This week, i’m feeling a little less optimistic about the future. The shadows seem a little darker and even the light looks a little grimier than it used to. What has caused this discouragement is recent interactions that I’ve had with different people across a few different domains.
Sometimes you can write off discouragement and peoples opinions as biased, selfish or just plain ignorant and to be honest it wouldn’t be the first time. I was told that Linux was a poor career choice and that learning a UNIX was a dead end. Even my mother had taught the family bird to say “Linux sucks”. Being young and stupid of course I stayed true to the path, however I wasn’t alone, there were Linux User Groups, magazines and companies hiring that inspired me to continue.
It always felt like there was a glimmer of light and hope behind my plans seeing others interested in the same direction, pushing the envelope forward to improvement keeping the seed of hope alive. This time however, I think that I’ve been made a choice in the wrong direction.
You’ll find that there is a recurring theme in my mistakes, which I plan to somehow fix going forward.
If you’ve had the pleasure of working in C, you’ll know that its a treadmill. It gets you hooked quickly but the corner cases, undefined behavior and security bugs are just take up too much time in the short lifespan we have. If there is one thing you take from this blog entry, its please stop writing new projects in C if you can help it. Think of the children.
I had been working with Erlang, which I had quite enjoyed however I failed to learn my lesson. There were almost no erlang jobs going that I could find in Australia. There was no other erlang programmers that I could find nearby but I could write some useful tooling and wrote some basic software that I enjoyed using.
Still, its not for ‘modern’ frontends, cecho for ncurse and cowboy, but for the interactive stuff for “other people” I still had to end up writing some crappy html and javascript, it was painful to share what I had written with others.
Still, the Erlang syntax is ‘cranky’. There has been recent improvements on the BEAM vm, which are nice (such as Lisp Flavored Erlang, but we’ll get there later in this article).
After trying to improve erlang-mode in emacs, I decided to give the “real thing” a go. I downloaded SBCL and had a ball. I enjoyed learning macros, writing telegram bots, writing a small text adventure, mapping out special effects and logic for my ongoing D&D campaign.
While working LISP has been very productive, and working for me its been very difficult to get any kind of adoption in my work. I haven’t come across another Lisp programmer (In an engineering group of about 2000)
I spent most of my after hours in the last 3 months trying to learn cobol. I can do quite a number of basic tasks, input screens, validation, math, currency and handling.
Realistically GNUcobol was the only version of cobol that I could get my hands on. The rest of the versions require payment or all kinds of trickery that i’m not willing to put up with.
As far as I can see while completely suited to business kinda work, which wouldnt be surprising if I’d only read the brochure. It lacks any kind any kind of ability to make socket requests easily, and while there is libcurl bindings, and the like. FFI is still a little strange for ‘structs’ and I’ve had to write helper C code to deal with any kind of struct interaction.
I’ve written an emacs gnucobol-mode, which is a fair start but has a lot of work to do to be completey useful, however working in cobol is slow and tiresome and there is little that I can do with it.
For a moment, for a brief glimpse I saw everything that I really wanted in a programming language. The great flexibility of lisp and the power of erlangs distribution.
Starting a new project is hard. Fetching new deps from rebar.config fails. SSL errors connecting to hexpm, ‘unknown reason’ joy.
Its powerful, familar and combines two things I really enjoyed writing, however this along with its lack of “front end” means I can’t distribute it to end users without doing more work. I did see the “livebook” from elixir, it would be great if it worked for lfe.
There were however some interesting tools that may mitigate some of my irks.
Writing my applications with a TUI and exporting it through the web, almost gets me there but then again i realise that the vast majority of people are now programmed not to understand anything but gumby web interfaces, so thats what I think that I need to deal with going forward. Sad reality.
I had figured that perhaps I could use new features of Kitty graphics terminal to promote some modern usability into the terminal that may be familiar to users, however getting this into the browser via xterm.js isnt a thing so I’m back to where I started.
One of the issues that I’ve always had with some langauges are when they are “good enough”. I do understand that there are business decisions often dictate choices such as language, toolkit and design, however when “below average” becomes “good enough” across the general developer community it makes me really question if I’m the unreasonable one.
This is a prevailing attitude in many engineering teams. The fear of putting an ‘unknown’ language or tooling into production, There are many places that new tools can be written and fit into existing structures with minimal risk. I’m also adult enough to know that when i’m swimming against the current and everyone else is against me, that i’m likely in the wrong.
- I need to let go of the past and my choices.
- I can’t plan to work with anyone else, as the number of people that use my tooling is non existant.
- I need to embrace that the web is the future, and that traditional software that isnt web is a dead end.
- There isn’t going to be a language that isnt javascript or webasm.
- this either means that i write a ‘javascript like’ language or give up the idea of distributing software to normal people.
I know this wasn’t a good answer, but I need to think real hard on what is happening going forward.