a good idea or that we should.

It makes sense, you aren’t telling sql server how to do something, you just tell it what you want and it figures it out. You aren’t even doing procedural stuff at that point.

I like the RAD tools being qualified as 4GLs as I haven’t really thought of them that way but again it makes sense.

Also screw PowerBuilder. I am sorry if anyone in this thread likes it…but it is seriously awful.

Edit: Before people jump me, I do know that you have some influence over execution plans with join orders, hints, etc… but by and large you don’t tell SQL Server how to do it’s job.

Can anyone see the token person of color or did they not even bother this time?

Yeah and unfortunately it’s going to get worse when AI agents are also always running in the background (which is inevitable, let’s be honest).

I get what you are saying and this is definitely a factor but I think the bigger influencer was mobile adoption. As soon as smartphones took off it was inevitable that we would see a surge in cross platform frameworks/libraries.

The fact we tackled this problem by shifting everything to web apps was also inevitable given the more simplistic deployment requirements and maintenance costs of a website vs native application.

I feel like I am shouting to the void when I talk about performance of modern software being unbelievably bad.

One could say they are streets behind.

Giving them your settings provides them (and anyone they sell it to) with more insight about you and how you use their software. This is valuable data and it kind of drives me crazy that articles refer to this as a free option. It isn’t free. It’s Microsoft pricing something low enough to get sales from middle of the road people, while being high enough that a lot of users opt into the backup option. It’s a poorly veiled attempt to extract more of you for their training, their ad sales, or their targeted sales.

Honest answer? It makes it easy to release an application cross platform.

Personal / hot-take answer? Because we are human and our drive for mediocrity is astounding…especially when it can save a few bucks. Why make something good when you can make something less good faster and cheaper? That should be Electron’s slogan.

Not the OP but just wanted to say thanks for typing that out. I think it perfectly answers the question, gives several examples/explanations, and provides further research resources. It’s always genuinely great to come across posts like this.

This person obviously has their own way of doing things that works for them and that’s great. Some of his views are patently absurd though. This is mostly commenting on his reasons against using a forge and not a comment that he should do something differently.

Trust

100% fair and I think this is the main take-away from the blog post. If you don’t trust something, don’t use it. Full stop, the post could have ended there and been fine. But then it goes on to say:

You get a workflow imposed on you

You mean like forcing people to use email to submit pull requests to your self-hosted git repos? It doesn’t matter what you are doing, if you are working on an open source project you are going to have workflow limitations. This is arguing a fallacy.

In particular, your project automatically gets a bug tracker – and you don’t get a choice about what bug tracker to use, or what it looks like. If you use Gitlab, you’re using the Gitlab bug tracker. The same goes for the pull request / merge request system.

Nothing is forcing you to use these features so just don’t use them. Plenty of teams use 3rd party tools but host their code in a forge site. Having options available to you automatically is not the same thing as being forced to use them. If it was, JIRA wouldn’t exist because everyone would use github/gitlab/whatever’s built-in issue tracking and project management.

The majority of the post comes across as someone who just doesn’t like the forge sites and aside from the trust aspect, then spent a bunch of effort trying to create associations and limitations between things that don’t exist.

Trust is 100% the main reason not to use a forge site and all the other things cited are superfluous and/or very subjective.

Yeah we aren’t anywhere close to the point of states breaking out of the union. Some people will call for it, maybe even a lot. But as soon as they realize what is required that shit will stop immediately. California would quite literally need to go to war with the union to gain that independence regardless of what they voted. So not only would they need to actually vote for it but then they’d have to be willing to go to war and kill and die for that separation and their independence.

As strong as people feel, we aren’t even close to that point. Not to mention it would fail; none of the states currently have any hope of competing against the US military machine. Give us a couple hundred more years to really really deteriorate and siphon all value from the people and land and we may be there.

It’s hard to truly internalize this but no matter what you think about something and/or how wrong you think someone else is, we are walking through life with imperfect imaginings of what other people think and feel. Trying to make sense of people is even harder than making sense of a person. And we are quite literally incapable of truly knowing what goes on in someone else’s head.

Definitely ask these questions but don’t drive yourself crazy if people don’t make sense. The behaviors and actions we witness in others are only the emergent characteristics of a lot of brain activity that we aren’t privy to.

This post is a journey, not a destination.