Slashdot Mirror
Getting Back To Coding
New submitter rrconan writes I always feel like I'm getting old because of the constant need to learn a new tools to do the same job. At the end of projects, I get the impression that nothing changes — there are no real benefits to the new tools, and the only result is a lot of time wasted learning them instead of doing the work. We discussed this last week with Andrew Binstock's "Just Let Me Code" article, and now he's written a follow-up about reducing tool complexity and focusing on writing code. He says, "Tool vendors have several misperceptions that stand in the way. The first is a long-standing issue, which is 'featuritis': the tendency to create the perception of greater value in upgrades by adding rarely needed features. ... The second misperception is that many tool vendors view the user experience they offer as already pretty darn good. Compared with tools we had 10 years ago or more, UIs have indeed improved significantly. But they have not improved as fast as complexity has increased. And in that gap lies the problem.' Now I understand that what I thought of as "getting old" was really "getting smart."
I reached that point in the 90's.
Now I write all my code in a meta language that compiles down into COBOL, C, C++, C#, Erlang, FORTH, Fortran, Google's Go, Haskel, Java, Javascript, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Rust, and more.
It takes about two weeks for me to learn a new language and write the "runtime" for my meta compiler. Then I can deploy all of my existing solutions on the new platform faster than the other guys can get "Hello DB Connection" out the door.
Fuck all the shitty languages and "new" platforms. Now that you've actually grown up and stopped being a fucking fanboy, go write your own meta compiler. I'll open source mine when I retire, it's what gives me the edge over all the noobs still wasting time reimplementing their wheels.