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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

#41

Post by Kametrixom »

lordnacho wrote: post #27

I don't wish back those days. I get that it's interesting to work to the bottom of things yourself, sure. But I've run into several problems that I couldn't have hurdled on my own, in any amount of time, without the help of the internet. - dll broken from MS. This happened to me. I did a lot of sleuthing, taking things apart, and it just didn't make sense. It was for a DB adapter, so the official documents would have…

> Sort algorithm broken in Swift

I really want to believe you, but I can't find any information on this, what are you referring to?

Re: The Biggest Difference Between Coding Today and When I Started in the 80s

#42

Post by kochthesecond »

user5994461 wrote: post #35
marssaxman wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this has worked well for me. Stay out of web development and it's not hard to spend your time doing "real" programming. Embedded work is especially good if you feel nostalgic about 80s-style PC hacking - the downside is that product cycles are limited by the hardware side, so the pace can feel really slow.

> Embedded work is especially good if you feel nostalgic about 80s-style PC hacking. True, and reciprocally, it is terrible if you hate it. Back to the world of having no debugger, zero tool, potentially no auto completion and unable to do a print. I still remember an old embedded IDE, when I scrolled down or up with the mouse, the code sometimes becomes a screen of garbage. It's not a display bug, if you save the fi…

I will never go back to neither logs nor stacktraces.

Re: The Biggest Difference Between Coding Today and When I Started in the 80s

#43

Post by zemo »

dheera wrote: post #28
tetraodonpuffer wrote: post #15

As somebody else who started coding in the mid 80s I feel this is one of the disconnects of the interview process: interviews evaluate you on the basis of an "80s programming model" where if you needed a red black tree library, you likely had to write it on your own. It would be a lot more representative of today's work if you were asked: given these 3 github repos with packages that all purport to do X, which one wo…

I disagree. A lot of times it still makes sense to write your own code from the ground up. There are so many instances where a lot of stuff out there is way too overcomplicated for the task at hand and takes more time to configure and resolve dependencies than it takes to just code the part you actually need from scratch. A lot of times, if I'm looking at some random github repo out there and its dependencies aren't…

sure but you often have to fight tooth and nail for the right to invent anything yourself in a lot of modern web-based environments. The idea of actually inventing something yourself is seen as crazy and dangerous in a lot of places.

Re: The Biggest Difference Between Coding Today and When I Started in the 80s

#44

Post by javajosh »

BearGoesChirp wrote: post #25
tetraodonpuffer wrote: post #15

As somebody else who started coding in the mid 80s I feel this is one of the disconnects of the interview process: interviews evaluate you on the basis of an "80s programming model" where if you needed a red black tree library, you likely had to write it on your own. It would be a lot more representative of today's work if you were asked: given these 3 github repos with packages that all purport to do X, which one wo…

>I sometimes feel like doing an Ask HN about "how do you find a coding job where you actually code most of the day when you are 20 years into your career" Find a company who requires any non-approved outside code, no matter how well known and even if using an already approved license, to go through a multi-month approval process that is almost always longer than the current project's allotted timeline. As it is, if I…

Multi-month approval sucks, but to be honest I wish more companies were more skeptical of adding 3rd party dependencies. At the very least, do a code review of the dependency (and it's dependencies..) and acknowledge the actual cost associated with the addition you are making.

Hardly ever happens.

Re: The Biggest Difference Between Coding Today and When I Started in the 80s

#45

Post by javajosh »

BearGoesChirp wrote: post #25
tetraodonpuffer wrote: post #15

As somebody else who started coding in the mid 80s I feel this is one of the disconnects of the interview process: interviews evaluate you on the basis of an "80s programming model" where if you needed a red black tree library, you likely had to write it on your own. It would be a lot more representative of today's work if you were asked: given these 3 github repos with packages that all purport to do X, which one wo…

>I sometimes feel like doing an Ask HN about "how do you find a coding job where you actually code most of the day when you are 20 years into your career" Find a company who requires any non-approved outside code, no matter how well known and even if using an already approved license, to go through a multi-month approval process that is almost always longer than the current project's allotted timeline. As it is, if I…

Multi-month approval sucks, but to be honest I wish more companies were more skeptical of adding 3rd party dependencies. At the very least, do a code review of the dependency (and it's dependencies..) and acknowledge the actual cost associated with the addition you are making.

Hardly ever happens.

