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On Getting Older in Tech

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Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#111

Post by lisper »

jpatokal wrote: post #106
reikonomusha wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few notes: * Google actively develops one of the Lisp compilers. Google Flights powers Orbitz, Kayak, etc. That's Lisp. * There are several Lisp compilers in active open source development. * There's a graph database written in Lisp called AllegroCache. It's good enough to support a business (Franz) for more than a decade. * Another company (LispWorks) also exists and has a large portfolio of clients. * Lisp has be…

I don't even code in Lisp, but I knew the Google Flights engine would come up, because it seems to be just about the only "serious" application ever written in Lisp. And it wasn't built by Google, but their acquisition ITA, which hails from Boston and MIT's Scheme reality distortion field. (And even MIT has stopped teaching SICP in Scheme...)

Emacs, ViaWeb, Macsyma, the DS1 Remote Agent, much of the autonomous navigation software for the Mars Rover before the Pathfinder mission... And I have built a number of small-scale web applications in Common Lisp. I'm running one of them in production right now.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#112

Post by gaius »

lisper wrote: post #108
lukego wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And that makes me grumpy sometimes. If you will excuse a moment of cheekiness... Could be that you have cause and effect backwards here: because you are grumpy you are dismissing 99% of other language developers' work as rubbish. Could be that it's less than 99% and you are overlooking some great ideas.

That's not cheeky, it's a perfectly fair question. Yes, that is certainly possible. And there have been a few cool new ideas that have come along that are not easily subsumed by CL, like Haskell's type system. It's easy to implement Hindley-Milner, but actually using that information to inform the compiler, plus adding laziness as a core language feature, is much harder. But I think the jury is still very much out on…

But I can't help but imagine how different the world would be if he had used Scheme as a starting point.

I've heard that he did in fact use Scheme, but the suits insisted on the whole curly-brackets-and-semicolons thing so they could call it Javascript and piggyback on Sun's marketing efforts.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#113

Post by grzm »

gaius wrote: post #112
lisper wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not cheeky, it's a perfectly fair question. Yes, that is certainly possible. And there have been a few cool new ideas that have come along that are not easily subsumed by CL, like Haskell's type system. It's easy to implement Hindley-Milner, but actually using that information to inform the compiler, plus adding laziness as a core language feature, is much harder. But I think the jury is still very much out on…

But I can't help but imagine how different the world would be if he had used Scheme as a starting point. I've heard that he did in fact use Scheme, but the suits insisted on the whole curly-brackets-and-semicolons thing so they could call it Javascript and piggyback on Sun's marketing efforts.

To be fair, he only took some of the semi-colons.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#115

Post by rifung »

100pctremote wrote: post #68
rifung wrote: post #44

> let’s look at the average age of IT workers at well-established companies. Facebook: 28. LinkedIn: 29. Google: 30 I had an interview at Google a couple months ago and noticed that most people were pretty young. When I asked the person who was in charge of taking me to lunch about this, he said that it's probably because there are just much more graduates of CS now than there were before, and that Google would very…

His reply couldn't sound more scripted

It didn't sound that way to me, but maybe I'm just too trusting. For what it's worth he was probably in his mid 30s and had a family.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#117

Post by JumpCrisscross »

randomdata wrote: post #31
paulsutter wrote: post #22

Elon Musk is 45. Does that make him old? Doesn't seem to slow him down. edit: just saying limits seem artificial, that's all

How much hands-on tech involvement does Musk actually have in his enterprises? I imagine his focus is on business, leaving the tech for the tech professionals that are hired by his businesses.

A LOT. The guy matched years of study with months of reading textbooks. His design inputs are almost always spot on, in the long run.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#118

Post by daemonk »

blub wrote: post #104

I don't find this post inspiring, I find it sad. It's partly self-encouragment, part PR. The fact that it even exists is proof that the author is facing some issues, no matter how confident they would like to appear. That recipe to stay current looks tiresome. Listen to two podcasts, two webcasts, subscribe to four magazines, teach courses, go to one conference per year, blog regularly, read blogs, follow the latest…

I kinda agree in the sense that I think that a lot of the tech jobs out there are not "difficult" in a way that requires years and years of experience to perform reasonably well at.

So maybe someone older should look for jobs that suit their abilities rather than a job that, as you said, anyone who went through a bootcamp can perform. Hopefully with age comes some kind of niche specialization or skill that can't be obtained easily.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#119

Post by IshKebab »

blub wrote: post #104

I don't find this post inspiring, I find it sad. It's partly self-encouragment, part PR. The fact that it even exists is proof that the author is facing some issues, no matter how confident they would like to appear. That recipe to stay current looks tiresome. Listen to two podcasts, two webcasts, subscribe to four magazines, teach courses, go to one conference per year, blog regularly, read blogs, follow the latest…

> And why is it that most older people answering on these threads are so passionate about learning and about new technologies and the latest and greatest javascript frameworks. Do they really enjoy having such ephemeral knowledge and basically competing with anyone that's finished a bootcamp or not even that?

Nobody enjoys having their hard-earned knowledge become obsolete (hence the "X11/bash/sysvinit/etc were good enough for me so let's never improve them" crowd).

But the fact is computer technology does change fairly quickly. You have to keep learning to keep up.

If you're really worried there are definitely some technologies that persist for longer than others. If you really hate re-learning stuff then I'd stay far away from the web and javascript. Stick with things like Java, Go, C#, C++ & Rust. Those aren't going away any time soon. Ruby, Docker, React, etc... I give 5 years max. Then you'll have to learn something new.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#120

Post by lukego »

lisper wrote: post #108
lukego wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And that makes me grumpy sometimes. If you will excuse a moment of cheekiness... Could be that you have cause and effect backwards here: because you are grumpy you are dismissing 99% of other language developers' work as rubbish. Could be that it's less than 99% and you are overlooking some great ideas.

That's not cheeky, it's a perfectly fair question. Yes, that is certainly possible. And there have been a few cool new ideas that have come along that are not easily subsumed by CL, like Haskell's type system. It's easy to implement Hindley-Milner, but actually using that information to inform the compiler, plus adding laziness as a core language feature, is much harder. But I think the jury is still very much out on…

My take is that Language X usually has major deficiencies compared with Language Y for domain Z, for many values of X or Y: Lisp, Scheme, Smalltalk, Forth, Erlang, Haskell, assembler, C, etc.

Confirmation bias makes it easy to bind those variables to values that make one's own favorite language obviously the best and everybody else's infuriatingly, irrationally terrible. If unchecked then this leads to wildly false conclusions, such as that languages fit into a hierarchy of powerfulness ("Blub Paradox.")

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