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Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

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Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#201

Post by progman »

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,…

> why should we suddenly start writing Lisp? The language is older than C, for god's sake.

If so many "modern" languages still copy features from Lisp (hello C++) then why not use the real thing?

All those nice "new" features which Python and C++ are praised for (lambdas, closures, list comprehensions) have been available for almost 50 years. Lisp was way ahead of its time. It just lacked the hardware power which we have today. It is still ahead of our time. Consider Lisp macros, Genera and MCCLIM. MCCLIM is an interactive GUI for shells which has been neglected for decades. It is being revived right now to make it available for modern Lisp distributions. Modern Lisp just lacks one thing to be the real deal: a native Lisp Machine.

https://common-lisp.net/project/mcclim/

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#202

Post by combatentropy »

tobltobs wrote: post #123
combatentropy wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, ...

  > IE6 CSS fixes
I didn't really ever learn these. I stuck to simple layouts or used tables, which is fine (https://www.combatentropy.com/coming_back_to_the_table).

  > Apache1 configuration file syntaxes
I didn't learn Apache until version 2.

  > PostgreSQl getOrCreate surrogates
I never learned these. I don't know what they are.

  > Jquery
This hasn't decayed.

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#203

Post by keefe »

I think it's time for this meme about engineering being a young man's game to die. There are plenty of events in the olympics with good competitors in their 30s and early 40s. The point being that we certainly haven't aged out of any physical requirements once we hit our 40s. Sure, I have a little less energy in my 30s than in my 40s, but overall I am more productive and make fewer mistakes.

I do agree that keeping skill levels up across a long career is difficult. Maybe these memes come up because it's a convenient excuse not to put the effort in? It's very easy to get complacent if you are smart, get things done and have a comfortable home life. We have to train to get that brass ring, to stretch the analogy ;)

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#205

Post by dwc »

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…

Early fifties here.

> Your use of the word "burn" concerns me. I'd prefer the word "invest".

I agree, but... sometimes it really is "burn". I don't keep up with front-end tech these days. If/when I need to work with it I'll learn it, and not before. If I spent time getting up to a real working knowledge now, there's every chance that in, say, 4 years when I needed to work in that space that I'd have to start learning from scratch again rather than brush up.

I do spend time learning new (to me) things, but I'm very selective. I devote most of my time to learning things that will give me alternate ways of doing things, rather than learning every nut and bolt of the latest framework.

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#206

Post by progman »

catscratch wrote: post #85
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.

A history of new things geared toward web app developers, starting with relevant popular technologies: Late 1970s: microcomputers, explosion of BASIC and ASM development Early 1980s: proliferation of modems, BBS's become big, Compuserve becomes big- people able to read news online and chat in real-time (but not popular like much later). software stores, software pirating, computer clubs, widespread use of Apple II's…

Dejavu:

> Early 2010s: Cloud computing

1960s: Client/Server Architecture. Big servers and small clients.

> Mid 2010s: Quantum computing

before 1950s: Analog Computers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_computer

There is nothing new under the sun. Analog computers passed away because they were not usable. Ok, quantum computing may be different but their practical use is also questionable.

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#207

Post by Chris2048 »

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…

I don't see anything wrong with picking up ideas like that and promoting them, if he didn't rename so many of them...

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#210

Post by Chris2048 »

zelos wrote: post #138

"...invest most in knowledge that is durable. My energy is better spent accumulating knowledge that has a longer half-life - algorithms, application security, performance optimization, and architecture" That's the key quote, I think. There seems to be far too much focus on 'programming knowledge' being about new frameworks, languages etc. That's just ephemera. Picking up React Native takes what, a couple of weeks? Th…

Too many cooks spoil the broth, if everyone shunned frameworks in favor of rolling their own things would be even more of a mess - except in JS which has all sorts of problems whichever way you go..
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