The Biggest Difference Between Coding Today and When I Started in the 80s
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Re: The Biggest Difference Between Coding Today and When I Started in the 80s
#2tl;dr: The good-ol' days were simpler back then, but today's amenities are nice too.
Re: The Biggest Difference Between Coding Today and When I Started in the 80s
#3Sometimes as a discipline/indulgence I go to a coffee shop that charges exorbitantly for wifi so I cost myself immediately measurable and painful (because exorbitant) cash if I don't invent the solution on my own. These hours are non-billable but they stretch my creativity and cleverness in ways OP describes, which increases productivity during billable hours etc. Also keeps me sane. :)
Re: The Biggest Difference Between Coding Today and When I Started in the 80s
#4There are so many options these days, and evaluation often requires all the work of using the package only to find out that it's incompatible or broken or unusable for some other reason. So it's often more efficient to write your own version anyway. At least then you'll know the jerk who made it.
Re: The Biggest Difference Between Coding Today and When I Started in the 80s
#5Oh man, do I feel this. I started programming in the late '80s and it really was a creative exercise. Now you just string together other people's stuff and call it a day. Lower barrier to entry is better for the world overall, but as a career, it can be a bit of a bummer.
Re: The Biggest Difference Between Coding Today and When I Started in the 80s
#6There are so many options these days, and evaluation often requires all the work of using the package only to find out that it's incompatible or broken or unusable for some other reason. So it's often more efficient to write your own version anyway. At least then you'll know the jerk who made it.
I agree, and posts like this [1] leave me floored. How does anyone have time to evaluate all of these individual components. My CS education taught me to build components for myself but not to necessarily do a complete evaluation of 3rd party components in a short time.
" We use Heroku for hosting, and run automated tests on CircleCI. Slack bots report what’s being deployed.
There are a lot of external services we rely on heavily. To run through them briefly: Help Scout and Dyn for emails; Talkdesk and Twilio for calls and customer service; HelloSign for online contract signing; New Relic and Papertrail for system monitoring; Sentry for error reporting.
For analytics, we’ve used a lot of tools: Mixpanel for the web, Amplitude for mobile, Heap for retroactive event tracking. We mainly use Looker for digging into that data and making dashboards."
[1] https://stackshare.io/opendoor/the-stack-that-helped-opendoo...
Re: The Biggest Difference Between Coding Today and When I Started in the 80s
#7Old days you would think and then program more (even being repetitive among programs you made).
Nowadays you think and integrate more, find which pieces fits in which one. You do program, of course, but just to glue those pieces together.
Sometimes, when you came from programing microcontrollers and so on, you might miss that you had control of every single bit of what was happening. You just rely that some package will deliver you what it says.
Re: The Biggest Difference Between Coding Today and When I Started in the 80s
#8The second biggest difference is that the internet has changed the nature of debugging.
You used to follow the program all the way through on your local machine and interrogate all the variables.
Now, you're debugging across the client and the server. I think that is one of the reason unit testing has taken off. It is much harder to know where something happened.
The third biggest difference is that languages can be a lot more complicated because documentation is searchable so you can have a lot of functions that do the things you might have written yourself.
Re: The Biggest Difference Between Coding Today and When I Started in the 80s
#9I received my first computer in 1980, a TRS-80 color computer, when I was a pre-teen. A few years later, I received a TRS-80 Model 100 laptop, and a few years after that, in 1987 or so, an Amiga 1000, which I used through university.
I agree with most of this article, but with one big difference: I still really enjoy programming, professionally and personally. (And maybe I'm over-stating the authors lack of enjoyment today.)
Back in the beginning, for me, there was the thrill of discovery, in a rather low-level sort of way. My first functional, written from scratch in BASIC program was enormously exciting. A couple of years later, as frustrations with the poor performance of a truly interpreted language pushed me toward learning a faster way, the same thrill was felt when my first machine language program started working. And then again with my first C program for the Amiga.
35 years later, I ask Google questions throughout day, every day, while I'm programming.
Sometimes I of think of it as a compiler for an optimized but very high level language. I rarely have to sweat the details, and when I come across a very powerful and clever solution (typically from Google), it doesn't really mean much to me, because I didn't 'earn' it. And I may or may not remember it in any detail, so I'll probably end up finding it again later.
But gcc does that same kind of thing, right? It converts C++ code into a highly optimized executable using all kinds of tricks that you probably don't know about, and that you very rarely need to explore. (Not never, though, given that every abstraction leaks over a long enough time period.)
The thrill I get today is from higher level and more abstract 'data and design things'. As one example, powerful and novel ways distributed systems can work together.
I'm intentionally leaving unaddressed a lot of the other interest, meaty things in the article, because nostalgia got the better of me.
Re: The Biggest Difference Between Coding Today and When I Started in the 80s
#10Of course, there also wasn't as much you needed to know back then. I look at something like a modern "Roadmap to becoming a Web developer in 2017" [0] and I wonder how anyone is able to get through all of that.