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BekahHW -
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Top comments (123)
Blockchain!!!!
It's like almost no one really understood that you don't need blockchain if you have a trusted network, which most companies do. So they are basically implementing distributed databases which they probably are already using in some form once we ditched mainframes.
Yeah, Blockchain is only useful when decentralization is of utmost importance. It's great for that though.
Yet, tech like blockchain has amazing potential to reduce corruption and improve governance for countries and municipalities. It's too bad the hype is overshadowing this amazing ability.
I've always wondered why governments don't use it in an online voting system. You could register your IP address up with something that identifies you in the gov database and use it for online voting.
That rings true, but also there is the simple fact that online voting solves a non-existing problem.
Paper based voting is much simpler and works.
If it doesn't work in the US, do it like in the countries where it works, problem solved.
I don't know if I'm interpreting "movement" correctly, but I remember when NoSQL was super-hyped, then we realized that good ol' relational databases were still the best for most of the tasks.
8 years of MongoDB development here and I can confidently say that I will never recommend NoSQL for another professional project.
Nowadays, we are putting our JSON into relational databases :D
SCNR
Oh I'm with you. If I ever need to save unstructured data, I would just use JSONB inside of PostGres. Now I'm a type-safety kind of guy, so I'm not sure I ever would do that. But if I found a good use case, PostGres' JSONB is the tech I would use instead of MongoDb.
If you tell nobody, I am using postgres too π
How is the name of that product supposed to be pronounced? Why is there only one S if it is both Postgres and SQL? FWIW I call it Post-GRE-SQL because somehow it seems "graduate level."
Originally the product was called "Postgres" (as Post Ingres, a DB at the time), then they joined the word SQL to make it clear it was a relational DB.
I think "POST-GRES-QL" is the correct one, like if it was "Postgres query language"
After two years of using dynamodb I would gladly slap the team that came up with it. Especially the throttling mechanism
Is it bad?
Depends your traffic profile and pockets. If your traffic follows a nice and constant increase/decrease pattern it's fine. If you have huge sudden spikes like we do...the only option is to turn it to on demand charging ...which is slightly more expensive but you don't have all the problems that come with bursting capacity, throttling and scaling.
I wasted a lot of time fretting about databases at that point.
Blockchain: the world's least-efficient linked list!
These ones I would say:
They all have the potential to be great but I fell like they are all really early in their development and a lot of people are just throwing it at problems where they really don't fit.
Also Scrum...
Blockchain, sure. Scrum... arguably, I guess, though I still use it. I disagree about IoT; afaik it's still huge, and more and more smart home devices are being produced every year and seem to be doing well (though I haven't done market research or anything).
But seriously, machine learning? The biggest, most successful field of AI research and development of the last like 50 years? I can't agree there. ML is powering every major search engine, it's used for photo and video analysis for all sorts of applications from social media to law enforcement and government intelligence, it's used for every sort of mass data analysis from advertising to stock markets to demographics research, and it's invaluable to the hard sciences where quickly identifying trends in huge datasets (think about trying to manually examine astronomical datasets, the output from Large Hadron Collider experiements, or even animal migration patterns with hundreds of thousands of data points).
I'm really not trying to be a jerk and go all "someone is wrong on the internet" or anything, I'm honestly very curious: what do you see as the failures of machine learning? Sure, there have been misfires and misapplications, just like any tech, but my god, it's been absolutely exploding as a field of both CS research and practical application for literally half a century
I might interpreting over-hyped in a different way than you are then. By over-hyped I don't really mean that something is bad. Machine Learning is awesome and has solved a lot of problems that were previously, dare i say, unsolvable.
What I mean with over-hyped is that it, in many ways, have started to be used as a buzzword. It is a thing that startups instantly put in their sales pitch even though they might use it in the smallest and least significant part of their actual service. Even worse is when ML is crammed in to a project that doesn't really warrant for it. Working for an agency I have even had clients saying "We want to solve this using machine learning" when there are solutions that would have done the work better.
This of course does not mean that machine learning is bad or has failed. It just means that it is hyped and sometimes misunderstood by a lot of people working in the industry.
What I am saying is not
"over-hyped = Bad"
but rather
"over-hyped = People sometimes use it only because there is hype around it".
Oh I totally agree with the first impretation though. I think Machine Learning is absolutely terrible. Even if we solve the issues around climate change, AI research will inevitable bring the end of humanity and needs to be stopped.
Do you mean because of strong AI and the rise of the machines, or privacy concerns, or something else? I probably agree with all of your concerns at least somewhat, but even if we avoid the research heading in those directions, ML is still fundamentally important. ML is a very field that covers everything from data compression algorithms to cyber security to, as I mentioned, interpretation of scientific datasets. We would honestly never have progressed past the tech of the 70s without ML
I thought scrum was an agile thing. Is it a software?
It's sort of a movement in, but not exclusive to, the software industry
Scrum is one of them things that works amazingly... but only if done really well.
Which means it's a terrible idea for a team organisation process.
You can't base your organisation on everyone performing the process to perfection all the time, you have to account for the fact that humans are performing it.
The best process is one that always produces the desired result regardless of the proficiency with which you execute it.
But do you think such a process exists? I feel that as soon as you add the human factor you also need to have a more human approach to team organization.
That's why it's best to focus on the Agile values instead of the processes.
Agree. I just feel that management tend to just throw it in to a project as the silver bullet and then wonder why all of these sprint planning meeting haven't gotten us to write more code.
Yeah scrum, the management at scale π
React
True, React is great but not THAT great.
SPA!
