Oct 14, 2026, 3:50 PM@badtux @fribbledom That being said, technical debt is a real thing.
- Oct 14, 2026, 3:50 PM
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Oct 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 PM@badtux Have you ever tried to program in COBOL?
- Oct 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.