Reflections of an “Old” Programmer • Hacker News Board

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#181

Post by 3chelon » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 11:16 AM UTC

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…

Another (very) late forties dev here too. Your use of the word "burn" concerns me. I'd prefer the word "invest".

As I've said before on this subject, if you're careful what shiny new thing you bother to learn, and restrict yourself to doing it every couple of years rather than every weekend, I find the family and kids will never notice.

And anyway, at our age time flies so damn fast the kids'll be grown up by next weekend anyway :)

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#182

Post by 3chelon » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 11:19 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…

Spot on about machine learning. That's something that never worked all my life, but it seems like some of these young turks might be onto something there... I should probably sit up and pay attention to that one.

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#183

Post by crdoconnor » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 11:23 AM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #158

keithnz wrote: post #36

I 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 on…

The tech industry has certain weird persistent prejudices. One of them is a prejudicial attitude to "CRUD" despite its importance and relative complexity compared to how it is perceived. Another is a fetish for unnecessary code optimization and scalability.

The obsession for newness is another one, obviously.

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#184

Post by biscarch » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 11:26 AM UTC

btown wrote: post #75

sotojuan wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Webpack story is interesting because its author isn't (well, wasn't) even a JS developer in his day job or was part of the JS community. I don't hate Webpack but I really have no idea where it came from. Browserify was made by one of Node's ecosystem top contributors, so at least that makes sense.

And webpack's documentation is the spawn of Satan. Going outside the typical use cases is downright impossible. While it has the widest feature set out there, it's incredibly difficult to believe in its reliability. That said, since you can always QA your bundle, reliability isn't as much of an issue I guess...

FWIW webpack's docs are getting much better for v2

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#185

Post by anexprogrammer » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 11:27 AM UTC

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…

A little past 50 here. I can relate.

Yet some things have barely changed. Beyond 25 years ago it was Solaris or HPUX, using C, talking TCP/IP and mucking about with SQL. Some of us were sad at SVR4 as we still preferred the BSD view of things. Running Unix and 10 terminals on some 680x0, learning to get efficient in vi. Some preferred emacs. I was excited for the future, especially of hardware and the OS, as I'd seen it on the Amiga. I'd seen some of the crazy ideas being thought about, like we might have this mad thing called VR. That looks interesting. It's insanely expensive and made me feel a bit seasick, but maybe it'll be the cool fad of of 1990. We'll see.

Fast forward to today. Oh. Well there's a lot more switches, and security has changed some things, desktops have pushed ideas because they think they're phones, but I'd never have conceived how similar so much would be. BSD isn't forgotten, mysql grew up and then some. Emacs and vi are still be being discussed. Why aren't old programmers more popular?

I'm still interested in hip new things. I'm losing some enthusiasm though. There's an increasing number I haven't got to, as there's just too many of them. Too much is just fashion. So often I'm struck by how $NEW_THING gives something, but takes something or adds needless complexity, yet manages to be a variation on an aging theme. In frameworks the best $NEW_THING fashion changes hourly.

Leaves me rather disappointed, but I'm still looking. And hoping.

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#186

Post by bsenftner » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 11:30 AM UTC

It is plain and simple, Kids. I'm 52 - been programming professionally since the 70's when I started writing C code and getting paid for it in 5th grade. Our "professional" is writing glue code, and how it is done and what hoops are jumped through simply do not matter: all that matters is the final shipping product, widget, or logical dodad works for the immediate marketing moment.

I speak from enviable experience: game studio owner at 17, member of original 3D graphics research community during 80's, operating system team for 3DO and original PlayStation, team or lead on 36+ entertainment software titles (games), digital artist, developer & analyst for 9 VFX heavy major release feature films, developer/owner of the neural net driven 3D Avatar Store, and currently working in machine intelligence and facial recognition.

Our profession is purposefully amateur night every single day, as practically no one does their computational homework to know the landscape of computational solutions to whatever they are trying to solve today. Calling us "computer scientists" is a painful joke. "Code Monkeys" is much more accurate. The profession is building stuff, and that stuff is disposable crap 99% of the time. That does not make it any less valuable, but it does render it quite ridiculous the mental attitude of 90% of our profession.

Drop the attitude, write code freely knowing that it is disposable crap, and write tons of it. You'll get lazy and before you know it, you'll have boiled down whatever logic you do into a nice compact swiss army knife.

And the best part? Becuause you'd stepped off the hype train, you'll have more confidence and you'll land that job anyway. If they insist or require you to learn and know some new framework: so what? you're getting paid to do the same simply crap over again, just more slowly with their required dodad. Get paid. Go home and do what you enjoy. This is all a huge joke anyway.

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#187

Post by andyjohnson0 » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 11:51 AM UTC

3chelon wrote: post #181

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…

Another (very) late forties dev here too. Your use of the word "burn" concerns me. I'd prefer the word "invest". As I've said before on this subject, if you're careful what shiny new thing you bother to learn, and restrict yourself to doing it every couple of years rather than every weekend, I find the family and kids will never notice. And anyway, at our age time flies so damn fast the kids'll be grown up by next we…

Good point. Appreciate your concern, but I wasn't being clear.

By time to "burn" I was referring to all the time I had in my twenties: when spending an evening or a day or a weekend doing nothing in particular didn't seem like much of a waste.

Whereas now, "me-time" comes in much smaller units (maybe an hour after the kids are in bed and before I get tired). And I'm very careful to invest it: I recently spent eight months studying UX on Coursera, and am getting back into electronics and Arduino after a break, for example. I just don't have big blocks of time any more. Certainly not whole weekends.

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#188

Post by chunk_manbeef » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 11:55 AM UTC

Taek wrote: post #139

tluyben2 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

What about Go? I like go a lot because I feel like they did hit the mark and they did learn from their predecessors. Strong standard library. Clean syntax. Easily compiles to every major platform and architecture (all you need to do is set an environment variable). Everything statically compiled (as a software distributor, this is super nice!). Phenomenal testing framework. It's not all that innovative, it's just ver…

Bingo! :)

I'm a 50+ developer who has increasingly felt that "life is too short" to spend all my time trying to keep on the latest fads.

That being said, I have found myself doing more "fun" programming in Go lately, precisely because, as you said, they hit the mark with how simple and clean the language is, with little of the baggage that comes along with a lot of languages and frameworks (I'm looking at you Rails and React) today.

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#189

Post by jimmcslim » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 11:57 AM UTC

osullivj wrote: post #172

Very sad that the author aspires to be Martin Fowler. Fowler is an adept populariser of other people's ideas, and he does that as marketing effort for Thought Works. AFAIK he has not originated any innovation over the last twenty years, whether it be patterns, enterprise architecture, microservices, generators, refactoring or agile. Basically he's a corporate shill trolling round the conference circuit drumming up co…

As a former "Thoughtworker" for a few years in the earlier part of my career, a cynical side of me is inclined to agree with you. A more generous interpretation however may be to compare him to a medieval bard, who sings us tales of battles fought in far away lands (aka design patterns? technology trends? shrug) so that we mere peasants can be more educated about the wider world?

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#190

Post by delinka » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 11:59 AM UTC

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…

The frequency with which "hot new things" appear isn't every week. I'd venture a guess and say one weekend every two months. I don't know where you live, but here the weather isn't perfect for 52 weekends of the year. Some weekends it's not even worth sitting in front of the computer - total laziness with the family is ideal.