Bit Quabit

My favourite rant on this subject. https://www.bitquabit.com/post/unorthodocs-abandon-your-dvcs-and-retur… Now svn does have things I miss from the Mercurial world.. grep --all, fa --deleted, revsets, phases.. some could be implemented serverside in svn, but svn dev lost a lot of momentum post-DVCS (git esp). But DVCS has issues that aren't an issue in svn land. History consistency, simple reliable narrow/shallow, people can work on files independently without syncing. (and a significantly more complex dvcs process)

I think my favourite fact(oid) to point out here would be that the React model is essentially the same thing as the good ol' Windows GUI model. The good ol' 1980s Windows, though perhaps slightly more convenient for developers. See [0]. I think it's good to keep that in mind as a reference point. -- https://www.bitquabit.com/post/the-more-things-change/

Great summary! For reference, the blog post that you're thinking of is "The More Things Change" [0], which compares React + Flux to a Win32 `WndProc` function. Original HN comments for that thread are at [1]. [0] https://www.bitquabit.com/post/the-more-things-change/ [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10381015

This blog post is pushing 10 years old and it's about StackOverflow, but it's still extremely relevant: https://bitquabit.com/post/one-which-i-call-out-hacker-news/ The whole thing is worth reading, but here are a few particularly choice bits: >"There is a tremendous amount of spit and polish that goes into making a major website highly usable. A developer, asked how hard something will be to clone, simply does not think about the polish, because the polish is incidental to the implementation." >The next time you see an application you like, think very long and hard about all the user-oriented details that went into making it a pleasure to use, before decrying how you could trivially reimplement the entire damn thing in a weekend. Nine times out of ten, when you think an application was ridiculously easy to implement, you’re completely missing the user side of the story.

Yeah, this tech is definitely pretty amazing. I'm not the biggest fan of facebook so I'll bash them a little bit here -- their biggest success with this was envisioning it (or bolting on) the fact that the react model wasn't built only for the DOM. Originally React & ReactDOM were the same (maybe it was temporary), but when they started to target more platforms, they split them out and that's been a changer as you can see now. Honestly I think companies that opt for a browser-based non-native UI do those for reasons that won't change just due to RN existing. Once developers get comfortable with RN, and start offering themselves as "we do native apps in half the time, give your users better-than-mobile-browser-site performance", I think the companies that were content to jam a webpage into an app will start improving. Also note this article with a pretty good criticism of React (I find those are lacking these days): https://bitquabit.com/post/the-more-things-change/ tldr; Turns out react is a little bit similar to a thing called COM, but maybe we're better at this pattern now and things won't become spaghetti

I doubt he meant that third-party developers' hands were tied. I think he means that Microsoft spent incredible resources on backwards compatibility at the expense of innovation. To take the most extreme example I can think of: going from OS 9 to OS X, Apple preserved a (comparatively) handful of APIs as-was, another pile as nearly-the-same-but-requires-modification, and regardless of which they temporarily preserved, made it very clear that you were going to completely rewrite your application if you intended to have a genuinely native OS X experience. By contrast, farking Microsoft OS/2 apps survived into Windows NT 4, and Windows 3.1 apps ran from 1993 through some forms of Windows XP without blinking. Even in the hated Windows 8, Microsoft went out of their way to make sure that they maintained very clear and well-spelled-out migration paths. It is theoretically possible (though you'd be insane) to write a WinRT app in C that mostly uses kernel32.dll, if you want to, because WinRT is unapologetically based on COM, which is in turn based on an old way that vtables happened to be laid out in VC++, which is in turn based on how C structs used to lay out function pointers. This hurts WinRT performance compared to what they could've accomplished with a Swift-like linker. Did this insane focus on backwards compatibility hurt Microsoft? I don't think you can conclusively say. Did it hurt me as a former Windows developer? Only at best tangentially; all the backwards…

As completely off topic as my response will be, I'll at least keep to the theme of this thread. I was reminded the other day of an article that called out React and Flux for reinventing the Windows 1.0 dispatch architecture, and it made me laugh: https://www.bitquabit.com/post/the-more-things-change/ Also, can't miss the opportunity to bring up Graydon's iconic 2010 talk "Technology from the past come to save the future from itself". http://venge.net/graydon/talks/

