> People answered this wrong in the Ruby era, they answered it wrong in the PHP era

Aren't you conveniently ignoring the fact that there were people saw through that and didn't go down those routes?

▲ badlibrarian 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Change it to "Some people" if your pedanticism won't let you follow the flow.

Or better yet point out the better paths they chose instead. Were they wrestling with Java and "Joda Time"? Talking to AWS via a Python library named after a dolphin? Running .NET code on Linux servers under Mono that never actually worked? Jamming apps into a browser via JQuery? Abstracting it up a level and making 1,400 database calls via ActiveRecord to render a ten item to-do list and writing blog posts about the N+1 problem? Rewriting grep in Rust to keep the ruskies out of our precious LLCs?

Asking the wrong questions, using the wrong tools, then writing dumb blog posts about it is what we do. It's what makes us us.

▲ PaulHoule 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There's this interesting issue that we've never had occupational licensing for software developers despite the sheer incompetence that we see all the time.

On one hand there's an approach to computing where it is a branch of mathematics that is universal. There are some creatures that live under the ice on a moon circling a gas giant around another star and if they have computers they are going to understand the halting problem (even if they formulate it differently) and know bubble sort is O(N^2) and about algorithms that sort O(N log N).

On the other hand we are divided by communities of practice that don't like one another. For instance there is the "OO sux" brigade which thinks I suck because I like Java. There still are shops where everything is done in a stored procedure (oddly like the fashionable architecture where you build an API server just because... you have to have an API) and other shops where people would think you were brain damaged to go anywhere near stored procs, triggers or any of that. It used to be Linux enthusiasts thought anybody involved in Windows was stupid and you'd meet Windows admins who were click-click-click-click-clicking over and over again to get IIS somewhat working who thought IIS was the only web server good enough for "the enterprise"

Now apart for the instinctual hate for the tools there really are those chronic conceptual problems for which datetime is the poster child. I think every major language has been through multiple datetime libraries in and out of the standard lib in the last 20 years because dates and times just aren't the simple things that we wish they would be and the school of hard knocks keeps knocking us to accept a complicated reality.

	▲	latchkey 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> There's this interesting issue that we've never had occupational licensing for software developers despite the sheer incompetence that we see all the time. I'm laughing over the current Delve/SOC2 situation right now. Everyone pulls for 'licenses' as the first card, but we all know that is equally fraught with trauma. https://xkcd.com/927/

▲ latchkey 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> pedanticism

  Pedanticism (or pedantry) is the excessive, tiresome concern for minor details, literal accuracy, or formal rules, often at the expense of understanding the broader context.

I don't think this had anything to do with minor details at all. You're trying to convey a point while ignoring the half of the population who didn't go down that route.