Are you suffering from developer ALS?

The rapid development of software development technologies has caused developers around the world to live in fear for a long time, and many programmers have suffered from developer's amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

Recently, TC columnist Jon Evan wrote an article pointing out that even for a senior developer who is proficient in eight development languages, the sudden popularity of JavaScript is enough to make his limbs go cold and tremble.

Most developers suffer from this ALS, and there is no cure.

The amount of choices available to developers today is insane and inhumane. Evan has been paid well over the past few years to develop applications in Java, Objective-C, C, C++, Python, Ruby, Javascript, PHP, etc. on SQL/key-value/document databases (e.g. MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, BigTable, Redis, Memcached, etc.), but he has never gotten over the fear that he has never used Erlang, Clojure, Rust, Go, C#, Scala, Haskell, Julia, Scheme, Swiftly, or Ocaml, which makes Evan feel guilty.

Evan admitted that he had suffered from developer's syndrome and was unable to keep up with the rapid development of the software industry, which made him feel paralyzed inside.

Any of the development languages ​​mentioned above has countless development frameworks, toolkits, and code libraries, enough to blow your mind. It would take months to seriously evaluate all the JavaScript frameworks and libraries available today, let alone understand Ruby, iOS frameworks, or NewSQL/NoSQL databases, Hadoop, Spark, Google Dataflow, or Avro\Thrift..

Fortunately, the mobile development ecosystem has settled on the two major platforms of Android and iOS. This sounds good, but in fact, developers still need to face some cross-border platforms such as Xamarin, or cross-platform HTML development environments, such as PhoneGap or Sencha.

The backend deployment of mobile development is even more maddening. Evan has experience in deploying backend systems on platforms such as Heroku, Amazon AWS, Google App Engine, Google Compute Engine, Parse, etc., but has never tried OpenStack, Force.com, Azure, AppFog and a large number of AWS services.

Evan*** pointed out that developers are overwhelmed by the dazzling array of development languages, tools, frameworks, and platforms. The time cost of selection, evaluation, and trial and error is very high. When you start working hard, you find that a teenager can develop faster or even better than you using PHP and Swift with emoji support.

Nowadays, whether you choose to start work with a language and tools that you or your team understands, or spend a lot of energy pursuing better technologies and tools, it means huge risks and costs for developers. This is the root cause of today's developer ALS, and there is no cure.