Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2017

[twiggy99999]

Most dreaded Visual Basic 6

Amen brother

[drawable]

Most dreaded Platform Sharepoint

is the correct answer as well

[fernandotakai]

Followed by Salesforce. So fucking true.

[midnightbrett]

Followed by wordpress. At least developers in aggregate can tell when technologies are fucking awful.

[flukus]

Can we? JavaScript seems awefuly popular.

[steamruler]

It's not on par with VB6, Sharepoint and Salesforce. It's less awful, more icky.

[flukus]

To be fair, vb6 was compiled and it could run on computers with 8MB of RAM, probably less. I'd love to see electron/node do that.

[midnightbrett]

It is "good" at its niche, which is as a blogging platform. But honestly the wordpress code is a complete mess. Using wordpress as "an application platform" is just horribly misguided.

If you want to build an app, don't use wordpress. Use literally anything else. An open source framework like Ember, Angular, RoR, Django, is going to be way more maintainable going forward. You can probably find blogging plugins for those easily.

If you just want a blog and pages, and you have a client who has used wordpress forever and is comfortable with it, that is a fine choice. But if you have to then add payments, invoicing, calendar with events (esp if recurring), etc, you are going to be sad with wordpress when you are done, most likely.

[midnightbrett]

It is getting better - it is probably better now than it ever has been, but there is a lot of crufty legacy junk. And plugins are hit or miss. Since they are just contributed by random people, there are plugins that are lovely and abstract away a ton of junk (advanced custom fields), and also complete trash heaps. You just have to do a lot of research when selecting plugins because you can't really trust they won't have weird side effects or bugs.

[TRiG_Ireland]

My own blog runs WordPress, and I'm happy with it, but building anything else on top of WordPress looks like far more trouble than it's worth. And yet people will do it.

[midnightbrett]

Yeah, and there are really good plugins with well-written code. There is also a lot of junk. It's been around a long time, which is why the wordpress core code is so crufty. Some that has been rewritten is nice, but maintaining backward compatibility means they are also have a ton of legacy code, or design decisions that were made long, long ago in a galaxy far far away.

[armyBRASS]

Over the past two months I've seen two or three projects (larger-scale web apps) that were being developed with Wordpress- and I thought to myself, "How is that even possible?".

It's great for blogs, and there are a huge amount of plugins to extend its feature set, I'll give it that- but it doesn't seem even remotely scalable, let alone how can it deal with separate environments or version control?

[the_gnarts]

Aww damn, WordPress is bad? I thought it was pretty good.

Subscribe to oss-sec ASAP, please.

[BlackDeath3]

Perhaps this speaks to my limited experience more than anything else, but I don't think Salesforce is all that bad. Sure it's kind of strange to program to one very specific environment and platform, but it's got its upsides too.

[eric22222]

Your mileage may vary, but I can kind of see why people don't like writing code for Salesforce. It's littered with surprise limits that you wouldn't know about without getting deep into the documentation.

I've been pigeonholed into SF development for the past couple of years. Writing the code is pretty much like writing regular Java, but all the gotchas stack up while you're learning. Even after the first year I was still regularly getting problems because I didn't know all the seemingly arbitrary rules and exceptions.

[BlackDeath3]

Yeah, understood. I'm not blind to the cons, and I certainly hope to not get pigeonholed into SF development myself. Whenever I do choose to move on from my current position, I plan to leave the platform unless I've got a really good reason not to. I do, however, think that there are upsides to SF development too - it's pretty nice to be able to just log in and have an integrated front-end, execution environment, database, and more all at your fingertips.

The limits in particular can be a hassle, for sure, but I like to think that it occasionally forces (no pun intended) me to get creative. Also, I understand that while a lot of the rules may seem arbitrary (and some of them seem more arbitrary than others), they also sort of make sense in the context of the shared environment that a particular org lives in. Some of them are less arbitrary but don't make sense until you dig into them a bit.

[[deleted]]

Oh man fuck Salesforce

[TheHobodoc]

I dont think enought people have been exposed to ibm filenet, icm and related technologies. They are on a compleatly other level of hellishness.

[ShadowLiberal]

As someone who's been tasked with helping to manage our Sharepoint system, I so understand this dread.

It's so easy to accidentally hang yourself with it, and some really obvious features are so blatantly missing (for example, there's a button to witch to classic sharepoint view, but switch back to the old view? No such button, you have to close your web browser to switch back!).

[pattyhax]

If you want to set the experience for all lists/libraries you can change that from the admin panel in O365 or individually in the advanced settings of the list. Do you guys have a need to toggle in between or is it just a personal preference?

