But better than this is would be if my go tooling didn't default to trying to pull codebases through a proxy
Forgive me for being cynical, but I don't like that out of the box the toolchain tries to pull all the code at `example.com/business/logic` through google servers.
Google “houseboats <european city>” and you’ll see how they are moored and connected to services. There’s many good videos on YouTube doing tours of boats if you want to go down a rabbit hole.
“Stored away for long periods of time to minimise fading” is such a polite way of saying “so that future generations have a chance of seeing it, _you_ aren’t able to see it today”.
1. Jacinda Ardern is no longer Prime Minister. This is a recent change without much fanfare, so it’s not unreasonable the author made this mistake.
2. ...Is Auckland suddenly more affordable? As someone who grew up there but currently living overseas, it’s news to me. A lot of my friends are saddled with large mortgages they could only get with help from their parents. In a low wage economy they will struggle to pay if interest rates rise from their historic lows.
Regarding (2), it depends on what you mean by affordable. It is becoming more affordable to buy land compared to the last few years, because of interest rate rises making the cost of credit increase. It is becoming less affordable to build a house or other capital improvements, because of construction material cost increases and a labour shortage. Rents are rising but not as rapidly as the rest of NZ because of a declining population combined with an increase in the supply of housing. This last point is really what the author is touching on, but those who rent are not your friends that have large mortgages.
My friends and family who could not afford to buy have almost all left the city completely, so I guess you’re right in the sense they don’t rent _in Auckland_ any more. Last Summer I spent half my time driving between Warkworth, Rotorua, and Hamilton just to see those nearest and dearest to me. We all used to live less than 20 minutes from the Harbour Bridge.
A ton of young people leave, because NZ has low wages, very high cost of living, and is very isolating because most places feel suburban/rural and car dominated.
NZ is terrific if you’ve got family wealth to fall back on, but without you’re doomed.
I wanted to stay, but in spite of graduating top of my computer science class, couldn’t find decently paid work.
I moved to Aus 5 years ago and immediately >doubled my salary, could afford a house, and lived in an exciting city instead of a low wage semi rural small town.
Australia of course has many problems of its own, and in particular, treats poor disadvantaged people terribly. But NZ is grim for everybody except the already well off property owning class.
I left NZ (Auckland) about 16 years ago now. Just going from Auckland>Sydney gained me 25k salary increase. However when I left, searching C# / .NET jobs there was like 3 listed in the last 30 days, vs ~300 in Sydney. While searching PHP in NZ there were ~100 of jobs.
Now I have a family and gonna be moving back to NZ, there isn't a chance in hell I would go to Auckland as the prices are out of control. The house I grew up in my parents bought for ~200k and sold for like ~600k, I recently checked and it last sold for 2.4m 2 years ago.
Prices are slowly coming down now that overseas buyers are barred from purchasing houses. But when you've had decades of housing prices going up and up its difficult for people to accept the house is worth less than when they bought it.
Theres many other problems causing housing prices to be high than just 'zoning'. The amount of effort to build your own house is absurd, people don't want to buy land and get an architect etc, too many rules and regulations, getting approval every step of the way takes forever. And the government is dragging its feet to get houses built themselves.
Auckland specifically has a declining population, although it may change this year with immigration returning to pre-Covid levels. Aucklanders often move out of Auckland either overseas or to cheaper cities, when the economy slows, in a mild version of a boom bust cycle. Usually immigration offsets this but it hasn't quite picked up to the previous levels yet.
NZ as a whole doesn't have a declining population, and Auckland usually does not.
House prices have certainly dropped since peak pandemic madness. It remains to be seen if they stay low, although there has been plenty of construction, and some supportive policy from the govt.
Are you me? Our services with all the best practices are also the worst to work on because the business value is hidden in layers and layers of indirection, abstraction and nested packages. It’s like someone took a recipe card to bake a cake and wrote each word on a single page (because god forbid we ever repeat ourselves) and then abstracted away a function behind a series of factories and interfaces that will join those pages with string, and now each word has a single context-less definition so we can tick the “S” box in SOLID.
