The standard defenses of the ability to be rich are persuasive arguments promulgated by those who are rich.
If we assume that the rich are, as other advertisers, rational and self-interested, the we should expect their messaging (i.e., the “standard defenses”) to be that which is most effective.
Something akin to if it works, it ships.
Consider that from the perspective of the accountants, every job created is a huge and ongoing liability and cost, and that from the perspective of the shareholders, every job created is stolen profit, money that is not returned in the form of equity appreciation + dividends.
Then you will begin to see the reality of the situation.
Would you please not post in the flamewar style to HN? It damages the container here (i.e. the capacity of this place to sustain curious conversation), and you unfortunately did it repeatedly in this thread.
I've heard of real, major issues in USA where organizations that were willing to train someone from zero just could not get them over the fact that the terminal was block-based instead of character based...
Dude, nobody cares. What ridiculous moralizing. "Fiddling with stuff on a computer?" Crabs-in-a-bucket comparisons to doctors? Whatevah. Get outta town.
No one pays you because they like your face. They pay you because you make them money.
No one works when they have rivers of cash flowing in their direction. You trade your time for their money: a slice of your life, in the most literal sense.
What is the value of your life?
Know your worth. Take every dollar. You will get precisely what you can negotiate, nothing more, nothing less.
Free markets hate good software. "Good" meaning secure, stable, and boring.
On both ends.
Software developers hate boring software for pragmatic HR-driven career reasons and because devs are apes and apes are faddish and like the shiny new thing.
And commercial hegemony tends to go to the companies that slap something together with duct tape and bubble gum and rush it out the door.
So you get clusterfucks like Unix winning out against elegantly designed Lisp systems, and clusterfucks like Linux winning out against elegantly designed Unix systems, and clusterfucks like Docker and microservices and whatever other "innovations" "winning out" over elegantly design Linux package management and normal webservers and whatnot.
At some point someone important will figure out that no software should ever need to be updated for any reason ever, and a software update should carry the same stigma as...I don't know...adultery once carried. Or an oil spill. Or cooking the books. Whatever.
But then also it's important to be realistic. If anyone ever goes back and fixes any of this, well, a whole lot of very smart people are going to go unemployed.
Free markets hate unchanging software. Software churn generates activity and revenue, and the basic goal of the game is to be the one controlling the change. Change is good when you have your hands on the knobs and levers, bad when someone else does. Organizations try to steer their users away from having dependencies on changes that they don't control. "You're still using some of XYZ Corp's tools along with ABC's suite? In the upcoming release, ABC we will help you drop that XYZ stuff ..."
That brings to mind one common computer scientest fallacy - that elegence is an end to itself. It may share some properties which make it practical but unfortunately it is not in practice.
Recursive solutions are more elegant but you still use a stack and while loop to not smash the stack.
Scheme is properly tail-recursive and has been around since 1975. Most (all?) Common Lisp implementations have proper tail recursion. Clojure has tail call optimization for simple cases and only if you explicitly ask for it, but it gets you most of the way there most of the time.
So there are reasons to prefer more imperative languages and their systems, but stack-smashing isn't one of them.
jQuery: 88KB, standard everywhere, one entity responsible for all of it, people know what it is and what it does, if it breaks you know what went wrong and who to blame.
Literally anything built with NPM: megabytes? tens of megabytes? in size, totally inscrutable, code being pulled in from hundreds of megabytes of code in tens of thousands of packages from hundreds or thousands of people of unknown (and unknowable) competence and trustworthiness, if it breaks not only do you not know who to blame but you probably have literally no idea what wrong.
It Depends, as always. The problem React was originally solving was that DOM updates cause re-rendering which can be slow; jquery (usually) works directly in the DOM, so applications heavy in updates don't perform well.
So initially an equivalent React and jQuery app would have React look a lot faster, due to smart / batched DOM updates. However, because React is so fast it made people create apps differently.
As always in software development, an application will grow to fill up available performance / memory. If people were to develop on intentionally constricted computers they would do things differently.
(IIRC, at Facebook they'll throttle the internet on some days to 3g speeds to force this exact thing. Tangentially related, at Netflix (iirc) they have Chaos Monkey which randomly shuts down servers and causes problems, so errors are a day to day thing instead of an exception they've not foreseen).
React is just so, so much nicer to work with. It's easy to be dismissive if you've never had to develop UIs with jQuery and didn't experience yourself the transition to React which is a million times better in terms of developer experience.
I feel like people that don't build UIs themselves think of them too much in a completely functional way as in "it's just buttons and form inputs that do X", and forget about the massive complexity, edge cases, aesthetic requirements, accessibility, rendering on different viewports, huge statefulness, and so on.
Old is better is just not true here. React is a dream. Synthetic eventing, batched updates, and DOM node re-use are so good. I rolled my own DOM renderer recently and remembered a lot of problems from the past that I would not like to re-visit.
Write your own framework-like code with just jQuery and watch it turn into a pile of mush. React is many things, but it is absolutely better than jQuery or Backbone. People always mis-use new technology; that isn't React's fault.
If I were in a spooky business, I'd never hire somebody who's too eager to work in this line of work. Too easy to hire a Snowden this way. And I have no idea how they solve this problem... must be tough to be a spook.
Valid point. To clarify, it was hyperbole, as I got (rightly or wrongly) a more "military" vibe. And in my highly uninformed opinion, I'd feel much less comfortable in close quarters with actual spook-dom than I would around high-end military establishment people. Maybe I'm wrong. I'd probably take upper six figures to warm a seat for either, though. Shake the hand of the devil, sell your soul on the dotted line.
It wasn't so much "gave up on" as it was "deliberately destroyed".
Since the late 1800's, the banks and the governments have pursued a continuous policy of economic centralization and integration, and key to that policy has been the gradual ratchet of making farms unprofitable and uneconomical.
We could have a thriving agricultural economy — just change the policymakers.
