Readit NewsLast time I checked apart from npm, no other language has anything similar to CPAN.
Some of it I recognize as being an artefact of the time, when conciseness really mattered. But it's still obnoxious in 2025.
The whole thing reminds me of D&D, which is full of classes & spells that only exist in modern D&D because of One Guy who happened to be at the table with Gygax, who really wanted to be a wuxia guy he saw in a movie, or because he really wanted a spell to be applicable for that one night at the table, and now it's hard-coded into the game.
Those days were different. You could say what people are doing in months to years today, in many ways people back then were doing in days to weeks.
Pace and ambition of shipping has not only faded, that very culture is non existent. You don't see people building the next Facebook or Amazon these days, do you?
I remember managers asking Java programmers how much time it would take to get something done, and get timelines on months and years. They would come to us Perl programmers and get it done in a week.
The era didn't last long. I would joke around our team saying, ideally a Java programmer with 10 years experience was somewhat like like a Perl programmer with 1 year experience. This was one of the big reasons, most of these enterprise coders wanted Perl gone.
In many Indian outsourcing firms, they permanently place a 'program manager' at big client's offices. Like for eg- Bank of America.
These managers also get a unlimited American express card, to spend on lunches, outings etc. You are expected to build 'relationships' so that when a project is needed to be won, you are just a call away from making it happen.
This is because a good percentage of the sales, projects, staffing, profits come from these big clients.
1. Most Indian bureaucracy is clueless about tech things, and just goes by whatever somebody who sounds like techy enough is selling them. Which in this case I'm guessing is a data mining company/lobby.
2. The information derived can be used for various purposes. Plotting election trends, economics, spotting general trends pro/against politics and other nefarious causes. etc.
3. Spying.
4. Using information to go after political opponents.
5. Demographic targeting, which in Indian context almost always means a pogrom against groups, which other groups don't like.
6. Selling data to commercial entities for better targeting, or even social engineering buying choices etc.
There could be many others. But its kind of nice that it was taken back. Having said this, it will be pushed again at some point when people are busy with a crisis and this will be sold as a fix.
No idea how good Zoho is, but if you can pay $X/month and never even think about the problem ever again, then that is compelling, and the value of that depends on the customer.
This is perhaps what most non-dev people don't get. Maintenance is a far more harder thing than building something. So you want to go slow when building things, not fast. Either way building things fast has been a solved problem for a while, people don't go fast not because we don't have tools, but there are other fairly valid reasons to go slow. This is true with so many other things outside of software. I guess its called 'haste'.
This is true for most things. Especially where money and life are at stake. But Im guessing you could extend this to anything where reputation is at stake.
Im guessing it doesn't apply to some start ups, but other wise every one is subject to this.
If you don't trust me, give a non-programming job a try for 1 year and then come back and tell me how much more comfy $JOB was :)
A lot of non-programmer jobs have a kind of union protection, pension plans and other perks even with health care. That makes a crappy salary and work environment bearable.
There was this VP of HR, in a Indian outsourcing firm, and she something to the effect that Software jobs appear like would pay to the moon, have an employee generate tremendous value for the company and general appeal that only smart people work these jobs. None of this happens with the majority of the people. So after 10-15 years you actually kind of begin to see why some one might want to work a manufacturing job.
Life is long, job guarantee, pensions etc matter far more than 'move fast and break thing' glory as you age.
And yes we’ve been heavy users of both AWS and Google Cloud for years, mainly because of the credits they initially provided, but also used VMs, dedicated servers and other services from Hetzner and OVH extensively.
In my experience, in terms of availability and security there’s not much difference in practice. There are tons of good tools nowadays to treat a physical server or a cluster of them as a cloud or a PaaS, it’s not really more work or responsibility, often it is actually simpler depending on the setup you choose. Most workloads do not require flexible compute capability and it’s also easy and fast to get it from these cheaper providers when you need to.
I feel like the industry has collectively accepted that Cloud prices are a cost of doing business and unquestionable, “nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM”. Thinking about costs from first principles is an important part of being an engineer.
If you are having a company that warrants building a data center, then AWS does not add much.
Other wise you face the 'if you want to build apple pie from scratch, you need to first invent the universe' problem. Simply put you can get started right on day one, in a pay as you go model. Like you can write code, deploy and ship from the very first day, instead of having to go deep down the infrastructure rabbit hole.
Plus shutting down things is easy as well. Things don't workout? Good news! You can shut down the infrastructure that very day instead of having to worry about the capital expenditure spent to build infrastructure, and without having to worry about its use later.
Simply put, AWS is infrastructure you can hire and fire at will.
By the early 1980s around 40% of the cast and crew had developed cancer, also including Susan Hayward, Agnes Moorehead, and director Dick Powell. And the movie nuclear bombed at the box office.
Just how nuclear waste polluted is Nevada?
Surely ~1000 tests in one place can't be good. Wouldn't be surprised if people around there do get cancers.
This seems to be a tug of war- that is- information vs distraction
I remember in the 1990s India it was quite common to view kids from homes that had TV/Cable TV as kids who were bad at academics, and distracted without focus.
OTOH, as time passed people realised those kids had better english speaking skills, vocabulary and general awareness of the world. So extreme focus didn't quite work out as well as people though it would.
In the modern context I know quite a few people with laser sharp productivity and get lots of work done. But here's what 'wasting' time on Twitter has led me down rabbit holes in the Stock market that has opened up newer earning opportunities. So its not as simple as saying social media is distracting.
Extreme focus does work when your work is individually measured and judged. And the pay off is immense. Other wise you are better off doing something to keep the wheels spinning while finding more things that can be rewarding.