Closed Poll: Would you code on the cloud



  • I was reading this article and the author makes a very broad affirmation.

    Programmers have taken to the Cloud like a duck to water. Coding on Cloud is a hot new trend that is all set to become the norm in the future.

    So, would you code on the cloud:

    • Yes
    • No
    • Maybe
    • What's the cloud?


  • To me, coding on the cloud sounds better.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    If I was told I had to. I'm not really a fan of IaaS/SaaS.



  • With what if I may ask? I haven't seen anyone coding on the cloud.



  • I code the cloud (the infrastructure software running it to be more specific). So I don't think I'd mind coding on the cloud either (whatever that really means).
    It is a hot trend though and lots of money to be made.



  • People selling cloud claim cloud is the future. Who would have thought.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    No me either, I wasn't aware that an IDE on the cloud actually existed until now. I'm just not a fan of the SaaS idea in general at work.



  • Oh, sorry, I thought you meant you were forced, as of right now, on using one.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    Nah, just that it's the only time that I would.



  • No I've never heard anyone else say that. It sounds better to me then in the cloud. Am I alone in thinking that?

    Edit: But I see they are now 😄


  • Garbage Person

    I want to offer Offering stuff as a service as a service (OSaaSaaS). So I can market my Cloud Cloud!



  • Missing option: CLOUD_NOT_FOUND


  • FoxDev

    Software to run on the cloud? Yes (it's my day job).
    Actually writing it on the cloud? Fuck off.



  • @Arantor said:

    CLOUD_NOT_FOUND

    Yeap, that's the first thing to cross my mind when pondering on this.

    @RaceProUK said:

    Actually writing it on the cloud? Fuck off.

    So, is that a no or a maybe?


  • FoxDev

    @Eldelshell said:

    @RaceProUK said:
    Actually writing it on the cloud? Fuck off.

    So, is that a no or a maybe?

    I'm not sure how 'fuck off' can be interpreted as 'maybe' :P



  • If you build a website and deploy it at a hosting provider, you're on the cloud. I was one of millions doing that in the 1990's. It's a stupid assertion that, although true, says absolutely nothing other than the infrastructure of the web now has a new name.



  • @RaceProUK said:

    Actually writing it on the cloud? Fuck off

    I work for a cloud provider - all of our desktops are virtual. I guess that might be what they mean by coding on the cloud. That's also a concept older than the term cloud, but is something that's rarely a choice made a programmer.



  • @RaceProUK said:

    I'm not sure how 'fuck off' can be interpreted as 'maybe'

    That's what the judge said.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    I've been writing cloud software (a mixture of PaaS and SaaS) for about 8 or 9 years now. But Coding on Cloud is going to continue to be terrible for me until network infrastructure becomes a lot more ubiquitous than it is now. Two examples:

    1. Can I use it on my regular commute? No. The mobile network signal is very patchy (all those nasty tunnels and railway cuttings).
    2. Can I use it when I'm flying to the US? No. Network signal over the mid-Atlantic is (AFAIK) non-existent.

    Local tools, while imperfect, have the advantage of at least not requiring a perfect network to function.


    I remember, long ago, a system where all applications and home directories were served out of NFS. (It was some version of Solaris.) This worked very well for quite a long time, but from time to time everything would hang. Everything. And it became more and more frequent. It turned out that as the load of users increased, the network would get stressed and the NFS server would start seeing some errors. Which made things seize up and then spontaneously reboot. The pause? That was while the disks were all fscked after an unscheduled reboot.

    I made things a bit better for myself by copying critical applications (IIRC, the X server, window manager and a terminal emulator) into local temp space during login, so at least I didn't have a total lockup when things crumbled, but it still didn't help a lot as access to my home directory was still hanging. (Other people were having it worse.) Things only got better once ops split everything up, with applications served out of a distributed set of NFS mirrors and user home directories split over a cluster of servers.