IMO SPAs make a lot of sense. It's the concept of dealing with the view on the client side, rather than on the server. The server should just send data, not the view itself.
(Yes, all of this is nuanced by server-side rendering and so on, but still.)
The reason I like this mentality is it means you can build a single API that then gets used across everything, any updates or changes an everything gets access to it and it also means easier to maintain as well.
Combine that with a tool like React-Native and you have an almost build once run everywhere product.
I actually agree strongly with this.
Is it trolling, if I say OOP?
Nah, OOP deserves it.
It's hard to pick just one! Candidates...
"...Scroll-wheel hijacking on Javascript websites..."
One of those things we should have asked 'just because we can, should we?'
Apropos to the last twenty years of web development, I might add.
And people mock me for creating content-oriented sites without all the bells and whistles. "You should make it modern-looking."
criticism >> /dev/nullI'd say that Neural Networks and AI/ML have made a huge impact in the large companies that have the expertise to implement them correctly, i.e. Google, Facebook, Amazon. But for the general purpose programmers they haven't at all.
Cloud.
It's just the time-share computing from the 60s.
The eternal mainframe...
MongoDB. Also, Coffeescript.
Coffeescript gets a pass for being the transpile gateway drug.
What should a coffeescripter (like me?) graduate to? Clojure?
Typescript, probably. Like CoffeeScript, Typescript is pretty much just normal Javascript, with some extra goodies. Clojure is a completely new paradigm of programming (Lisp), and won't be as easy of a transition.
I second Coffeescript π€¦π½ββοΈ
I liked Coffeescript :(
Inheritance in OOP (Interfaces and Composition with Delegates are the better parts of OOP and yet we're still teaching the whole Dog extends Animal to newbies). The best OO code I've seen uses the least inheritance.
UML
XML
Thin Client vs Thick Client debate: mobile apps nuked this whole paradigm
Flash, ActionScript
AR/VR: believe me, I think it's cool but it's still just all hype for a fraction of a percent of the market (This is an area I hope I'm wrong in, but I wouldn't bet on AR/VR)
Domain Specific Languages: like, they're fine and useful, but 2010 hype was that they were going to Change the World
UML, that's a nightmare from the past :D
I remember Eclipse had a functionality that generated Java code from UML.
π
I recall the opposite, where coworkers would print out GIANT UML diagrams of our code for new hires and interns. Looking back it was probably just a weird flex.
DSL's...uggg. I have yet to see a situation that would not be better served using an established language/markup.
UML is actually very useful to visualize existing code.
But it must be done properly.
I'd say microservices. You go anywhere and they'll tell you "we are splitting our monolith into microservices"... A lot of the times it ending up a bunch of smaller monoliths.
Bunch of smaller monoliths is still far better (usually) than one huge monolith. At least you need to set some boundaries.
if its the same team building them as the original one it will end up been a bunch of huge monoliths(arrgh here we go again) that slow everything down and eventually team will come back to refactoring the original monolith. its very sad:)
That was going to be my suggestion too π
Most people are saying "blockchain", but I would point specifically to "cryptocurrency". It is essentially a software movement. But bitcoin and its ilk has ZERO intrinsic value. And its monetary value is based on the whims of a market that buys and sells almost nothing except speculation on it's own currency. I realize there are a few "major retailers" that accept bitcoin now, but it's an afterthought in most cases.
Most 'real world' currency also has zero intrinsic value. Most major currencies throughout the world only have value because the governments responsible for them say they do and most of the world population for whom it matters either agrees or just blindly trusts them.
Sovereign currencies have value because issuing governments only accept tax payment with those currencies, and tax payment is required under penalty of prison. Iβm not sure I would call that agreement or blind trust.
It's the governments way of ensuring that currency has value.
That's certainly true. But with cryptocurrency, you don't even have the advantage of physical currency.
I think it's fair to say that based on the amount of Bitcoin that's been stolen or extorted from individuals-- including by Bitcoin exchange operators your supposed to be able to trust-- only a fool puts any real confidence in cryptocurrencies.
So where does that put us? Only government-regulated cryptocurrency could be trusted in any realistic way. And that basically defeats one of the goals of cryptocurrency.
Not to mention the gluttonous waste of energy it takes to "mine" cryptocurrency.
BLOCKCHAIN!
"Write once, run anywhere" for Java
XML as the universal interchange format (we're still dealing with CSV :D)
+1 for XML. JSON ate it for breakfast.
But I don't understand: Java fulfilled that promise? Java has been the Top or 2nd Top Language for 15 years1
On top of that, the JVM allows programmers to target the JVM instead of worrying about Operating Systems.
"Write once, run anywhere" wasn't about popularity, it was about writing the code once and running it literally anywhere.
They created JVMs for basically anything (from personal computers to washing machines), but there was obviously a fault in that logic: virtual machines don't completely isolate you from the operating system.
Also remember not all JVM implementations were the same (I'm not sure about the current state).
See also what happened on the client side with Java applets or well... do you remember Java Mobile Edition?
That's why that slogan was "over promising and under delivering" :)
Java and JVM as you said reached immense popularity, but the title of the thread is about "over hyped software movement" and I think this one deserves to be here.
I wonder if WebAssembly will be the "write once, run anywhere" promise fulfilled of the 2020s or if in a few years it will be mentioned in another thread like this :D
Only if you're doing relatively simple stuff and don't need amazing performance. The VFS layer in particular still shows a lot of the underlying OS behaviors.
That's why Docker was created, we do not need Java anymore
I'll take "Over-hyped Technologies From The 1990's" for $100, Alex. ;-)