HACKER Q&A
📣 seph-reed

Are there any “golden calfs” tools in your field that rub you wrong?


Do you ever feel like you're taking crazy pills for being the only person who doesn't love some very popular tool within your industry? What tool is it, and what industry?

What should people know about X over-hyped software/framework/tool/design-pattern/etc?


  👤 AnimalMuppet Accepted Answer ✓
Lots of things. Lisp. Haskell. Functional programming. Apple computers. Anything described as The One Right Way.

But in none of these cases am I the only person. Far from it. I'm one of a quiet majority facing a minority of loud zealots.

Note well: Lisp and Haskell are reasonable languages in which one can be quite productive. My issue isn't with the languages per se; it's with the zealots. (I would probably feel the same about Rust, but I haven't bumped heads with as many Rust zealots.)

What should people know? X is useful. X also has flaws. There are other ways to go about it that are also useful, and also have (perhaps different) flaws.


👤 mindcrime
Everybody loves IntelliJ except me I think. I tried it and wasn't impressed in the least.

Not a fan of basically anything proprietary / closed source / patent-encumbered either, which is a group that probably includes a lot of popular "stuff". On that note, I don't use any Apple products, as I fundamentally disapprove of their "walled garden" ecosystem approach.


👤 Nextgrid
The general trend of microservices and making everything a distributed system with the data smeared across dozens of separate services.

It makes the development experience terrible, introduces a new set of bugs and failure modes you have to consider, and is unnecessary in the vast majority of cases.

Maybe there are some people that legitimately enjoy dealing with this complexity, but for me engineering is simply a tool to solve clients' business problems so I can get paid, and the least engineering I have to do (and my client has to maintain down the line) the better.

I've ranted about this before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28025934 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22877650.


👤 seph-reed
Right now I feel like I'm taking crazy pills for not loving a very popular web-dev tool. I'm wondering if this happens to everyone. I'm hoping it's not just me.