I think two things play into this: Layers.. it is just easier for people to add layers around something, not touching and understanding the original code and doing it right there. And then profs or someone else always says layering is good!
(It may sure be, or also sometimes such "hacks" are the right thing to do, but if that is always the default mode... uhh oh).
And second, university training: OOP, design patterns, software layers, all claimed to lead to structured good programming automatically still taught in 2023, which is just not true. By untrained or unexperienced personnel leads to worse than 80s spaghetti code..
Just yesterday I exercised with relative who is in university for exam.. Java, design patterns, arggh. Imo it just makes no sense at all to try to teach students inheritance and design patterns with Cat/Dog/Animal et al, it is so backwards. You need to program for a while bigger real systems to see some patterns emerge and their usefulness, and then can relate to the formal way and maybr use some patterns reasonably. But starting with those on toy examples just leads to what you describe:
People going in with their trained knowledge and applying that to everything without rhyme or reason. What could be a simple five liner function already becomes a convoluted abomination. Just one concrete example, but this then on many levels of software engineering.
Who or what will save our future? :D No, it won't be ChatGPT.
(Second lol btw, relative really showed me how likely all of then may use ChatGPT i. their online exams...)
I'm not too hopeful. In my experience, functional programming adoption is divided into two categories:
1) Proper FP languages with good enough semantics and necessary features to write functional code effectively. Those languages all fall into category of "too difficult" for the majority of industry, which seems to suffer from severe allergy to learning anything beyond "Intro to programming in Java 6" freshman class.
Even things like lambdas only recently stopped being too complicated for a typical programming shop that follows well-known best practices, such as "Programs must be written for inexperienced non-programmers with no prior exposure to the problem space to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.", and "Would somebody think of the juniors?". Closures? Nah, the zeitgeist is still on the fence with this.
Yes, I have a sore spot for this. I've heard this reasoning many times in real life, and once was even target of it - an otherwise competent programmer and a good manager once asked me to stop using lambdas for event handlers in Java 8 (which the company had only recently adopted), for the sake of the juniors who won't understand. In fact, he meant specifically his favorite evergreen junior (who's been in that company a couple years longer than I was then). But guess what, couple juniors actually asked me to explain the how-and-why of lambdas to them and got it near-instantly. Said evergreen junior probably spotted the lambdas in the codebase too, or otherwise got interested in this, read up on the topic independently, and three months later was evangelizing basic functional programming in Java and otherwise upskilling his fellow coworkers.
But yeah, it's too difficult, your co-workers won't understand. Anyway, where was I? Oh right:
2) The other, arguably larger, kind of FP adoption: library-level and code style level implementation of FP features in languages with little or no natural support for them. This doesn't mean people understand FP extra well - they're barely aware of it at all. But every now and then some library gets popular - say, a sum type for error handling (typically known as Result, Either, Expected, or something similar) that's "obviously" "better" than exceptions. Except, that library is doing a half-baked implementation of a concept (e.g. monads) that doesn't fit the language, and the users don't understand what the approximated concept is, nor are they supposed to try (remember, FP is too abstract for a freshman after "Java 6 101" class).
The result is, as expected, an ugly mess in the codebase, displaying all the bad sides of imperative and functional styles, and leveraging none of the good sides.
Anyway, what is my proposed solution to this? For the industry to stop hating education and professionalism. To embrace the idea that the job of a junior is to learn, not to be the yardstick for complexity of the codebase. To encourage a culture of learning, of professionalism, at every level. To stop dismissing or banning techniques that reduce size and complexity of the codebase by large factors, just because one has to invest a couple hours of learning up-front to be able to use them. Etc.
Probably because currently multiple rich people can subjugate humanity, while AI would allow the single richest person to subjugate everyone, even second place
Forgive me for being cynical, but I don't like that out of the box the toolchain tries to pull all the code at `example.com/business/logic` through google servers.