    The point? Relying on a remote system is all very well when it is up and accessible, but when it goes down or the route to it crumbles, you're hosed and there's nothing you can do except bitch about it.


  • BINNED

    Read the article, or at least the first part, it's not really worth reading the whole thing. They're definitely talking about actually writing it on the cloud using a web-based IDE.




  • FoxDev

    Coding for the cloud (work: Salesforce/GP Dymanics)

    Coding On the cloud (Cloud9 IDE c9.io)

    coding with the cloid... havent tried that yet. how would i get it to press the right keys?



  • I don't see the point to it.

    I definitely would code to cloud, meaning, anything I write that needs massive storage or distributed hosting, I'd code so that it was easy to put on a cloud provider.

    But running my programming tools on a cloud VM? Why? My local machine's faster and more convenient.


  • FoxDev

    @blakeyrat said:

    I don't see the point to it.

    I definitely would code to cloud, meaning, anything I write that needs massive storage or distributed hosting, I'd code so that it was easy to put on a cloud provider.

    But running my programming tools on a cloud VM? Why? My local machine's faster and more convenient.


    Me and @blakeyrat agree on something.

    Is the world ending? :)



  • One very competent guy I know codes PHP and node.js using Cloud9, I think. Says he likes to be able to access his project from home, work or any other machine, and just continue from where he left off. Also, he likes to work on Windows, but needs to target a Linux environment (the old pain-point of Windows' lack of a good *nix shell, discussed before).

    Good points, but

    • There are much better ways to synchronize work between machines (dropbox, Google Drive, VCS, flash drives... or you can just carry a laptop)
    • You can set up some automatic deployment to the VM or dev server, and run your code there

    But all these things require additional effort to set up. He doesn't seem to care enough to invest the effort.

    Conclusion: cloud development's main use case are developers who are OK with a good-enough dev environment and just want to get right into coding, without messing around much with the setup.

    Fair enough. Just not for me.


  • BINNED

    @cartman82 said:

    cloud claim cloud is the future.

    And the past. We're in the process of taking our mainframe application wrapping it in something shiny en webby and selling it as a SAAS solution. After all it doesn't run in on the servers of the client, right? At the core is however still the same beast from the '80ies (and the reason the company was founded). Not entirely the same actually. The beast recently got transplanted into a new house. So we show up in the statistics as one of those strange companies that bought a new mainframe.


  • BINNED

    @RaceProUK said:

    I'm not sure how 'fuck off' can be interpreted as 'maybe'

    Ask management?


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Eldelshell said:

    I was reading this article and the author makes a very broad affirmation.

    In the context of the article (which I finally got around to looking through fully) it's not as broad a claim as all that. The idiot author is also singing the praises of Swift and Wyvern (when I googled for it, I had to go to the fifth page of results for the first relevant hit) and claiming that “GPUs will replace CPUs”, and that:

    if there ever was a programming language that has always adapted to the changing needs and demands of its users, it is Java
    Speaking as someone who uses Java quite a bit, I think the page is one that can be discounted in its entirety. If it says anything that's right, it's entirely by chance.

  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    A friend writes his best code when stoned off his ass. That is his version of coding on the cloud (of smoke).



  • Yes, pretty much the whole article is utter bullshit click-bait, but I thought: "I like vim, most don't, so maybe I'm missing on this new fad"



  • @Intercourse said:

    A friend writes his best code when stoned off his ass. That is his version of coding on the cloud (of smoke).

    His version of the Ballmer Peak?


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    Yeah, except you tend to fall asleep or go fuck off and watch crappy sci-fi before you start writing bad code.



  • @Intercourse said:

    Yeah, except you tend to fall asleep or go fuck off and watch crappy sci-fi before you start writing bad code.

    Wouldn't know. I know I figured out the Ballmer Peak for alcohol however.


  • :belt_onion:

    @cartman82 said:

    codes PHP

    @cartman82 said:

    He doesn't seem to care enough to invest the effort.

