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On Getting Older in Tech

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Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#421

Post by latchkey »

3131s wrote: post #292
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…

Some pretty sweeping generalizations about the culture after only 1.5 months. I live in a country neighboring Vietnam and there are similar perceptions of the culture here, yet in my experience these ideas are baseless and often ingrained in expats well before ever learning the language or sometimes even before entering the country.

"these ideas" -- which ideas?

Yes, there is a ton of racism and generalizations among expats. As soon as I got here, I was added to a few private facebook groups where expats vent steam over the craziness of this country. I'm actually not a fan of it because it is honestly very racist, but I want to know both sides of the story. Much like democrats read republican news.

The language is hard and learning is going to take me years. I'm trying my best, but when I say something as simple as 'một' (the number 1) to someone, they rarely understand me. Vietnamese also want to learn english (my company has a full time english teacher) and will not help me.

So instead of language, I've focused on learning the culture first and in 1.5 months (also this isn't the first time here, so it is more like 2.5 months) I think I have a pretty good handle on a lot of it. I make 1-2 (or more) new friends daily thanks to the friendliness of the people and because I'm out there networking like crazy. I have over a hundred friends here now, both from business and personal.

If I stop liking it here, I'll leave. I don't see that happening any time soon though.

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#422

Post by latchkey »

bitxbitxbitcoin wrote: post #194
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…

Thanks for your inspirational story. It seems there is hope if you are willing to step out of your comfort zone.

Thanks! I don't even know what my comfort zone is anymore. =)

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#423

Post by tome »

bbcbasic wrote: post #418
kazinator wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

h might not be evaluated at all! Consider

    h x = factorial x
    g x = 0
(but I agree that Haskell doesn't reject sequencing).

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#424

Post by neeleshs »

_h_o_d_ wrote: post #369
neeleshs wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think often faster coders are younger? With many more tricks up their sleeves, a more experienced coder will be faster. Or are you saying compared to literally older people, but not experienced?

Cognitively, people do slow down after 21 or so. It is likely not to be a linear process, but I'm sure a quick google of research will find this. It is not, as suggested by the other comment, spurious feeling, but a well-known cognitive fact about humans. And experience in eal things doens't help with random tests, expecially if you're 20 more years away from your CS finals. Whether this translates into a perceptible…

At least one study suggests that unlike athletic abilities that do peak at around 20, fluid intelligence is more complex and may peak all the way up to 50 years. http://m.pss.sagepub.com/content/26/4/433

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#425

Post by [deleted] »

kazinator wrote: post #408
cronjobber wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why would I want implicit laziness everywhere? Modularity; see the stone age paper discussed yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13129540 > Functional programming languages provide two new kinds of glue - higher-order functions and lazy evaluation. Using these glues one can modularise programs in new and exciting ways, and we’ve shown many examples of this. > This paper provides further evidence that la…

The paper claims in its conclusion that it has provided evidence (what is more, "further evidence") yet I can't find any in there. It argues that you can achieve a certain useful separation between programs together when one produces data for the other. This can be achieved in a very satisfactory way with explicit streams (i.e. lazy lists). It can be satisfied with delimited closures, coroutines, threads and often wi…

[deleted]

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#426

Post by lukego »

lisper wrote: post #414
allenbrunson wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Just a data point: I founded a Lisp startup together with a bunch of experienced Lisp hacker buddies from the SBCL community. Sadly and reluctantly, we found Lisp awkward and ended up rewriting everything in C, and then never looked back.

These days I am developing such software with LuaJIT and that is working much better for me than either C or Lisp.

One thing I learned along the way is that many tales of Lisp heroism are actually anti-paradigms. Once upon a time when I read about ITA Software rewriting CONS to better suit their application I thought it was impressive; now I see it as a farcical workaround for having chosen an ill-suited runtime system and sticking with it (and generally an indictment of Lisp not providing a practical performance model for the heap.)

Lispers are too expert at spinning bugs as features. "It's insanely complex, every line could be an interaction with undefined behavior or a race condition or an unexpected heap allocation" becomes "suitable only in the hands of trained specialists, like a chef's knife or a surgeon's scalpel or a Jedi's light saber."

I feel like we need to have a shared "our emperor didn't have any clothes" moment with regards to Paul Graham's essays.

(I say this as somebody who does love Lisp and will probably do a lot more Lisp work in the future but only on a project that is a peculiarly good fit.)

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#427

Post by lukego »

lisper wrote: post #140
lukego wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

What do you see as Common Lisp's "major deficiencies"? (Pick your favorite value for Z.) This isn't a challenge, I'm genuinely interested in your answer.

I prefer not to. I think it would be more productive as a private thought experiment: what would you expect a Smalltalk hacker curse about if you forced them to use Common Lisp? a Haskell hacker? a Rust hacker? I think they would miss some really valuable things, and that you could easily miss the value of those things if you took them out of their original context (e.g. considering only whether Lisp would be improved by adopting those specific features.)

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#429

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.

> Haskell has excellent State support

Someone who understands where that support is and how to use it should rewrite atrocities like:

https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Assigning_Values_to_an_Array#Ha...

Re: On Getting Older in Tech

#430

Post by lukego »

lukego wrote: post #426
lisper wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Just a data point: I founded a Lisp startup together with a bunch of experienced Lisp hacker buddies from the SBCL community. Sadly and reluctantly, we found Lisp awkward and ended up rewriting everything in C, and then never looked back. These days I am developing such software with LuaJIT and that is working much better for me than either C or Lisp. One thing I learned along the way is that many tales of Lisp heroi…

(Funny feeling of being a Lisp hacker searching for catharsis in the Hacker News comments section... :-))
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