That’s decades of legacy for you…
I bet each step/arrow/decision had a good reason at some point, but most of them probably back when computers lived in caves and hunted their tapes using spears and rocks.
I feel like we’re slowly reaching a point where the complexity is collapsing in on itself - just look at the absolute chaos a modern web app is.
That’s the point.
In Germany there was a battle between left and right back then. The economy boomed in the 20s and faltered in the 30s. Capitalists saw the threat of socialism looming just behind Poland and so they supported fascism.
The Nazis funneled billions into large businesses. It was unsustainable and morally multi-level wrong, but they skimmed a lot of profits from these agreements. They got rich, while the economy started to collapse - even before the war.
Even after the war, most of them got away. They kept much of their wealth.
Unfortunately, the current finance minister is really that stupid.
Absolute braindead wannabe neoliberal.
Prudes…
Java’s Duke just stands there, fully nude and is giving NullPointerException fucks.
Fake news! We should ask Ukraine for peace talks! Otherwise we might provoke Putin!!
Every system will get gamed by bad actors.
At least in my case, I can’t come up with a system that doesn’t suffer from these problems, but still keeps corruption in check.
For example, I was in a bidding process for my own software. Our contract has a legal time limit, afterwards it has to be renewed using the same bidding process as the first time. It makes perfect sense for us not to rewrite our software - it’s working just fine after all. But legally, we’re bidding on rebuilding the entire thing, have to compete with laughably low offers from all over Europe, and when we won the contract we decide, almost by accident, to keep using the old software, but on a very tight budget.
The pragmatic thing would have been, to just extend our contract, but that could mean endless contracts to extremely high prices for software that just happens to be embedded deep enough to be irreplaceable.
No good solution, really.
Maybe because the original post seems awfully arrogant, if you don’t know the context - and the post didn’t provide any context.
I’ve seen a ton of responses like yours. You’re implying that everyone gets the context, if they don’t, you assume everything is “hostile” if it’s not the exact line of thought you happen to support.
Accept that other people live different lives from yours and have different experiences and knowledge.
As a software engineer, this applies to my entire industry as well.
I’m forced to write subpar software, sometimes with atrocious security simply because some idiot set an unrealistic budget.
The worst part is, my current projects are all government funded. The German government implemented processes to prevent corruption, which force unhealthy competition and backhand corruption onto the bidders, which then churn out bad software, which causes gigantic costs down the line, because nothing works. Great job.
Yeah, but number go up!
Half an Apple a day keeps the IDF away!
I still don’t understand how all that infrastructure is supposed to be financed by just a handful of whales.
All those developers, analysts, designers, etc. could surely make more money in a proper business.
Or requires a timestamp with zone offset, but ignores the zone offset, so you have to send the timestamp itself with a zone offset of zero relative to the systems timezone, but can’t just omit the zone offset, because it’s required.
Again, did you actually read the comments?
Is SQL an API contract using JSON? I hardly think so.
Java does not distinguish between null and non-existence within an API contract. Neither does Python. JS is the weird one here for having two different identifiers.
Why are you so hellbent on proving something universal that doesn’t apply for the case specified above? Seriously, you’re the “well, ackshually” meme in person. You are unable or unwilling to distinguish between abstract and concrete. And that makes you pretty bad engineers.
Did you read the comments above?
You can’t just ignore context and proclaim some universal truth, which just happens to be your opinion.
Nope.
If there’s a clear definition that there can be something, implicit and explicit omission are equivalent. And that’s exactly the case we’re talking about here.
I find it really weird that something as simple as the basic functionality of nextcloud seemingly can’t be implemented in a stable and lightweight manner.
Nextcloud always seems one update away from self destruction and it prepares for that by hoarding all the resources it can get. It never feels fast or responsive. I just want a way to share files between my machines.
There are other solutions, I know, but they’re all terrible in their own way.
The German feddit (and reddit) space has bursts of memes. A while ago it was stupid puns using sturgeons or eels. Currently it’s pizza.
These intense meme storms (Stahlmemegewitter) last for a few days and then blow over.
That’s exactly not the thing, because nobody broke the contract, they simply interpret it differently in details.
Having a null reference is perfectly valid json, as long as it’s not explicitly prohibited. Null just says “nothing in here” and that’s exactly what an omission also communicates.
The difference is just whether you treat implicit and explicit non-existence differently. And neither interpretation is wrong per contract.
It can, but especially during serialization Java sometimes adds null references to null values.
That’s usually a mistake by the API designer and/or Java dev, but happens pretty often.
I see that problem also in a kind of “contact guilt” in certain topics.
That is, if there’s any polarized issue, there’s always the liberal/left/progressive position with extremely clear boundaries to what is acceptable to even discuss. And then there’s the vast conservative-fascist spectrum. If any problem arises within that issue, even mentioning it is immediately labeled as outside of the acceptable part, simply out of fear that this could be used as a wedge against the liberal position.
That in turn alienates people, they see an actual problem and the liberal side either ignores the problem or says it’s fascist. And the actual problem never gets solved or even tackled, simply because nobody wants to touch it.
This leads to a situation where for a whole bunch of people the fascists seem downright reasonable and then the radicalization pipeline kicks in and suddenly they think Hitler might not be such a bad guy after all.
So essentially, the left feeds the right gullible people out of fear they might legitimize some of their points.
Just an example from Germany: when the first wave of Syrian refugees came to Germany in 2015, they were greeted with literally open arms. Great thing. But if you let about a million people into the country, you also need about 500k new apartments for them, the bureaucracy has to be capable of processing everything, language courses have to be expanded drastically, job trainings have to be organized, etc etc. A whole bunch of problems.
Now, what happened? Nothing. There was great fanfare, the local governments did their best, but nothing substantive happened. Nobody talked about it, because that might fuel the existing resentments. Nobody tackled the problems. And within a few months, we had tens of thousands of young men, who had nothing to do, were not allowed to work, were completely alone and had no money or social safety net. Well, of course a bunch of them turned criminal, which then fueled the resentment even more, because suddenly the fascists actually had what they hoped for: criminal foreigners. Even if the actual problem was tiny, it was the spark that ignited the fascist resurgence.