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Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

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Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#161

Post by progx »

"The doctor at 40 doesn't seem to be worried about discovering that all his knowledge of the vascular system is about to evaporate in favor of some new organizing theory. The same goes for the lawyer, the plumber, the accountant, or the english teacher."

This is the point you think in a wrong direction. All of this Jobs need a basic knowledge (a developer need it too) and all auf this Jobs need tools or regulations to do the job.

A doctor need knowledge about new medics, new instruments. A good teacher teaches not the same way for 40 years. ...

React or whatever are tools. And yes, the most tools reinvent the wheel and this is not development specific, this is valid for many jobs.

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#162

Post by [deleted] »

tempodox wrote: post #159
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #150

I 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.

[deleted]

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#163

Post by andyjohnson0 »

delinka wrote: post #13

I'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…

Late forties developer here.

> Every time I feel like I'm "out of touch" with the hip new thing, I take a weekend to look into it.

There's my problem right away. I can't just "take a weekend" to learn some new shiny thing. I have a partner and children who I want to be with at the weekend. And I'd rather go climbing or hiking or even just go out on my bike, than learn another damn api. Twenty years ago I had evenings and weekends to burn. Now I don't.

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#164

Post by toxik »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #163
delinka wrote: post #13

I'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…

Late forties developer here. > Every time I feel like I'm "out of touch" with the hip new thing, I take a weekend to look into it. There's my problem right away. I can't just "take a weekend" to learn some new shiny thing. I have a partner and children who I want to be with at the weekend. And I'd rather go climbing or hiking or even just go out on my bike, than learn another damn api. Twenty years ago I had evenings…

I'm 26, and modulo the kids, this is how I feel as well. I've been programming professionally for almost ten years, and I feel less and less pressure to keep up with the latest packages on NPM or whatever the flavor of the month is. It's much more interesting to know what has been tried before, and why that didn't stick. Like this newLISP thing, why should we suddenly start writing Lisp? The language is older than C, for god's sake.

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#165

Post by fao_ »

toxik wrote: post #164
andyjohnson0 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Late forties developer here. > Every time I feel like I'm "out of touch" with the hip new thing, I take a weekend to look into it. There's my problem right away. I can't just "take a weekend" to learn some new shiny thing. I have a partner and children who I want to be with at the weekend. And I'd rather go climbing or hiking or even just go out on my bike, than learn another damn api. Twenty years ago I had evenings…

I'm 26, and modulo the kids, this is how I feel as well. I've been programming professionally for almost ten years, and I feel less and less pressure to keep up with the latest packages on NPM or whatever the flavor of the month is. It's much more interesting to know what has been tried before, and why that didn't stick. Like this newLISP thing, why should we suddenly start writing Lisp? The language is older than C,…

NewLisp is over 25 years old.

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#166

Post by dunkelheit »

raarts wrote: post #112
jhall1468 wrote: post #102

Earlier 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.

I call BS. The progress that was made in the late eighties/early nineties was much more astounding. Going from character screens to fully event driven, windowed graphics mode was a much greater and more impressive change in a shorter time-frame. the that time you had to learn a lot of new stuff in a short time too.

Well, in early 2000-s suddenly most of computers in the world became connected to each other and then after some time everybody got a powerful and networked computer in their pocket. I think this is pretty impressive too.

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#167

Post by douche »

pjc50 wrote: post #157
delinka wrote: post #13

I'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 r…

That's the constant battle. "Oh, this library kind of does what I want, but this behavior kind of sucks, and this bug hasn't been fixed... Do I shoehorn it in and write all the glue and adapter code? Fuck it, I'll just start over, and build yet another grid component, or datepicker, or rich-text editor."

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#168

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

gt2 wrote: post #143
paganel wrote: post #136

Earlier 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.

Alt + left arrow still goes back on ff and Alt + right arrow goes forward. It's been that way for quite a while.

The outlook Web app on the other hand sometimes blocks backspace from deleting a character, presumably to stop you inadvertently jumping back from inside a text field. This is only "on" when inside a text field in the first place, so if MS could do it, I don't see why Google's better engineers couldn't.

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#169

Post by [deleted] »

gt2 wrote: post #143
paganel wrote: post #136

Earlier 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.

[deleted]

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#170

Post by oblio »

strictfp wrote: post #103
grogenaut wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> the google engineer started by instantiating the controller from the view

Sort of playing devil's advocate here, but what did you not like about that approach? I'm guessing he should have used dependency injection? Am I missing something else?

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