    The PHP devs are lazy thread is ↙



  • @darkmatter said:

    @cartman82 said:
    He doesn't seem to care enough to invest the effort.

    The PHP devs are lazy thread is ↙

    Hey, not all of us are lazy.



  • I love buzzwords. I would prefer to code on the cloud for an enterprise big data web 3.0 social networking service.


  • FoxDev

    @Dogsworth said:

    I love buzzwords. I would prefer to code on the cloud for an enterprise big data web 3.0 social networking service.

    Just don't forget you have to synergise the deliverables. Or something.



  • I HATE the world cloud. It's useless marking jargon and can mean literally anything you want anymore.


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    I could not agree more. When clients ask me what the cloud is, the only reply I have been able to reasonably come up with is: "The cloud is nothing, the cloud is everything. It is a meaningless marketing term that only makes web services seem magical." What I really want to do though is scream: "It is a useless fucking term dreamed up by some marketing asshole when he saw a Visio diagram where a cloud pictograph represented the WAN link on a network diagram."



  • @Intercourse said:

    It is a useless fucking term dreamed up by some marketing asshole when he saw a Visio diagram where a cloud pictograph represented the WAN link on a network diagram.

    And that chimp coming up with half-baked ideas probably makes twice as much as the developers actually doing work.



  • As much as I hate buzzwords, I think the "Cloud" is very specific IMO on what it is. Online services outside your network.

    The perfect example for this is gmail and all the companies ditching Exchange + Exchange Admin for a cloud solution.

    OTOH, people simply throw the "cloud" term to many things not cloud .



  • Like these silly things?



  • Those aren't clouds but fluffy things



  • Fluffy things are the best ☁!
    totally not likebaiting @accalia~




  • FoxDev

    @aliceif said:

    <small><small><small><small><small><small><small><small><small><small><small><small><small><small><small><small><small><small><small>totally not likebaiting @accalia~

    I see what you did there and refuse to be.... are those clouds fluffy? i love fluffy!



  • @Eldelshell said:

    As much as I hate buzzwords, I think the "Cloud" is very specific IMO on what it is. Online services outside your network.

    How is "Cloud" different from the traditional word for doing this: "Hosted"? The day the word "Cloud" was invented, it wasn't invented to describe something that currently had no description, it was invented to make a long established way of doing business look like a new hot thing.

    There isn't even really any innovation behind the trend of "going to the cloud". There has been a business need for it forever, but connectivity has only recently come to the point where you can get reliable high-speed connectivity almost anywhere for a reasonable price. If one of us went back in time to 1999 with the source code for a virtualization platform and a suite of cloud products, we would go broke due to a lack of customers.



  • I agree, there's nothing innovative here. What I meant is that hosting is more related to platforms like eMail, FTP or HTTP servers. Cloud relates more to services. You don't pay for a GMail server but for an email service. Also, sometimes hosting doesn't involve maintenance, on SaaS that maintenance is included in the price.



  • The biggest cloud provider on earth, Amazon, sells more IaaS than anything else. "The Cloud" is a huge chunk of virtual machines with a few SaaS solutions thrown in. Also, 80% of SaaS solutions are simply the provider running a set of servers for you. Almost nobody gives a shit about PaaS because all the PaaS vendors are going for lock-in.

    In addition, software as a service is the one part of the cloud that has changed the least since the term was coined. For example, people have been using PayChex and ADP for payroll processing forever.


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    @Eldelshell said:

    As much as I hate buzzwords, I think the "Cloud" is very specific IMO on what it is. Online services outside your network.

    The perfect example for this is gmail and all the companies ditching Exchange + Exchange Admin for a cloud solution.

    You say specific, I say nebulous. It covers anything that is hosted by someone else, and that makes the term complete bullshit. When clients ask me, "Do you think we should be in the cloud?", they are asking because they have no fucking idea what they are talking about, they just know it is a buzzword that is being thrown about everywhere. The buzzword is complete nonsense. Nothing but marketing jargon. It means nothing, because it means everything.


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