I'm 45. Feels like there are 1000 directions I could go to improve my skills, from soft skills to different programming models and industries. As long as someone will pay me to, I will program for money, and when they stop paying me I'll keep on learning and coding for fun anyway.
Reflections of an “Old” Programmer
101–110 of 339 posts
Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's the last truly new thing you can think of? I'm interested because I am young (22) but have studied programming language paradigms and history and I also agree a lot of "new" stuff is old.
New stuff: Machine learning that works. Rust's borrow checker. 3D SLAM that works. Voice input that works. Lots of image processing stuff. Machines with large numbers of non-shared-memory CPUs that are actually useful. Doing non-graphics things in GPUs. The webcrap world is mostly churn, not improvement. Each "framework" puts developers on a treadmill keeping up with the changes. This provides steady employment for m…
Hasn't improved websites much? I remember the days of iframes and jquery monstrosities feigning as web "applications". The idea o a web-based office suite on the web would have been laughable 20 years ago.
My guess is you haven't actually built a real web application. The progress we've made in 20 years is astounding.
Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer
#103I get where the guy is coming from, I'm right there as an old guy. On the other hand, I think there is a bit too much fatalism in the article. Sometimes the kids are being stupid, and they need to be told so. The vast majority of web apps could be built in 1/10th the code with server-side rendering and intercooler.js. All this client-side crap is wasted when you are trying to get text from computer A into data-store…
posts like this are why I love HN. Intercooler looks cool and simple, and simple enough I can just re-write it. Angular is big enough that my eyes glaze over thinking about reading into it.
History repeats itself. I'm also "old" and when I saw the first presentation on Angular many years ago, the google engineer started by instantiating the controller from the view. So blatantly wrong, yet noone reacted. I saw the same sh*t go down with JSP, and though to myself that I couldn't be bothered with going through the same thing twice. So I left the presentation and never looked back. That decision served me well, very happy that I'm off that bandwagon. Still love new tech though, so I'm not backwards in that sense.
Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You're not solving hard engineering problems What, in your mind, makes an engineering problem hard? I've certainly had to dig out CS algorithms and 'clever' applications thereof to reach desirable performance out of some custom widgets in front end projects. I don't know if that can considered hard – hindsight tends to make everything seem easy – but it is certainly beyond pasting in a library like you describe. I…
>What, in your mind, makes an engineering problem hard? A problem which requires a high degree of creativity, intelligence, and technical ability, likely one which hasn't been solved before. You're right; it's a bit difficult (at least for me) to define, but we know it when we see it. Sending men to the moon was a hard engineering problem; implementing the UI for gmail was not. You speak of using 'CS algorithms' in y…
Lol, you think you are spending 40 hours a week at the forefront of problem solving new challenges?
Let's be real, for a moment. By your definition of a hard engineering problem, very few people are spending their time doing it. Virtually no one is doing it every day.
Why pick on front end dev specifically? You think the average backend dev building installing flask is facing a lot of unsolved problems? You think the average game dev is rendering 3D models in some new, magical way?
Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
That would take a novel. The overarching theme would end up being that you don't know as much about front-end development as you apparently think you do. Which is what I said in the first place anyhow.
So, another non-response response. I don't think you have a leg to stand on and you just enjoy feeling superior (for no good reason as far as I can tell.)
So far everything I've seen you post has been either a humblebrag or a serious need to feel superior to those of us that do the "easy" work.
How much are the big 4 paying those of us that don't have hard jobs?
Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
New stuff: Machine learning that works. Rust's borrow checker. 3D SLAM that works. Voice input that works. Lots of image processing stuff. Machines with large numbers of non-shared-memory CPUs that are actually useful. Doing non-graphics things in GPUs. The webcrap world is mostly churn, not improvement. Each "framework" puts developers on a treadmill keeping up with the changes. This provides steady employment for m…
Hasn't improved websites much? I remember the days of iframes and jquery monstrosities feigning as web "applications". The idea o a web-based office suite on the web would have been laughable 20 years ago. My guess is you haven't actually built a real web application. The progress we've made in 20 years is astounding.
