Thread by @GeePawHill

My experience of the dozen languages one must be comfortable with to implement and ship a database-backed multi-user web site is that the task-dedicated language game is not worth the candle. I realize this makes me an old fogey.

I routinely see geeks manipulating SQL, Java, HTTP, HTML, CSS, JAVASCRIPT directly, and having rigged custom YAML, XML, property-file, and bash and gradle and groovy. And I keep asking myself, why didn't we just do this using a general-purpose language?

The idea (aside from the CSS/html distinction, and frankly, how's that workin' out for you) is that the custom langauge will enable me to do things more quickly than the gp. I love that theory, but it doesn't feel true.

Every week there's a new system with two wizards, and as long as you want to parameterize *exactly* what the wizard-writer wanted to enable you to parameterize in exactly the way she wanted you to think of it, it's great.

And from there? It's stack overflow copy/paste all the way. "do u feel lucky, punk?" and u spend days & days trying 87 variants. u get wrinkly skin from all the time u spend standing in the shower trying to think of one more thing to try.

Again, the idea is that there are well-defined layers, and the responsibilities are crisp, and since you have to change thinking modes anyway, change them to another dialect that expresses the different layer more correct.

But it's not true. How many of those languages I just mention are in fact turing complete? Why? Because they *must* be to do what is needed. Why? Because the division of responsibility theory isn't accurate except in powerpoint slides.

And of course, that's just the languages. Listen, "spring-boot" isn't java, it's its very own special-purpose language. (It isn't even "spring" in some places.)

Throw in the 31 cloud systems, each with 19 different configuration files, the dependency management tool, the 18 plugins, or 83 if you're using vim.

Who, exactly, is surprised that it's so hard to ship software value?

And I realize it's Friday night and I won't be able to say this in a scant couple of hours, but I'm dead sober here.

This just doesn't feel like it's working.