Re: The Biggest Difference Between Coding Today and When I Started in the 80s

#46

Post by greggman »

jfv wrote: post #14

I miss that too (90's for me). Honestly I don't enjoy programming much anymore for this reason. I remember when it was normal for people to write their own data structures for their programs -- and while not "practical," there's a certain joy you get debugging your own sorting implementation that you don't get, say, copying and pasting frameworks' error messages into Google. One problem with today's coding environmen…

Seriously?

I see SOOO many people making AMAZING things gluing stuff together. Maybe they're gluing together three.js with WebVR. Maybe they're gluing together the JS Magic Leap support with a Kintec and an arduino. I see artists making art throwing together Unity with a few plugins for networking etc.

Sound way WAY more fun than me writing

    10 moveto rand(320), rand(240)
    20 lineto rand(300), rand(240)
    30 goto 10
If you like writing the low-level stuff that's great. Knock yourself out. Me, I want to move on to the bigger stuff. Some people like to build cameras, Others just like to use cameras to make movies. I'd prefer the later (but I'm glad someone likes to make the cameras so I don't have to)

Re: The Biggest Difference Between Coding Today and When I Started in the 80s

#47

Post by golergka »

alkonaut wrote: post #21
tetraodonpuffer wrote: post #15

As somebody else who started coding in the mid 80s I feel this is one of the disconnects of the interview process: interviews evaluate you on the basis of an "80s programming model" where if you needed a red black tree library, you likely had to write it on your own. It would be a lot more representative of today's work if you were asked: given these 3 github repos with packages that all purport to do X, which one wo…

I think if you miss doing proper algorithmic coding and feel stuck gluing frameworks between a db and a web browser, you should just try to avoid web related development. In embedded, desktop, games and a ton of other disciplines, there is lots of old school and fun dev and a minimal amount of CRUD boilerplate.

If you can't tell apart a O(n^2) solution from O(log n) one, you still shouldn't be doing server-side development though.

Re: The Biggest Difference Between Coding Today and When I Started in the 80s

#48

Post by usrusr »

mrec wrote: post #13
simonh wrote: post #11

To me the big difference is the appearance of libraries and frameworks. Back then your code depended on or built on very little pre-existing code. You wrote to devices such as the screen, tapes, disks and printers almost or even literally directly. If you needed a data structure more complex than a discrete value or array you had to include the underlying code yourself every time. Every program was a creation ex nihi…

Very true, and I'm wondering now why this wasn't a Thing in the old days. The obvious answer is "no distribution mechanism for shipping libraries separately from the machine/OS/compiler/interpreter", but that's not entirely true. The pre-internet Amiga had a thriving public domain and shareware scene where volunteers would advertise in the magazines and you could pick and choose apps/demos/games for the price of post…

Take a look at early open source licenses, those that did not make it into the present (e.g. the POV-ray licence). Even people who opened their sources where often fiercely protective of their creations. Today it's usually all about protecting the creator (from various kinds of litigation), only the GPL adds a bit of impersonal "for the cause" flavor. The extinct licences, in contrast, were often bristling with protection of personal attribution. "Mine forever" used to be a big concern.

Today there is the idea that being the one person who knows more about a piece of code than the rest of humanity combined is a thing of value by itself and that this does not require protection. Letting your code free won't take that away from you, at least not as long as you care. I guess that idea just wasn't part of the mindset of that age.

Re: The Biggest Difference Between Coding Today and When I Started in the 80s

#49

Post by jandrese »

golergka wrote: post #47
alkonaut wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think if you miss doing proper algorithmic coding and feel stuck gluing frameworks between a db and a web browser, you should just try to avoid web related development. In embedded, desktop, games and a ton of other disciplines, there is lots of old school and fun dev and a minimal amount of CRUD boilerplate.

If you can't tell apart a O(n^2) solution from O(log n) one, you still shouldn't be doing server-side development though.

Of course when you're gluing libraries together it is hard to know what they're doing under the hood. There are a lot of libraries with catastrophically stupid design decisions hidden behind the API, and then when everything runs like shit you find yourself having to dig into the libraries until you find the problem.

Re: The Biggest Difference Between Coding Today and When I Started in the 80s

#50

Post by jandrese »

gmarx wrote: post #36

Another huge difference was how slow compilers were. Programming is a completely different task when you don't mind hitting compile. I remember programming as a kid in the 1980s with my older brother. He would hit compile and we would wait and wait and wait and finally get an error. After a few times he would slam his fists on the keyboard in frustration. These days I sometimes compile rather than looking up the corr…

You can always add Boost to your project if you pine for the days of slow compiles.
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