Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

On Getting Older in Tech

corgibytes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

411–420 of 440 posts

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#411

Post by dang »

latchkey wrote: post #25

Not a bad post at all and it definitely hit home for me. I'm 43 and have been doing professional development for 20 years (actually 20 years). I moved permanently to Saigon just 1.5 months ago. I'm teaching the Pivotal software engineering process (agile / extreme) to a 100 person consultancy full of really smart ~20 year olds who didn't know or understand process at all. I keep up on all the latest tech and I have a…

Given the topic of the thread, it's clear that your comment was upvoted because it's inspirational to do new things at the (oh so advanced!) age of 43. But I want to address it along a different axis.

> Viet are shy and have poor personal communication skills.

When I imagine how such a statement might land with your fellow HN users who are Vietnamese, let alone, say, a Vietnamese elder, such a claim is painful to read.

> I'm the oldest guy in the company and the only American here. This has quickly lead to a lot of personal mentoring on many levels, not just software, but life in general

I have a similar reaction here too. Other dynamics leap painfully to mind—a vast power differential and violent history—that don't have to do with "life in general".

We don't want a gotcha discourse in which well-intentioned people get scourged for saying things; I don't mean my comment that way. At the same time, civility means more than personal politeness. It includes respect for others different from oneself. That is a profound thing with many levels, each of which challenges us to awareness. Every one of us has these challenges, of course. They're just easier to see in somebody else's case.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#412

Post by lispm »

allenbrunson wrote: post #405
lisper wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no idea why Lisp didn't work for Reddit. But Common Lisp has exceptionally good library coverage today, and with Quicklisp, getting access to it is virtually seamless.

okay, maybe i betrayed my biases there too much, but, i agree with everybody else: if lisp was such a great secret weapon, there would be a hell of a lot more visible success stories by now, other than just pg's original viaweb implementation, and some flight routing software. plenty of other tech has come from up nothing in the last few decades, to wide adoption, and big successes. the fact that lisp hasn't is, in m…

> there would be a hell of a lot more visible success stories by now, other than just pg's original viaweb implementation, and some flight routing software.

There are, but you are ignoring them, you simply did not do any research or it is simply hidden.

The success of Common Lisp today is relatively small, but a careful reader could find a few interesting applications of it like the scheduling system for the Hubble Space Telescope, the design software for the Boeing 747 (and other aircrafts), the software for the Roomba, the software for DWAVE's quantum computer, the crew scheduling software for the London subway, chip design verification software at Intel (and other chip companies), ...

There are some old application platforms which survived. For example Cyc, an attempt to provide common sense AI to computers, is under continuous development since the mid 80s. The company Cycorp has 50+ employees, is very secretive and you need to guess who pays for it. Customers are among others the United States Department of Defense, DARPA, NSA, and CIA. They are using it for various applications.

Note also that prototyping software was for a long time an application area for Lisp. Have relatively small teams develop a prototype and make it a product once the idea is validated. Example: Patrick Dussud wrote the core of the first Microsoft CLR (.Net Common Language Runtime) garbage collector in Lisp. The code was then automatically translated to C (IIRC) and enhanced from there after some time. Lisp now is no longer used and the GC has a lot of new features, but the first working versions came from that Lisp code.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#413

Post by bbcbasic »

kazinator wrote: post #407
bbcbasic wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An analogy to that is that OO doesn't embrace IO. Yet weirdly enough that makes OO-IO better than older languages that have built in commands to write to disk. Haskell doesn't have state but you have multiple models to choose from, from simple folds to STM or State or Reader or Writer Monads all of which serve different purposes and do different jobs well.

OOP absolutely embraces I/O. I/O begs to be OOP and makes, hands down, the best use case for illustrating OOP.

What I am getting at is that OOP languages like C++ have no IO commands built in it is all delegated to libraries.

Haskell has no state support built in, it is all delegated to libraries.

So:

C++ has excellent IO support, but the language doesn't embrace IO at all.

Haskell has excellent State support, but the language doesn't embrace State at all.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#414

Post by lisper »

allenbrunson wrote: post #405
lisper wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no idea why Lisp didn't work for Reddit. But Common Lisp has exceptionally good library coverage today, and with Quicklisp, getting access to it is virtually seamless.

okay, maybe i betrayed my biases there too much, but, i agree with everybody else: if lisp was such a great secret weapon, there would be a hell of a lot more visible success stories by now, other than just pg's original viaweb implementation, and some flight routing software. plenty of other tech has come from up nothing in the last few decades, to wide adoption, and big successes. the fact that lisp hasn't is, in m…

> if lisp was such a great secret weapon, there would be a hell of a lot more visible success stories by now

Not necessarily. There are other possible explanations of Lisp's relative lack of commercial success, not least of which is the fact that a widespread belief that "there must be something wrong with it because no one uses it" can become (and I think has become) a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But another important factor is that the Lisp community seems to attract people who are really good at tech but really bad at business. I think if someone (or, more likely, some pair of co-founders) could bridge that gap they could still kick some serious ass.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#415

Post by kazinator »

bbcbasic wrote: post #413
kazinator wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OOP absolutely embraces I/O. I/O begs to be OOP and makes, hands down, the best use case for illustrating OOP.

What I am getting at is that OOP languages like C++ have no IO commands built in it is all delegated to libraries. Haskell has no state support built in, it is all delegated to libraries. So: C++ has excellent IO support, but the language doesn't embrace IO at all. Haskell has excellent State support, but the language doesn't embrace State at all.

C++ I/O libraries in fact depend on the sequencing semantics built into the language. If we make two calls to the library, they happen in that order; consequently, the I/O happens in that order. We can do wrong things like:

    f(cout
where we don't know whether x is sent to cout first or y.

