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The audacity to be nostalgic for Eclipse!
Old man shouting at clouds…
The way the author described programming in 2025 did make me chuckle, and I do think he makes some excellent points in the process.
It’s 2025. We write JavaScript with types now. It runs not just in a browser, but on Linux. It has a dependency manager, and in true JavaScript style, there’s a central repository which anyone can push anything to. Nowadays it’s mostly used to inject Bitcoin miners or ransomware onto unsuspecting servers, but you might find a useful utility to pad a string if you need it.
In order to test our application, we build it regularly. On a modern computer, with approximately 16 cores, each running at 3 GHz, TypeScript only takes a few seconds to compile and run.
Hmm, partially. One real thing that I see now is cloud costs. All of the stuff we now have in our pipeline does inflate our costs quite a bit, which then puts pressure on the budget and that crunches everywhere.
What’s funny is if you added another “level” to this going back another 15 years there would be someone complaining about the same things but with Java as the target. “Java is slow” wasn’t just a joke for no reason after all.
There are some funny parts in the post as well as some true statements to the current state of things. We’ll see another post like it in 10-15 years and it will be a chuckle. Then we’ll all continue as we always have and deal with whatever comes down the pipe next.
It’s what humans do and it isn’t restricted to technologies or programming languages.
Every time I read something like this it comes to mind that we’re more likely to remember the good bits of the past than the struggles. People use containers because the “works on my machine” problem was a constant pain.
You can still ship code into production quickly if you pair program and commit to trunk to bypass the code review process, and have a CI/CD pipeline set up to automatically build and publish the package.
And I’d much rather have a cloud env pull my code and automatically deploy something than manually transfer files over FTP.
Good write up. I agree with several points
And it pains me too that everything is damn electron. Can we please go back to writing stuff that doesn’t require that?
I don’t mind an old style interface. Hell, in many cases I’ll welcome it with open arms. Modern UI is not necessarily better. Both tech wise and also style wise.
I started programming in 2015 and I’m very surprised that webapps have managed to get worse in that time period. We have 10 years of work on the V8, 10 years of React and Angular, 10 years of DX improvements and my current work is C# takes a minute to compile and Angular takes 4 minutes for a production build.
I know now we have TS and there’s a lot of safety that comes with it but somehow things are just slow, both building and on deployed websites. Websites should be snappy when everyone has a GPU that can go incredibly fast compared to 10 years ago and cores that are 2x faster and 4x as numerous.
If you try frameworks interested in performance like Svelte or Astro or mostly anything beyond Angular and React, you’ll see very short build times and sub-second updates.
If it were my choice I would probably go for Vue since I’ve worked with it for about a year also Evan Yu is a developer I have 100% confidence in making it better over time. I mean, he made Vite after all. The transition from v2 to v3 was pretty much backwards compatible while angular breaks shit all the f-ing time. But out of the ones I don’t know Svelte looks the best. Do I need a “chart.js-svelte” package? Nope, just use the normal one. Dependency management looks soooo much simpler than having a less supported framework specific version of it.
Vue is great too! Basically everything outside of enterprise React and Angular would be quite performant.
Great write up!
Of course, I never stopped editing my code in
viso I missed some of the editor frustrations.
