Reflections of an “Old” Programmer • Hacker News Board

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#121

Post by minipci1321 » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 7:13 AM UTC

Very surprised and honestly, even shocked. Not sure what to think about this post, and I am good deal older and been working longer too. Maybe learning is hard for him? He has 2 degrees.

In his sig he says he likes to write about making decision, and not a word about intuition, how it builds up in you over years from that seemingly pointless going round in circles? Very little about how we improve in relationships with people (going from 0% skill for many of us), and accomplish even more by making others pull in right direction?

I have never wanted to do anything else than what I do. Differently, yes, but no farming / opening a restaurant or an art gallery. Maybe that is the real culprit?

Last thing, knowledge does not "afford increased measure of respect and compensation". Adding value, helping people, and solving their problem does. If you have this trail on your CV, maybe that long list of the technologies is less needed.

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#122

Post by lmb » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 7:22 AM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #116

khedoros1 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never built a web application of any description. As a user, what are the improvements that I should be looking for that have been introduced over the past 10 years? It was longer ago than that that AJAX started getting big, and as far as I can tell, that was really the last key innovation for most apps: Being able to asynchronously load data and modify the DOM when it becomes available. I'm aware of other thing…

There's actually a fair number of new features in the web today that you couldn't do in 2006 - offline access, push notifications, real-time communications (without a hack that breaks on most firewalls), smooth transitions, background computation, the history API, OS clipboard support, accelerometer access, geolocation access, multi-touch, etc. Few websites use them effectively yet, at least in a way that benefits th…

My first install of Netscape Communicator had an offline mode, and one of my colleagues recent told me how they had fully working live cross-browser video conferencing in 98. Their biggest competitor was WebEx, which is still around.

I think many of us underestimate what was possible to do in browsers. What has happened is that these features have been democratised: what took them months to build I can now pull of using WebRTC in the space of a weekend.

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#123

Post by tobltobs » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 7:23 AM UTC

combatentropy wrote: post #48

glandium wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How exactly are you contradicting that sentence you're quoting? In fact, it seems to me you're confirming it. He didn't say that everything a programmer knows will be useless in 10 years, but that half will. You're only enumerating the half that won't.

I agree with the grandparent, that the writer overstated how much in ten years will be useless. It was almost 20 years ago that I first learned HTML, and since then neither it nor hardly anything else I have learned has decayed: CSS, native JavaScript, jQuery, PHP, PostgreSQL, Apache, and Bash. But I guess it depends on what you try learning.

Things you have learned, but decayed: IE6 CSS fixes, Apache1 configuration file syntaxes, PostgreSQl getOrCreate surrogates, Jquery, ...

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#124

Post by nostrademons » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 7:28 AM UTC

lmb wrote: post #122

nostrademons wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's actually a fair number of new features in the web today that you couldn't do in 2006 - offline access, push notifications, real-time communications (without a hack that breaks on most firewalls), smooth transitions, background computation, the history API, OS clipboard support, accelerometer access, geolocation access, multi-touch, etc. Few websites use them effectively yet, at least in a way that benefits th…

My first install of Netscape Communicator had an offline mode, and one of my colleagues recent told me how they had fully working live cross-browser video conferencing in 98. Their biggest competitor was WebEx, which is still around. I think many of us underestimate what was possible to do in browsers. What has happened is that these features have been democratised: what took them months to build I can now pull of us…

My very first software internship ever was getting streaming video to work for the Air Force Center Daily at MITRE Corp, back in 1997. I did it with RealPlayer, Layers in Netscape (remember them?) and DHTML in IE.

The thing is - the polish matters. You can't do viable consumer apps until they actually work like the consumer wants, which is often decades after the technology preview. You could emulate websockets using IFRAMES, script tags, and long-polling back in the late 90s, but a.) you'd get cut off with the slightest network glitch and b.) you'd spend so much time setting up your transport layer that you go bankrupt before writing the app.

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#125

Post by indy » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 7:35 AM UTC

jhall1468 wrote: post #102

Animats wrote: post #100

Earlier 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.

Do the web based office suites use these new libraries and frameworks? (React, Angular, Webpack etc) Genuine question as I thought that companies like Google use their own in house libraries like Google Closure which have been slowly built up over many years.

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#126

Post by bostonvaulter2 » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 7:37 AM UTC

thesmallestcat wrote: post #2

Hm. The author works for a web/mobile development agency and uses React Native and GWT as examples of the new and the old, respectively. I hope it isn't news to anybody here that this sort of work is a race to the bottom and has such turnover precisely because it's mostly being done by junior developers. Linux systems programming arcana, for instance, doesn't disintegrate so quickly as the ten years the author cites.…

But one of the downsides of doing Linux systems programming is that it is much more niche and really restricts your options for employers as well as where to live.

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#127

Post by place1 » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 7:38 AM UTC

ams6110 wrote: post #22

To me, it seems a bit like JSPs of 15 years ago, with all the logic in the presentation code, but I'm "old", so I assume I just don't "get it". No, you get it. It's the people who get excited about stuff we tried and abandoned two decades ago that don't get it.

So i'm young. What makes JSPs bad, why aren't you using them anymore and what are you using instead?

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#128

Post by tobltobs » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 7:46 AM UTC

carsongross wrote: post #25

I 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…

Thank you for mentioning intercooler.js. After skimming through the docs for five minutes I am sure I will use this regularly from now on.

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#129

Post by mafribe » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 7:49 AM UTC

Animats wrote: post #100

sotojuan wrote: post #28

Earlier 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…

   Program verification

We really tried. It's hard, and verification of even simple programs easily hits the worst cases in automation. It will take another decade before program verification is digestible by mainstream programmers.

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#130

Post by szines » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 7:51 AM UTC

Nice article. Thank you. We should never stop learning...

Interesting, I found this writing also, which is about new frontend frameworks: https://medium.com/@edemkumodzi/how-to-choose-a-javascript-f...

About How to choose a framework... and it suggest, if you already an experienced dev, who prefer OO patterns and you believe in serious computer science, you should use Ember.js. If you are a designer, Angular is good for you. However, if you are young and you don't have any experience, go with React, because it is easy to learn... like PHP back in time... I'm afraid React will be the new PHP, because we will see a full generation growing up with mixing logic with view, and they follow this kind of patterns... :)