C++ statements could be added to C++ (e.g. as a compiler extension). They would be straightforward to use; C++ doesn't inherently reject that the way Haskell and its ilk reject sequencing and state.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#416

Post by BrendanEich »

jodrellblank wrote: post #357
tmerr wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Nobody uses it, but it's the best choice, both can't be true Sure it can. It is possible for both to be true, as long as developers don't pick languages rationally, which they probably don't. There are a few biases at play. One is that people are only exposed to a subset of the languages that exist, which are those that are either used in industry, or are making the rounds in news. Another bias is that we like to pi…

I also doubt it. But LISP dates back to 1958. JavaScript is from 1995. "I chose the language which exists" doesn't apply to the people in 1994 who could have had /thirty-five years/ of LISP experience (potentially) and yet still chose to write another language, in another language. And when Brendan Eich was in college around 1981, the tutors there could have had /twenty years/ of LISP experience, but weren't there to…

I agree that claims for Blub (for any value of "Blub") are too often over-hyped. But don't make stuff up in the course of justifying your reasonable point against hype.

I met John McCarthy in 1977. In college, a professor (Ruth Davis, I think; SCU EECS department) brought in someone who taught Friedman's "The Little LISPer". By the time I got to Netscape, I had read SICP. I knew enough about LISP to be dangerous.

But as I've said many times, and Netscape principals have confirmed, the reason JS isn't Scheme is because Netscape did the Java deal with Sun by the time I hired on (after I was recruited with "come and do Scheme in the browser"), and that meant the "sidekick language" had to "look like Java".

There was no "chose to write". Netscape management gave the MILLJ order; Netscape source was C (mostly), JS ("Mocha") was supposed to go server-side via "LiveWire" as well as embed in Navigator, and I was a C hacker. These are the reasons for the new language and its first implementation language.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#417

Post by johnwheeler »

butterfi wrote: post #259
epalmer wrote: post #161

I'm going to apologize ahead of time. this might be a ramble. 63 year old white guy with little hair and a lifelong beard that is now white. A tad overweight as well. I feel for so many people expressing angst about ageism. I've seen it elsewhere but not where I work now. I suspect that at the faster growing companies and companies in tech centers, mostly on the coasts, see more pronounced ageism. My last job was at…

Thanks buddy! 50+ here and optimistic I can remained gainfully employed, but nervous about it. It's been my experience as well that the kind of companies you might see parodied on "Silicon Valley" have a more pronounced age bias, but there are lots of other places that need IT/web and have no such issues. I was in a room full of developers when I read aloud the story about the guy who started oldgeekjobs.com, who def…

lol

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#418

Post by bbcbasic »

kazinator wrote: post #415
bbcbasic wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I am getting at is that OOP languages like C++ have no IO commands built in it is all delegated to libraries. Haskell has no state support built in, it is all delegated to libraries. So: C++ has excellent IO support, but the language doesn't embrace IO at all. Haskell has excellent State support, but the language doesn't embrace State at all.

C++ I/O libraries in fact depend on the sequencing semantics built into the language. If we make two calls to the library, they happen in that order; consequently, the I/O happens in that order. We can do wrong things like: f(cout where we don't know whether x is sent to cout first or y. C++ statements could be added to C++ (e.g. as a compiler extension). They would be straightforward to use; C++ doesn't inherently r…

Haskell doesn't reject sequencing. f = g . h will require h is evaluated first.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#419

Post by dwarman »

Existence proof. Can avoid ageism. But likely only via competence, creativity, and rep.

I've been lucky, I guess.I would add to continuous learning: continuous invention. New stuff in the world, not just new to you. In my case, almost entirely unplanned drunkard's walk of a career that I don't recommend anyone emulates, but it sure has been a wild ride.

I'm 69 last month. Started 50 years ago inside discrete component technology mainframes. Done hardware logic design, firewire and Medialink FPGA, datacomms Hard Real Time embedded firmware, synchronous and asynchronous comms protocol design, real time networking design in the Music world (before anybody thought it possible, we showed em!:), created cool 4G visual programming languages, lately Audio DSP inside gaming consoles.

Moral: Keep inventing, keeps you young, moreso than just leaning new stuff you won't be using until it is obsolete. A wide T LI profile doesn't hurt either. But that is not an after-thought, it's a side effect of your lifetime of energy and obsessions.

Vaguely thinking of retiring when I'm 72 or so. Want to make more music, DSP takes too much time.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#420

Post by latchkey »

dang wrote: post #411
latchkey wrote: post #25

Not a bad post at all and it definitely hit home for me. I'm 43 and have been doing professional development for 20 years (actually 20 years). I moved permanently to Saigon just 1.5 months ago. I'm teaching the Pivotal software engineering process (agile / extreme) to a 100 person consultancy full of really smart ~20 year olds who didn't know or understand process at all. I keep up on all the latest tech and I have a…

Given the topic of the thread, it's clear that your comment was upvoted because it's inspirational to do new things at the (oh so advanced!) age of 43. But I want to address it along a different axis. > Viet are shy and have poor personal communication skills. When I imagine how such a statement might land with your fellow HN users who are Vietnamese, let alone, say, a Vietnamese elder, such a claim is painful to rea…

I could have said it another way that was more civil and polite. I won't argue that. I have a very direct personality that I don't feel like I should subdue for HN. So I went with painful, but honest. #inmyopinion

Overall though, my experiences have been extremely positive. I literally wake up every day happier than the last, all because I live here now. They are happy and friendly people. They are young and full of energy. If I can help it, I'll never go back to San Francisco. Vietnam certainly isn't perfect by a long shot, but I love it anyway.

Post reply on HN