Scott is not who I want to have this lecture from, and I think his typically heavy-handed approach does disservice to the point, but I'm somewhat glad to see this general point captured somewhere. "Artisinal handcraft" is one of my favorite ways to talk about software. The great irony being that most of the world eventually industrialized, but here the most advanced leading edge of the "information society" is doing it all by hand again and again and again and again.
> Honestly virtually everything in "software engineering" is non-standard craftsmanship spaghetti bullshit... I think most of software engineering will remain ad-hoc piles of craftsmanship bullshit, mostly because old software is valuable. There is otherwise absolutely no reason for it.
Huge amounts of people have tried. Java was overflowing with attempts to create a robust business info-environment, with tools like BPM to plan & assemble systems, efforts like CDI to avoid having to use imperative duck tape everywhere, Spring had a stunningly powerful AOP system built-in admid other IoC systems. Efforts at the time like Apache UserGrid attempt to be a complete Backend-as-a-Service. We keep trying to find good top down control principles, but we keep returning to writing code bottom-up again and again. The attempts to invert become anchors holding us back.
That's a specific point. More broadly, I think Scott's reaching for control/authority/assurity is overly needy & whiny in general, and in specific areas.
> For a long time, LAMP was a software stack representing about 90% of what net companies do. It was a sort of defacto standard because it represented 4 technologies which were sort of “first and easy to use” -Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python.
As a start, his halcyon image of the LAMP stack being semi normal ignores that how we stood up/ran/administered Linux was artisinal, how we ran apache-httpd was semi-artisinal, what went into our MySQL databases was artisinal, and what libraries or latter frameworks we used in PHP/Perl was also artisinally picked & non-standard. Ok maybe there was some superficial picks that were more similar than they are today, but the actual work was all still artisinal even then.
> Now of course this stuff is enormously out of date and replaced by a bewildering bucket of cobbled together brainworms that have various alleged special qualities which supposedly make them better or solve some subset of problems more efficiently. LAMP type problems, of course, could be made to go away with an efficient standardization, or even a product meant to standardize these sorts of workflows.
Handing out insults to the field while saying the job could just simply be done universally. How so Scott?
> Of course, people who solve these kinds of LAMPy problems the way they presently do are highly paid and vastly over privileged craftsmen who enjoy licking each other’s butts, so it won’t happen until some founder goes even farther than Bezos did and creates the Labview for LAMP patterns.
The world has a new interconnected medium, and haven't all decided to just solve the problem and get on with things, and this man is very angry about it. Riiiigghhtt Scott, right. We just need a WebsiteFactoryFactory class implementation that's robust enough to replace this whole pointless mass of programmers, absolutely Scott, you nailed it.
The web is a media-form. Figuring out how to encode our thought and ideas has shifted many many many times, is a huge frontier, the frontier of what thought itself is. That we've spent so long rejiggering & moving things around makes a lot of people very upset, but to me, it's always been a great & exciting project & I can see real gains and wins, with how we capture ideas, with how we cobble together machines. I think this iteration & exploration of terrain has been greatly to our benefit, and I think there's a lot more to go. Once we can think better, then I think the machines to mechanically lay bricks on the path will have a much better chance at substituting for the artisinal.
> Honestly virtually everything in "software engineering" is non-standard craftsmanship spaghetti bullshit... I think most of software engineering will remain ad-hoc piles of craftsmanship bullshit, mostly because old software is valuable. There is otherwise absolutely no reason for it.
Huge amounts of people have tried. Java was overflowing with attempts to create a robust business info-environment, with tools like BPM to plan & assemble systems, efforts like CDI to avoid having to use imperative duck tape everywhere, Spring had a stunningly powerful AOP system built-in admid other IoC systems. Efforts at the time like Apache UserGrid attempt to be a complete Backend-as-a-Service. We keep trying to find good top down control principles, but we keep returning to writing code bottom-up again and again. The attempts to invert become anchors holding us back.
That's a specific point. More broadly, I think Scott's reaching for control/authority/assurity is overly needy & whiny in general, and in specific areas.
> For a long time, LAMP was a software stack representing about 90% of what net companies do. It was a sort of defacto standard because it represented 4 technologies which were sort of “first and easy to use” -Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python.
As a start, his halcyon image of the LAMP stack being semi normal ignores that how we stood up/ran/administered Linux was artisinal, how we ran apache-httpd was semi-artisinal, what went into our MySQL databases was artisinal, and what libraries or latter frameworks we used in PHP/Perl was also artisinally picked & non-standard. Ok maybe there was some superficial picks that were more similar than they are today, but the actual work was all still artisinal even then.
> Now of course this stuff is enormously out of date and replaced by a bewildering bucket of cobbled together brainworms that have various alleged special qualities which supposedly make them better or solve some subset of problems more efficiently. LAMP type problems, of course, could be made to go away with an efficient standardization, or even a product meant to standardize these sorts of workflows.
Handing out insults to the field while saying the job could just simply be done universally. How so Scott?
> Of course, people who solve these kinds of LAMPy problems the way they presently do are highly paid and vastly over privileged craftsmen who enjoy licking each other’s butts, so it won’t happen until some founder goes even farther than Bezos did and creates the Labview for LAMP patterns.
The world has a new interconnected medium, and haven't all decided to just solve the problem and get on with things, and this man is very angry about it. Riiiigghhtt Scott, right. We just need a WebsiteFactoryFactory class implementation that's robust enough to replace this whole pointless mass of programmers, absolutely Scott, you nailed it.
The web is a media-form. Figuring out how to encode our thought and ideas has shifted many many many times, is a huge frontier, the frontier of what thought itself is. That we've spent so long rejiggering & moving things around makes a lot of people very upset, but to me, it's always been a great & exciting project & I can see real gains and wins, with how we capture ideas, with how we cobble together machines. I think this iteration & exploration of terrain has been greatly to our benefit, and I think there's a lot more to go. Once we can think better, then I think the machines to mechanically lay bricks on the path will have a much better chance at substituting for the artisinal.