Monday, April 25, 2016

Frustration

There's so much frustration in the software industry, not only that it tends to get religious about it as well. Sometimes fiercely sometimes in a sober fashion, but mostly its fierce. Sometimes its between languages and sometimes its between platforms.

I recently found myself in this situation where I changed job to a .NET shop, coming from a basically "use whatever works" (in terms of platform) to a proprietary, or more properly, constricted environment. It's working with a straight jacket and whenever you turn it tightens its grip around you until there's no other way of doing things. Not only that you are bound by the "physics" of the .NET and Windows platform, it soaks into your mind as some sort of brain wash. I'll get to that a bit later.

I started checking out C# and initially I thought "This is Java done right" and then I realized that it's even more than that. I had all these things which were really nice like LINQ, delegates even async/await which seemed like heaven initially. I finally got a language which I could use with really powerful tools without a fuss. I really thought I've found something which would make me happy and this shiny new tool would make me forget the "sorrows" of the JVM echo system.

Disappointments

I immediately started to check out frameworks to see what there was. I checked if there were ports for the most usual frameworks... and found fairly little, Not only that those I found they were not as "good" as their counterparts (YES there are good ones) there weren't much. I turned to the platform itself and found that most of the time you simply use the ones the platform had. Fair enough.

Most projects developed in this shop are developed individually by contractors which are hired whenever they are needed, and not only one person have worked on a single project. There have been several system overhauls where the code have been rewritten to suit the products, and supposedly it is in a state which would qualify as "good". Quite nervous to join such a professional shop, I eagerly dug into the code to see what I could expect and what I though would be expected of me.

I was stunned, I really couldn't believe it so I had to ask. And from one of the more senior and one of those which had worked there the longest I got this blank stare as not understanding what I were talking about. It was a freaking mess. I thought it might just that part of code I was looking at, but there were more, there were those patterns you'd expect and whatnot but all these "tools" just made it somehow worse. I can't really explain it more thoroughly but the code just were f*ked up.

Somewhat dis encouraged I started coding on my own, firmly determined to do a good job. I resorted to every tool I knew of to produce good code (and provided a solid baseline for coding in other languages). A few good frameworks like XUnit came to the rescue (damn that's a really nice framework) and I started doing quite good pace with features. Though then things started to turn ugly, most notably Dispose and the life cycle of objects. Why did they do this? It gets really ugly not only considering thread safety. Not going through all that but some of it can you read here.

Then It came to the solution part of the "ecosystem". It was just Microsoft's things. And really I do know that you can do things without it but it just sort of never gets right. You either do one thing but then you cannot do the other. And when you need help it's really hard to find out what you need to do to get things working. And there's the "easy" solution which is always the wrong one.

I do recognize that you can write good code with C#, its not that. It's the straight jacket which limits the possible solutions. And this somehow restricts the solution space of the developers. You can solve a lot of things bu using LINQ, but it's so easy to actually misuse it you don't see that you actually just did that. LINQ is a perfect example of "too much abstraction" which it seems like a viable tool to use but it really is the wrong one, though its so easy to make that decision and that's why I think the code gets so messy. There are too many tools which are easy to use so you are using it for everything, and you don't see the alternative, and suddenly its NOT the right tool anymore and suddenly you are in a dark corner with no way out.

Additional problem is that you start thinking like it as well, since you become blind for other solutions. Though I've fallen into that trap a few times myself, I feel it like its a real problem for C# developers or at least that's my experience. I don't blame the developers here, but the platform.

Quite frankly I think working with C# taught me that it's good to work with different platforms, though .NET is not the one, at least not for me. Well maybe when the Windows become Linux or any derivatives like such.




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