In 2005, I worked on a crud app framework that used data binding driven from the server and doing minimal partial updates of the web page in a way that is much more efficient both in resources and development time than anything currently mainstream. That was the second version of something that used XML islands to do data fetching before XHR was introduced by Microsoft. IMO most mainstream JS dev is just barely catching up with what smart devs were doing in individual shops.
Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer
#107If somebody had found himself in Edinburgh in 1986 and bumped into a tall gentleman called Robin, who was a bit familiar with this new-fangled thing called computers, and had asked Robin, what kind of programming language should one learn to use these computer thingies, what would Robin have said? Not sure, but maybe something along the lines of "well ... there are many interesting languages, and different languages…
Haskell isn't quite “mainstream”, so I'm taking the liberty to add innovations from other “not quite mainstream” languages:
- Hygienic macros as a scalable tool for extending and redefining languages, and furthermore, making the extensions interoperable with each other (Racket).
- Language support for building reliable massively distributed systems in spite of individual node failures (Erlang).
- General-purpose programming with growable arrays, hash tables and no other data structures (okay, these ones are very mainstream).
Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
"but there's no real technical challenge in front end stuff." oh boy, you are so wrong! as an old fart having spent a number of years building UIs, can tell you, this is hard! information layout, controls, flow - it can be tangled into a total CF, or it can be seamless. you are not pasting libs on top of libs - that is the job of a monkey, front or back end alike. normal devs start their day with talking to end users…
You're describing a task which is more frustrating than technically challenging. Nothing you described requires a high degree of intelligence or training, only time. Of course some are better than others at it, but that's true of anything. Think; designing the CV systems for self driving cars (since that's a hot topic at the moment) vs designing a UI which works seamlessly across browsers. One is a real, honest to Go…
by UI design I do not mean cross browser compatibility, but rather an understanding of the underlying data and operations on it, which involves familiarity with the business domain. this is hard. putting stuff on the screen is not hard. I am OK with tables and gifs. with all due respect your contempt for people who build UI (and clean the toilets) and misunderstanding or general principles of engineering are sad (pardon my microagression).
Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer
#109I'm a bit older than the author. Every time I feel like I'm "out of touch" with the hip new thing, I take a weekend to look into it. I tend to discover that the core principles are the same, this time someone has added another C to MVC; or the put their spin on an API for doing X; or you can tell they didn't learn from the previous solution and this new one misses the mark, but it'll be three years before anyone noti…
> Every time I feel like I'm "out of touch" with the hip new thing, I take a weekend to look into it. I tend to discover that the core principles are the same, this time someone has added another C to MVC; or the put their spin on an API for doing X; But that is only for the 'abstractions' they implement; the details are another thing. I feel the only thing that really changed is that now big companies with PR / mark…
> React
Similarly on Flux: I implemented an immutable store where only incoming messages change state and changes are distributed to widgets in 2005.
Around the same time we started using feature flags in our application.
We also did CI around 2000. Didn't call it that of course.
Never did it myself but heard of TDD long before it became a thing. Again under a different name.
Erlang. Superior technology that forms the heart of new kid on the block Elixir. Built long before the Bay Area CS grads re-invented ageism and claimed young people to 'be just smarter'.
Sure some things are new, but there's just no respect for experience any more.
Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer
#110I'm also a bit older and have had a 10 year academic career followed by 10 years of software contracting. The biggest difference between academia and current web development - not sure of "other" software development like embedded code, systems languages - that in academia:
0. you went to school, did some homework (not that it's all so useful, but at least you have a background in what you are doing, and a common denominator / language with your peers)
1. before you start something new, you do a thorough review, or read a lot of review papers, so you do know what was done before and why
2. you do get mentorship, even if Phd students / postdocs often complain about the lack of it. But directly or indirectly you do test your ideas on people who know more and who have been there longer
3. you start to send preliminary workshop / conference papers for review, and also funding applications
4. at this point you at least know why SQL - or whatever else - is there, and in some cases you might even learn some humility
I guess my conclusions are trivial. Many of us have amazing technical skill but our education and experience is not on par. It results in a lot of waste, of time and quality.