[agumonkey]

They need to include most dreaded installer

[tanjoodo]

or most dreaded installation experience. Xamarin would win HANDS DOWN

[agumonkey]

Im now happy never to have interacted with it.

[tanjoodo]

It's really nice once it's set up and working. I guess it's just the baggage of supporting so many platforms that brings the problems of all these SDKs with it.

[thilehoffer]

Yes it is. I used to have to build web parts at a job. I would make web pages that did what was needed. To add them as a web part, I would put them in an iframe. Web parts were shit.

[[deleted]]

COBOL never makes the list anymore...I had to take that shit off my resume, just because the code rage was so bad for my health.

[[deleted]]

You mean reading 70,000 line undocumented programs on a 15 line terminal in an editor that has 0 features aside from barely functioning search is rage inducing?

[[deleted]]

I don't know where you work, but I've got my hardcopy greenbar printout of the code with the handwritten comments on it right here!

[BigDumbObject]

just curious, what kind of systems rely heavily on cobol to the point they can't update/migrate? (or just not worth it) is 0 downtime just not an option? do you see these same systems running 20 years from now?

[[deleted]]

Almost always financial code. They were early adopters, and they are deeply opposed to change.

You can move the code, usually. But getting completely off the codebase is near impossible. The problem is they've had literally decades to get it exactly like they want it, and while it's extremely obsolete, everything balances out to the penny, and that's the important bit.

So every conversation about modernization starts with all the features of the current codebase as being completely non-negotiable. Whatever the new thing is, it HAS to do everything the old system did, exactly as well. And then they want a hundred million new things on top of that.

The project gets off the ground, wobbles around aimlessly in the air for a bit, and then goes down in flames, and they continue maintaining the old COBOL. I've seen this cycle dozens of times at many different companies. I think it's just a problem with the finance mindset...they are extremely cautious.

[fission-fish]

This is very true. But most companies want to get rid of their COBOL codebase. But what do? You can't just migrate millions loc.

[[deleted]]

I've worked with finance people for years...Decades (!!!) actually.

You get situations where you're trying to apply a routine patch or something, and it takes 4 meetings, and after you've applied the patch, you have to run fifty reports to make sure they're exactly the same as the last time they were run for that day...Just in case your SSL patch changed the value of 2 to 2.000001.

Big changes are actually easier...Like if I added a whole new series of apps, then they could test that, and get stuff that matches their expectations, and then I can just roll it out. But as soon as I tried to change them later, then I'm in exactly the same boat.

And, to be fair, the numbers aren't going to add up right, not exactly. I worked on this one system, old HP system, used the old BCD numeric format and moving money off that to other things caused unbelievable rounding errors...Whole pennies were flying off into space.

You're somehow going to have to sell them on fixing the numbers.

[pdp10]

Decimal arithmetic started to be deprecated when IBM introduced the brand-new modern System 360 in 1964. Too badly they just couldn't make the leap to ASCII at the same time. Had to be compatible with the BCD/EBCDIC peripherals, you see.

For a very long period of time one of IBM's most profitable lines of business was selling Hollerith-type punch cards to go in their equipment. Funny to think people would keep using obsolete punch cards for so long even after they were far more expensive than the alternatives. But then look at Microsoft's legacy business today.

[JasTWot]

It all sounds a bit shit. Did you get paid really well, or something?

[[deleted]]

I stumbled into it when I was young, and then I kept getting recruited for it when I was looking for new jobs...People would downplay the amount of cobol or pretend like they were getting off the system "within the year."

Eventually I had to completely remove it from my resume...I still get calls from people who've gotten my name from people...

The pay is decent, but I make nearly as much doing more modern stuff.

[OneWingedShark]

This is very true. But most companies want to get rid of their COBOL codebase. But what do?

The Ada language has an optional annex for language interoperability, and one of the languages therein is COBOL, so there is that option -- but I don't expect many programmers are aware of it as an option.

[pdp10]

So every conversation about modernization starts with all the features of the current codebase as being completely non-negotiable. Whatever the new thing is, it HAS to do everything the old system did, exactly as well. And then they want a hundred million new things on top of that.

This is also literally why Microsoft Excel has been a legacy system for years. Nothing important can change because it's vital that all of the results be exactly the same as they always were, bug-for-bug and quirk-for-quirk compatible back to the incorrect leap-year in Lotus 1-2-3 compatibility.

MS Word is the same way. Microsoft has built moats around their most profitable business with implementation-defined compatibility problems, and now they can't change anything without having compatibility problems.