Really good one in response to claims that stack overflow could be rewritten in a weekend: https://www.bitquabit.com/post/one-which-i-call-out-hacker-news/

You mean that they should wrap native controls? It's not React Native's model, it has been around since forever. WxWidgets (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WxWidgets) 1992 SWT (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Widget_Toolkit) 2003 Or if you mean React itself, I found this blog post kind of funny: https://www.bitquabit.com/post/the-more-things-change/ :-)

But I have, it just had a different name, https://www.bitquabit.com/post/the-more-things-change/ https://wiki.haskell.org/Functional_Reactive_Programming

There is a big upset coming in the UX world as we converge toward a generalized implementation of the "diff & patch" pattern which underlies Git, React, compiler optimization, scene rendering, and query optimization. Don't forget Windows 1.0 in that list: https://www.bitquabit.com/post/the-more-things-change/

You may be surprised to learn that React's paradigm is basically how Windows GUI apps have been written from 1.0 up through at least Windows 7: https://bitquabit.com/post/the-more-things-change/

React is not a new concept, it is moving back to tried and true basics, honestly it's one of the few JS frameworks that has been built by people that learned from past mistakes, from former implementations: https://bitquabit.com/post/the-more-things-change/

Not so much. https://bitquabit.com/post/separate-support-serve/

Mercurial has largefiles and locking too: http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/LargefilesExtension http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/LockExtension Like other people have noticed, you can have the good parts of a DVCS and the good parts of a CVCS. It doesn't have to be either-or: https://blogs.janestreet.com/centralizing-distributed-version-control-… http://bitquabit.com/post/unorthodocs-abandon-your-dvcs-and-return-to-…

Checking in your deps handles that. If your tests don't pass, don't check in the change. But this requires source control systems that can store the files for many projects at a time. (See today's other discussion about git.) [1] [1] http://bitquabit.com/post/unorthodocs-abandon-your-dvcs-and-return-to-…

The term may have originated here (edit - actually, probably not based on the publication dates.) But it's where I first saw it: http://bitquabit.com/post/coding-is-priority-number-five/

I appreciate that you don't have all of the info on whats happening, and that those who do are a tad busy right now. However, as I understand from your profile you are a coder on Kiln[1]. Are you really telling us you don't know whether there was a backup datacenter or not? If there was, I understand you might not be able to tell us why it didn't catch the fail-over, or if not, why there wasn't one in the first place. However basic info like whether a backup existed in the first place really seems like it should be within your realm of knowledge. [1]http://bitquabit.com/page/about/

http://bitquabit.com/post/cache-me-if-you-can/ That was a better link with actual information, but I can see why you didn't post it. Something from fogcreek.com is much more likely to hit the front page of HN. Anyhow, good article.

More than a decade ago, some HN commenters claimed "StackOverflow could be thrown together in a weekend", which is very similar to the sentiment expressed here. StackOverflow employees reply here: https://blog.codinghorror.com/code-its-trivial/ and here: https://www.bitquabit.com/post/one-which-i-call-out-hacker-news/ Their main argument is that some developers take an incredibly myopic view of what it takes to run a software business, and I think the same applies here, if not more so, considering Twitter's business model of selling advertising. From the linked posts: > If you then tell a developer to replicate StackOverflow, what goes into his head are the above two SQL tables and enough HTML to display them without formatting, and that really is completely doable in a weekend. The smarter ones will realize that they need to implement login and logout, and comments, and that the votes need to be tied to a user, but that's still totally doable in a weekend; it's just a couple more tables in a SQL back-end, and the HTML to show their contents. Use a framework like Django, and you even get basic users and comments for free. > But that's not what StackOverflow is about. Regardless of what your feelings may be on StackOverflow in general, most visitors seem to agree that the user experience is smooth, from start to finish. They feel that they're interacting with a polished product. Even if I didn't know better, I would guess that very little of what actually makes…

Yeah, it's all just a few bad apples, there's no underlying problem. Just like all the other women with appalling experiences of sexism in the tech community. Seriously, if you can't see a fundamental problem, I seriously doubt you're looking very hard. http://therealkatie.net/blog/2012/mar/21/lighten-up/ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cerian-jenkins/the-tech-industry-is-one-… http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/CouchDB_talk http://bitquabit.com/post/seriously/ http://farukat.es/journal/2012/10/669-kathy-sierra-primer-sexism-discu…