The critical difference I think is deterministic vs non-deterministic. A compiler isn’t the correct comparison, it’s reading out your desired specs to a team member who does the actual engineering work.
> it’s reading out your desired specs to a team member who does the actual engineering work
Congratulations, you just discovered ”delegating”. I hope you don’t have anyone reporting to you at the moment because if this simple concept sounds demeaning to you… wow.
I was described by a slightly mad client as “the Harry Potter of front-end development” after I’d pulled off a particular effect my designer had come up with. (They then proceeded to give the entire dev team Harrods hampers and failed to pay the company when we sent an invoice.)
I built a mildly responsive site in 2007 using transparent PNGs overlaying a photo in the header, only for it to turn out that the client’s IT policy blocked the PNG loader. In the end I had to explain to them that everyone else would see the site normally, and they’d have to put up with it until IE7 launched.
When working in the public sector in 2016 I had a person seriously annoyed with me for dropping IE6 support when all their libraries (as in buildings with books) were still on it.
Healthcare industry here. I couldn't drop IE6 until COVID.
Lots of doctors offices and others were still running it. But when the virus slashed our staff, we finally got permission to drop the extra work of supporting IE.
Mostly Internet Explorer 7 and 8, some Mozilla Firefox builds. That’s what I had in mind when I said “old browsers.” The last project I worked on that still had to support browsers from that era was in 2018.
Sounds about right. Looking back I’d already moved IE7 to “functional” support in late 2016[1] and was planning to do the same to 8 and 9 in the not too distant future.
They really just need to mandate that new datacenter construction uses closed loop cooling, and must provide an upfront investment sufficient to add enough carbon free energy to the grid to power it. That would, of course, make it much more expensive, but maybe it'd be enough to make investors consider whether lighting trillions of dollars on fire is really the best use of their money.
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