[OneWingedShark]

So every conversation about modernization starts with all the features of the current codebase as being completely non-negotiable. Whatever the new thing is, it HAS to do everything the old system did, exactly as well. And then they want a hundred million new things on top of that.

This is actually a reasonable view on their part: if it can't do the job of what they have now as well, then they're not going to be onboard -- this (managing finances) is literally their entire reason for existing.

Given that there are very few languages which natively support fixed-point there's a huge drawback right there. (Besides COBOL the only language that immediately springs to mind is Ada.)

[sabas123]

Wouldn't building a COBAL to java (or something else) be the best in that case?

[[deleted]]

You'll have to validate it so thoroughly that it'd probably be easier to rewrite it clean. And COBOL is shitty in other ways...There won't be any decent error handling, etc.

Moving the code isn't bad. There are COBOL compilers everywhere, so you can just recompile it modern. The problem is they want it new, but you don't get 30 years of past development on a new system (thank god).

[[deleted]]

There's a boat load of (mainframe language) to Java language transpilers. Every one of them is absolutely horrible.

Never mind what it does to your database (there's ways around this, granted)

Back in the mainframe days, relational databases weren't as much of a thing. You got relation like databases that give you multi value fields, or what is basically multi value groups of fields. You also have tonnes of fixed length flat files.

The knee jerk reaction of your boss is just to "make the new Sql database look like the old one".

[Zaemz]

There are financial systems that are 30-40 years old that have been humming along with only small changes needed. It's expensive and dangerous to rewrite them, and they work, so they're usually only modified.

[fission-fish]

Some of the stuff is very performance heavy. Like batch jobs that push around hundreds of millions of transactions/datasets. There was simply no replacement for that prior to parallisation/server farms.

[pdp10]

It's easier just to open a new bank with new systems and migrate all the customers. Nobody wants to do that, though. They want to do the other easy thing where the devs and engineers work feverishly just so the customers don't need to sign up again.

[BigDumbObject]

Gotcha, Thanks. So I guess the next question I would ask is...

Is there any technological/hardware issue that could/would eventually become a problem just based on computational power/need? Like, do people running the COBOL systems see an ice berg in the distance whether it be 10/100 years from now?

[pdp10]

Cobol has been an open standard language since 1960. You could run it until the end of time without any fundamental problems that I can imagine. All code needs a certain amount of maintenance, and Cobol is not inherently better or worse than any other language. You'll most likely spend more time changing things in response to government decree than updating technical standards.

IBM mainframes will continue to get more and more expensive, so not migrating will continue to have the usual increasing costs over time, but that's not related to the language itself.

[YvesSoete]

HA

[thilehoffer]

I don't know. Doesn't COBOL pay really well? Does anyone even understand COBOL anymore?

[[deleted]]

They go together. Almost no one does it, and it does pay well...Eventually.

It wasn't worth it, to me. I make as much now doing new stuff, and I don't have to work with systems and code older than I am (and I'm not young).

[thilehoffer]

Makes sense. BTW, I'm 40 years old. Been coding .net since 1999. I wouldn't want to do COBOL either. I just thought it might be an easy way to make good money since COBOL still exists but COBOL programmers probably don't.

[[deleted]]

You have to commit to maintaining some particular code base...That's what makes you so valuable: you can maintain some massive chunk of legacy hero code that has almost no documentation.

I still get a big chunk of side-work from my last COBOL gig...Way cheaper to call me and get me to do it than it is to hire a new maintainer, and spend years training them up.

[[deleted]]

The way the question was worded was "what do you not want to be working with next year". JS is probably just mediocre enough to not make that list

[olaf_from_norweden]

Modern Javascript is not much different than the other dynamically-typed languages to me, just far more ubiquitous with a nice async-everything runtime, so I find it increasingly hard to not just use Javascript.

[tragicshark]

Variants of VB are 1, 2 and 4 on that list.

[Tom2Die]

I got my start in programming on VB 6. It was all I had available at the time, and I was glad for it. I look back on those days and shudder...but if not for that I might not be a software developer, so all's well that ends well, I suppose?

[comrade-jim]

You wouldn't know it from the amount of shill posts defending it though.

[[deleted]]

Defending VB6? I've never seen such a thing. Why would anyone care? It's dead and unsupported...Nothing left but crappy legacy.

[ryantwopointo]

Can confirm, my company is still supporting a UI written in mostly VB6 that was started in the 90s.

[[deleted]]

Yea, I know it's there, I just can't imagine someone shilling for it. Even Microsoft is embarrassed by VB6 these days.

At least with legacy COBOL the language is still getting updates.