Reflections of an “Old” Programmer • Hacker News Board

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#291

Post by monksy » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 7:10 PM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #116

khedoros1 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never built a web application of any description. As a user, what are the improvements that I should be looking for that have been introduced over the past 10 years? It was longer ago than that that AJAX started getting big, and as far as I can tell, that was really the last key innovation for most apps: Being able to asynchronously load data and modify the DOM when it becomes available. I'm aware of other thing…

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…

Most programs that existed before (lets be real.. programs were replaced with web apps now) defaulted to being offline only, or would sync. I miss those days.

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#292

Post by city41 » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 7:14 PM 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…

I'm 39. There's no denying tech requires you to constantly keep up. But in my opinion, it's not as bad as most make it out to be. For the most part I read blogs while lying in bed at night (about 15 minutes or so), and I always have a side project going that I get to here and there. I still maintain a healthy life balance and get to enjoy things outside of tech just fine.

To be fair, I don't have kids. I'm sure that's a huge factor.

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#293

Post by saratogacx » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 7:19 PM UTC

paganel wrote: post #133

Animats wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> his provides steady employment for many people, but hasn't improved web sites much. Just a week ago I made the startling discovery that FB's mobile web app it's actually worse than a lot of websites I used to visit at the end of the 90s - early 2000 on Netscape 4. Case in point, their textarea thingie for when you're writing a message to someone: after each letter push there is an actual, very discernible lag until…

FB does auto-complete for names, groups, places, and so on. So for each char it does a callback to see if it should display the dropdown. Using a swype style keyboard ia a bit nicer because you're only adding full words at a time.

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#294

Post by astrostl » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 7:24 PM UTC

jerf wrote: post #211

progman wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

"If so many "modern" languages still copy features from Lisp (hello C++) then why not use the real thing?" Because if it hasn't "succeeded", for suitable definitions of "succeeded" in 50 years, as an old fart approaching 40 myself my assumption is that there is a good reason. I was much more willing to believe the "everybody else is just stupid and can't see the obvious brilliance" reason when I was younger, but as I…

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/apr/07/the-sugar-co...

"In 1972, a British scientist sounded the alarm that sugar – and not fat – was the greatest danger to our health. But his findings were ridiculed and his reputation ruined. How did the world’s top nutrition scientists get it so wrong for so long?"

Without advancing an argument for Lisp, I'd just note that it's possible - in any discipline - for something to be decades (or more) ahead of its time.

Of course, that wouldn't mean that everything old is avant-garde just because it said it was. But, if people are still or suddenly looking at it, and looking at it hard, I would at least take that as a signal to give it some due consideration. It's apparently fighting age, and winning to some degree.

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#295

Post by Jtsummers » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 7:30 PM UTC

Zelmor wrote: post #228

bboreham wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Containers is an exploding field, and basically "Linux systems programming". Sure it's more niche than the web, but there are many many companies hiring, all over the world.

Maybe in 5-10 years I'll consider taking a look at containers. Currently, they are a fad not much unlike React.

Hmm, why do you think they're a fad?

Virtualization as a way of controlling specific application environments has been around for decades. The current movement (kicked off by the hypervisor work over a decade ago) is towards running more virtualized environments now that hardware and software support is much better (reduced overhead associated with it, greater portability).

Do you mean that they're overused or that their value is overstated?

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#296

Post by oldmanjay » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 8:05 PM UTC

Reading over the comments here makes me want to hug everyone and carefully explain that complaining that you want to dedicate less time to your craft and still get the outsized rewards you feel you deserve just for being old isn't going to convince anyone to hire old programmers.

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#297

Post by mti27 » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 8:05 PM UTC

"And then one day you find, ten years got behind you. No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun..."

To the author: Hang in there, man! You're just feeling the time crunch, now that you have kids and other responsibilities. Based on your age, it would have been the mid-1990s when your professional career started. Back then, the economy was a lot better and outsourcing hadn't yet taken over at large companies. It's a little more dog-eat-dog economically, but your brain probably still works fine. Just take a breath and keep going.

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#298

Post by wvenable » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 8:29 PM 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…

> There's no fully general solution yet?

The power of software is that you can create specific solutions. There are plenty of fully general solutions out there but they're not tuned to exact needs of the user. For that you need programmers and programming.

Things have actually gotten a lot better but, as the technology improves, so do the demands of users. I do a lot of CRUD but it's all highly specialized. An hour of my time coding a very customized way of shuffling data from database to the UI will save hundreds of people hundreds of hours.

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#299

Post by ensiferum » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 8:47 PM UTC

This is why you let the javascript fanboys come and go with their "angularjs". You can focus on tools that do not change so much. Just to name a few, C++ (slowly updates), C, posix, Qt and many other native technologies that have a good "shelf life" of at least nearly 5-10 years with only casual update.

Further on, the core of computer science has even better shelf life. It basically never expires.

Personally I split two things. The stuff that I need to learn just now to get my current work done, and the stuff that matters in the long term. The former can change quickly and I don't fuss about it. If It's the buzzwords and latest tech gimmicks or just a new technology I didn't use before, I learn as much as I need to and as much as sticks naturally over the course of my work, but I don't always actively try to retain it.

The latter part however is the real "gold". Once you know the core computer sciency stuff you can always build on that later on using whatever tools and technologies.

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#300

Post by grogenaut » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 8:48 PM UTC

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…

I think you misunderstand me. I just wanted to see how it worked... intercooler is simple enought to dig into. Angular is 4 layers+ of abstraction deep now. I'd only dig into angular's code for work. I can dig into intercooler for fun. Then very likely just write it myself.

But smaller code like this that is well factored is great for learning and picking up new tricks and style.