Reflections of an “Old” Programmer • Hacker News Board

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#271

Post by weaksauce » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 6:10 PM UTC

anexprogrammer wrote: post #185

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…

> Why aren't old programmers more popular?

Cost and reduced willingness to work the death march hours that many places want the new hires to work/are willing to work to "prove" their worth.

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#272

Post by rejschaap » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 6:10 PM UTC

gjvc wrote: post #152

gt2 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'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!

Actually, it didn't go back on Windows XP. After using Windows 7 for 4 years, I am still not used to this 'new' behavior.

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#273

Post by clifanatic » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 6:26 PM UTC

dkarapetyan wrote: post #7

This statement is false > Half of what a programmer knows will be useless in 10 years. and the rest of the article seems to be based on it so it negates much of what is said. Foundational knowledge does not decay. Knowing how to estimate the scalability of a given design never gets old. Knowing fundamental concurrency concepts never gets old. Knowing the fundamentals of logic programming and how backtracking works ne…

> Foundational knowledge does not decay. Knowing how to estimate the scalability of a given design never gets old. Knowing fundamental concurrency concepts never gets old. Knowing the fundamentals of logic programming and how backtracking works never gets old. Knowing how to set up an allocation problem as a mixed-integer program never gets old.

Tell that to all the people hiring programmers, they seem to be unclear.

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#274

Post by rpeden » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 6:26 PM UTC

indy wrote: post #125

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.

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.

Google Apps use Closure, and after taking a peek at the source of Microsoft's online office apps, they appear to be using Script# or a similar C# to JS tool, as I see lots of references to namespaces, and lots of calls to dispose() methods.

iCloud's office apps use Sproutcore, which eventually forked into Ember (though the original Sproutcore project still exists).

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#275

Post by clifanatic » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 6:26 PM UTC

bitwize wrote: post #40

jimmaswell wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying that there aren't any jobs using long-term established stable ecosystems in the hiring market? No J2EE CRUD apps, no standard LAMP websites, no .NET stack-based jobs?

Sure, if you like 3-month contracts.

In a different state than the one you live in.

No relocation assistance.

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#276

Post by clifanatic » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 6:28 PM UTC

iamleppert wrote: post #18

You don't need to learn React or Angular or another framework. Spend your time getting really good in your preferred stack of choice. That could be a framework or something of your own creation. Do not go to work for a company that only wants to hire people familiar with a specific framework. It's a huge red flag. The work will be boring and the team mediocre. More often than not there will also be culture issues. Gr…

> Do not go to work for a company that only wants to hire people familiar with a specific framework.

So, filter out 99% of the jobs that are out there? (And 100% of the ones outside of San Francisco)?

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#277

Post by clifanatic » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 6:28 PM 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.

Our (relatively young) "Angular" UI guy didn't know what a JSP was. Never heard of it.

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#278

Post by tpaul247 » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 6:29 PM UTC

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Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#279

Post by tpaul247 » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 6:29 PM UTC

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Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#280

Post by wvenable » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 6:32 PM UTC

jhall1468 wrote: post #216

wvenable wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Browsers have improved greatly and new web development frameworks are necessary to make use of those improvements but the actual process of building usable web application doesn't seem that improved. It's certainly not any easier to achieve pretty much the same results. > The idea o a web-based office suite on the web would have been laughable 20 years ago. What's laughable is how much effort has gone into rebuilding…

20 years ago there was exactly one multiplatform office suite, and if you think StarOffice was better than the current incarnation of Google Apps I'm not sure how to respond to that outside of laughter.

I also kind of question whether or not a web-based office suite is truly multiplatform. For the most part, it doesn't interact with my desktop so it's really a single platform.

It's almost like saying Microsoft Word is cross-platform because I can RDP into a Windows machine from Linux. It's not really part of Linux, it needs a client to access an application running on a remote server. The only difference is how complex the client is.