There is a general phenomenon that countries who pioneer a concept or technology and start to deploy an earlier iteration at great scale seem to stick with the older version while younger countries "skip" ahead. Good example might be the magnet stripe card payments or check books common in the US but almost never used in Western Europe anymore.
I suspect Poland's precarious positions in the 19th century might have affected its development of central banking and currency in such a way as to make society less "stuck in its ways".
From childhood to adolescence I used to go on calls with my dad to fix air conditioners with my dad and we met a Polish couple. By this time I was 14 and communist, having read the motorcycle diaries. Anyway, I asked them about their experience growing up in communist Poland.
The wife was absolutely disgusted towards communism. Mind you, this couple lived in a pretty luxurious two story house. She associated communism with lack. The husband on the other hand, well, he wasn't communist, but he told me about how you didn't feel precarious, so to speak. How you knew you'd be able to go to college if you studied hard, how you'd get to go to summer camp, how you'd get an apartment when you got a job, and so on. Like you could kind of feel economically secure about your future in a way that you couldn't in capitalism.
I found this really interesting. Perhaps this is gendered because the husband (who worked) is more stressed out by economic precarity than the wife (who didn't), or who knows.
Anyway, I think Poland is a bad example here - I think they are not as nostalgic towards communism generally as, say, Russians are. Moldovans seem to even go beyond nostalgia, holding communism to just be a time when life was much better.
I don't have opinions on this, just my experiences based on a handful of conversations. In other words, less than anecdotal.
> How you knew you'd be able to go to college if you studied hard, how you'd get to go to summer camp, how you'd get an apartment when you got a job, and so on.
Except if you pissed off the communist party, then none of that for you and your children.
No way around the state-given requirements - want to work with computers and don't have a diploma for that? Well that's not possible - here's your shovel and get digging already, the state needs you! Want to move to another city and change careers? Well you're going to need good friends at important positions, and gift them dearly (and not just once to get what you want - you needed to build the relationship for a long time before that).
My grandfather was beating his children (my father and uncle) because if a child did or said the wrong thing at the wrong time, it was over for the whole family, and he felt like that's the only way to get the children to truly understand it. And even in 2013 - 25 years after the revolution - he was still afraid of the communist secret police.
My father was hit by a car when he was 12 and had a very seriously broken leg. My grandfather was taking care of him by himself, because the state's idea of taking care was locking him in a dark room with bars on the windows and using a medieval-like machine to stretch the leg, without any painkillers.
My grandfather took him to Yugoslavia to swim in the sea and that actually helped and saved his leg. However since it took months, the communist party decided to label him a parasite - punishable by prison. The local communist party cell voted about it and it didn't go through by one vote... that my grandfather got thanks to a bribe.
It was "good" for the people who fell in line - as in, they didn't have any special circumstances. Anything out of the ordinary and your life was way worse.
> The wife was absolutely disgusted towards communism. Mind you, this couple lived in a pretty luxurious two story house. She associated communism with lack.
Women had to use newspaper instead of menstrual pads. There was only very few styles of clothing/shoes available for women, while men had much more choice. Women didn't get the opportunities to be educated and work like men did, because it was expected they will stay at home and take care of children. It was a system made by men, for men. It's not surprising that a woman hated it.
> How you knew you'd be able to go to college if you studied hard, how you'd get to go to summer camp, how you'd get an apartment when you got a job, and so on. Like you could kind of feel economically secure about your future in a way that you couldn't in capitalism.
It's sort of like, communism is for conformists. If your goal in life is to be a mid-level bureaucrat who never speaks out of turn then your rent gets paid.
But it's exactly that security that makes it fall apart. There is no penalty for mediocrity so it proliferates.
Yes, that's absolutely possible. My company is making a b2b product. We have challenges and sometimes the scope of the new features can be huge. But I never felt big pressure.
As a Java developer, why the hell does Javascript still doesn't have a equivalent of Gradle or Maven? An extensible build tool that does it all and uses sensible defaults?
One issue with JS is completely different environments. There's very little in common between node.js and browser environment. For node.js you technically don't need a build system at all. For browser: it depends. Until recently you had to bundle your frontend into a single or few large files. Right now you technically can develop a frontend without a build system either, at least when it comes to your code, without dependencies.
Second reason is quickly moving APIs. Common.js, AMD, ESM. Those are foundational APIs and they were changing every few years. Just similar Java example: java modules were introduced in Java 9 and even today maven (AFAIK) does not utilize those at all. But java modules were infinitely more compatible with old code.
Third reason is TypeScript. It does require a "stripping types" step which could be counted as a compilation.
Fourth reason is community. I don't really know what's so special about JS community, but they deliver new tools and frameworks at alarming speed. There's no single source of truth. You can't really do anything with this chaos. Google develops angular, but it's not popular. Facebook develops React and it is popular but people still use other frameworks like vue from small companies.
10 years ago I thought that with time things will settle down. Now I'm not so sure.
As it has been said bazillion of times, the problem is that comments get outdated quickly. And yes, there is self descriptive code,and I'd wager 80 percent of the code is self descriptive. Comments should be reserved to describe something that might be surprising or not obvious. And for the apis.
Self commenting code gets outdated quickly too. Not the code itself, but the names. Just because a developer managed to embed their comments into function and variable names doesn't suddenly make them immune to staleness.
