When Should We Ditch Our Platform?

odoketa writes "My organization recently had to replace our Web developer. It took us an extremely long time to find someone with the necessary skill set. I don't know if this is because of the platform we are running (which I will leave nameless), or simply because the fates conspiring against us. It's easy to assume that languages or platforms are popular based on buzz, but the rubber hits the road when you have to hire someone to maintain that code. How are folks out there determining when you've backed the wrong horse, and getting back on track?"

Comments

Re:Which platform?

[orclevegam]

He wants to know, generically, how you decide that what you're using is the wrong choice. All choices are wrong, some are just more wrong than others. Generally you attempt to find the least wrong choice at that time, and then periodically re-evaluate the cost of switching to a newer less wrong choice.

Re:Which platform?

[Omnifarious]

My hatred of Java has nothing to do with speed. The platform has become a giant morass of 'enterprisey' 'solutions' that create more need for more 'solutions'. And all Java 'solutions' must somehow involve XML, because it's standard, and enterprisey.

Re:Solution

[HomerJ]

I've actually WRITTEN web backends in Fortran....how else are you going to make a pretty website with data that only sits on a 20 year old VAX?

I also did one site in Fortran just to see how it would work. Fortran write statements using formats, is a lot better than using C, I'll tell you that much.

Re:Holy negativity pal

[microbox]

Well...

They develop web applications but only ever test them on windows. These are apps for the government that are for general consumption. Not having a single OS X or Linux testing station is plain wrong. But hay, at least the corporate types got the contract right? Never mind doing the job properly, or even learning what that means.

Also, testing things on Linux, Windows and OS X is a great way to make sure that what you're doing doesn't have hidden quirks. That goes for designing webpages as well as network shares and other network services.

I find Outlook a terribly annoying email client to use, and would prefer to use my own.

When writing documentation, I find it *much* easier to use OS X's screenshot technology and inter-app tools to bring the pieces together. This saves enough time that I frequently go home to write significant amounts of documentation, and it looks great when it is done, and it's done *fast*.

OS X and linux have a superior command line with a complement of tools that is esp. useful when you're batch processing vast volumes amounts of files. I used to write ruby scripts and run them on windows because of a lack of a command line. That is not the most efficient way of doing things. My co-workers were wowed at the things I could do that they just didn't think were feasible because they have no real experience with getting the command line to sing. Large numbers of files is typical when working on software projects.

I like using multiple desktops, I find that much faster and easier to do than work with the almost crippling windows taskbar.

And there's tones of fanboy stuff too.

What I don't get is how anybody thinks that standardizing everything on windows is somehow going to just make everything cheaper and hunky dory. People use other platforms for a reason, and using a bit of intelligence there is no reason why sysadmins can't figure it out. And you get the benefit of not grid-locking yourself into a single vendor.

To me it seems like common sense is being replaced by a rule book. That's why I left for a smaller company, and they let you run what you want - but only support you with stuff they know. It works out great.

Re:Which platform?

[Dragonslicer]

Sorry I have work on both Perl and PHP. I see little difference in them as far as read ability. Heck if nothing else PHP can be worse. The big difference is that PHP gets more readable as the skill level of the person who wrote it increases, while Perl gets less readable as the skill level of the person who wrote it increases.

System/36? Newbie! I used a System/34

[billstewart]

I has a summer job in college doing programming on an IBM System/34, mostly in RPG2. It had 48KB of Semiconductor RAM (as opposed to real core), and a 13MB Winchester drive, and came with two IBM employees who were around every couple of weeks to keep it happy (usually by updating the accounting software, and then re-patching the updates to deal with the customizations our system had because the construction industry does accounting differently.) Unfortunately, we only had the slow printer, not the fast printer, so compile time was largely constrained by how long it took to print out the 10-page program listing, which was 20-30 minutes, and the printout was not optional; you always got one when you compiled. And of course when the Apple II came out, except for the disk drive it could totally kick the /34's ass, not that you'd want to run corporate accounting packages on the Apple.

The thing that was cool about the /34 was the Operations Control Language, which was a shell-like interface that you could actually do simple programming in. It was obviously cooler than JCL, but it was also even cooler than the PDP-11's RSTS-11 user interfaces that we used to run BASIC programs.

One thing that wasn't cool about the /34 was its mainframish approach to file system management - the OS wrote new file system headers when you saved or closed a file, but if it got interrupted before you'd done that, you basically lost everything. We were a steel fabricating company, and one day the clerk had spent about 6 hours typing in the list of parts we were going to need for a project, and some guy in the shop was trying to shut off the circuit breaker for his welder and powered us down instead. Fortunately she'd entered an hour or so worth of data the day before, so there were pointers to the beginning of the file and where it had ended after the first hour's work, and it was an extent-based file system. So I spent about 5 hours on the phone with IBM wandering through hex dumps of the file system to find the remaining pieces; it ended up being slightly faster than just retyping the whole thing would have been, but that could have easily gone either way. If you remember fsdb, it was kind of like using that on the raw disk.