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peter_l_downs | 1 year ago

I think a lot of new entrants to previously-well-explored spaces tend to label themselves as "modern" in order to signify that there is something new about their approach.

For instance, I have a migrations library that I descibre as "modern" because it is designed for a continuous deployment environment where you're automatically running migrations on container startup — there are tons of existing popular migrations libraries, but none of them work this way because they were written in the era that you'd manually run sql commands in prod. I say "modern" so that if anyone finds my library, they realize that it was created recently based on more recent dev/ops trends.

Maybe I should drop the "modern"? I do see a lot of people describe their code as "minimal" or "clean", which is pretty meaningless to me, so I get that "modern" could come across that way as well.

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tomwphillips|1 year ago

Interesting. My take is more negative than that: modern indicates they are unaware of prior art and the key challenges in the particular space, and consequently the software is buggy and/or fundamentally broken its approach.

I think you should drop “modern” for something like “designed for CI”, “CI-first” or “CI-native”. It’s more informative.

skeledrew|1 year ago

Another issue with using such relative qualifiers IMO is that they become meaningless over time, as the namespace becomes polluted as every few years something addressing some problem with a potentially different approach is given a similar qualifier.

Aeolun|1 year ago

Maybe? I think, everything else being equal, that “modern” is still a relatively positive signal to me.