I roughly concur with the OP's thoughts on the matter. Which makes programming more than just a profession to me. It is, if you will, a way of life.
Reflections of an “Old” Programmer
151–160 of 339 posts
Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The progress we've made in 20 years is astounding. And yet "open mail in new tab" in Gmail has been dead for at least a couple of years now. In fact, I'd say that "open link in new tab" is dead on most of the new web "applications", I'm actually surprised when it works. The same goes for the "go back with backspace" thingie, which Google just killed for no good reason. Copy-paste is also starting to become a nuisan…
'Back with backspace' was changed to CMD+left-arrow assumedly because a simple backspace can change the page unexpectedly for someone who thinks they are in a text field.
'Back with backspace' has been standard in the Windows file manager for as long as I can remember. Given that the file manager was the moral precursor to the browser of today it would have been nice to retain it.
Back with backspace!
Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer
#153The second advice, investing in durable skills, is key. In addition to what the author mentions, I would point out that more change happens higher in the stack. There is relatively little change at the x86, C, operating system level, entrenched protocols. But once you start getting into the higher level languages, and in particular web, the churn is much greater. So personally I'm trying to stay away from those higher levels.
Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Another way to look at it is that, even after 20 years and huge investment from serious companies, we can still only build poor substitutes for desktop applications. Don't get me wrong, it is amazing progress given the technology you have to fight. But in absolute terms it's not that great.
I really am very glad to hear someone writing in public what I've been mentioning to colleagues and all who would listen for the past few years.
Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The progress we've made in 20 years is astounding. And yet "open mail in new tab" in Gmail has been dead for at least a couple of years now. In fact, I'd say that "open link in new tab" is dead on most of the new web "applications", I'm actually surprised when it works. The same goes for the "go back with backspace" thingie, which Google just killed for no good reason. Copy-paste is also starting to become a nuisan…
'Back with backspace' was changed to CMD+left-arrow assumedly because a simple backspace can change the page unexpectedly for someone who thinks they are in a text field.
I know the reasons, I just think they're stupid. They've replaced one simple key-press with two non-intuitive ones. On my keyboard I have to move both my hands down in order to press the 2 keys, the backspace key was very easy to reach without moving my hands.
On top of that I actually have no "CMD" key on my keyboard, I have a "Ctrl" key which I assume is the same as "CMD" (I also have a key with the Windows logo which I had assumed it was the CMD key, I was wrong). KISS has gone out of the window long ago.
Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer
#156Earlier 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…
Thank you for the explanation. Some of those I've known about (but they didn't come to mind in my original comment), and some are definitely things that I would've taken for granted (coming from a native application programming background). Those are all features added to web standards and implemented in browsers though, right?
They're all in web standards. Browser support varies but is generally pretty good for most of them.
They're taken for granted in native application programming, yes, but the big advantage of browsers is the zero-cost, on-demand install. This is a bit less of an advantage than it was in 2003 (where new Windows & Flash security vulnerabilities were discovered almost every day, and nobody dared install software less their computer be pwned), but there are still many applications where getting a user to install an app is a non-starter.
Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer
#157I'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…
There's an eternal war between "avoid reinventing the wheel" and ahistorical "not invented here", isn't there?
Because the profession is so heavily skewed towards the young and self-taught, people don't seem to know about the solutions of a decade ago and their merits and demerits. This is partly why software componentisation as "parts catalog" has never really taken off. It's easier to reimplement or independently reinvent something than it is to find the right existing solution and learn it.
It's as if it were easier to turn every bolt you needed on a lathe than to go to the shop for them.
(The closest might be npm, but then we see what an engineer would call an excessively large bill-of-materials, as trivial projects pull in thousands of dependencies)
Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer
#158I started programming when I was 7, I'm 45 next month :) The one thing in the programming world that is almost 100% applicable to almost every article like this ( and many other topics ) is..... it depends. I'm fortunate in that for most all my career I have spanned many technologies from embedded systems to the latest crazes on the web. Mostly what becomes redundant is language syntax and framework. If your programm…
spend a lot of time creating solutions that shuffle data from a DB to a screen then shuffle data back into a DB.... then a majority of your programming skills will become redundant relatively quickly
This is kind of astonishing, isn't it? When this kind of "CRUD" data bureaucracy has been going on for decades. There's no fully general solution yet? We're doomed to keep reinventing it regularly?
Debugging is really one of the core skills of programming that should be explicitly taught.
Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer
#159I agree mostly with the author. The only quibble I might have is this: We realize that it'll require real effort to just maintain our level proficiency - and without that effort, we could be worse at our jobs in 5 years than we are today. If by "worse", you mean more forgetful of the details of latest fads? Sure. But definitely not less able to put together solutions (Not if you've been spending your time doing that,…
> I just don't think they know what the hell they're talking about.
Same here. But if you tell people their big wide world looks like a rather small box from your perspective, you'll discover that killing the messenger is very common. Even among folks who consider themselves educated and enlightened.
Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer
#160Hm. 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.…
When it's easy / boring as hell why not make the computer do it?
There is a lot of tasks with enough variation to resist being automated (or at least they require much higher skill to pull it off) but they are boring as hell after you do a few instances.