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< Don't let the sun... catch you oscillating between work dread and work guilt

I'm only in my early forties, and I've come to see software development in a corporate setting (especially webdev) as an exercise in trying to build a cathedral on quicksand with resources better suited to building a trailer park. It's thankless work best automated or outsourced.

I'm currently trying to get my head around React to stay "relevant" at my day job, and I find myself wanting to recoil in horror. Whoever came up with JSX, which involves embedding HTML and CSS inside JavaScript, either didn't know or had forgotten how shitty it was to have style information embedded in HTML in the 1990s before CSS became a thing.

I know a lot of techies like to denigrate liberal arts education, but I think the ones who do are the ones who need it most. They have no sense of history and no grounding in philosophy, which makes them vulnerable to hucksters (like Curtis Yarvin) selling dead ideologies that we left behind for good reason.

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~inquiry wrote (thread):

I've never felt so much like an ecstatic choir, preacher! ;-)

My main, underlying issue with software development is I've long felt the species missed a huge opportunity to wind up truly computer literate, instead becoming dumbed-down-addicted to "Windows" and GUIs (browsers included, of course) in general. Rather than really understanding what they're doing in a reasonable command-line-favorable OS/environment, people have come to imagine that pointing/clicking/dragging/dropping constitutes computer prowess.

By now, most might have understood how to script/automate/integrate otherwise disparate computational thingies for themselves. Instead, unless/until a GUI app has functionality buried in some ridiculous - not to mention ever *frustratingly* changing - menu hierarchy, people are at the mercy of waiting until one does, completely beholden to someone else making such kinda/sorta/maybe/not-really what they need.

And that makes me very sad.