Oct 14, 2026, 4:15 AM@fribbledom Tools makers have been very successful at labeling working code and working tools as "technical debt". As you would expect from people who would be unemployed if not selling us on using new tools to write new code. Really slick scam they have going on there. With the willing participation of people who similarly benefit from calling working technology "technical debt". #technology
Oct 14, 2026, 3:50 PMOct 14, 2026, 4:37 PM@me @fribbledom Only because tool makers make it a real thing. If I am not running Java 37 and Spring Boot 9 I can no longer get security and bug fixes. Instead I have to upgrade to new security flaws and new bugs. As well as introduce new bugs into my program because they changed APIs and renamed a bunch of things. It's a scam to keep people employed.
Oct 14, 2026, 7:49 PM@badtux That is definitely a thing, and I'm not going to pretend the modern computing industry isn't a giant clusterfuck, but also, sometimes we just legitimately come up with better ways of doing things.
Things do get messy when money is involved, though.
Oct 15, 2026, 2:45 AM@me The reality is that 95% of data entry jobs would work just as well with a 25x80 greenscreen terminal backed up by a COBOL application. A huge amount of the "improvements" since that was state of the art are self serving nonsense intended to keep programmers employed and tools providers emitting a constant stream of paid updates (or in the case of free tools, to keep the programmers of those tools employed writing a constant stream of updates).
Oct 15, 2026, 8:38 PMOct 15, 2026, 9:52 PM@me 95% of new programmers would benefit from knowing how to do control-break processing. I clean up after so many youngsters doing ad hoc processing for data we have known how to process efficiently since 1968.
Honestly I much prefer Java to COBOL and the recent enhancements to add more modern language features to Java version 255 are much appreciated. However: Programmer convenience is not the purpose of software engineering. Solving business problems is.
Oct 15, 2026, 10:05 PM@badtux I think that programmers could also benefit from learning assembly. That doesn't mean I'm going to use it as my day-to-day language. A good software engineer knows that everything is a trade-off, and it's about picking the tool that best solves the problem at hand.
I wholeheartedly agree with you that the industry is overrun with inexperienced devs who build a ton of slop (even before so-called AI hit the scene) because the companies they work for want to make line go up above all else. That's a capitalism problem more than an engineering problem though.