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

thecodist.com

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

#91

Post by adrianratnapala »

PeterisP wrote: post #66
adrianratnapala wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say that skill set is useful for the 10% of jobs where programmers are pretty close to being their own managers. Really it is better if "product owners" (or whatever) could actually do their job and talk to clients to distil out requirements that are clear and achievable. After that, the kind of programmer right for the job depends on, well, the job.

What clients? The vast majority of programmers and programming quantity happens in in-house functions in non-tech companies. There's no "product owners", there are business functions that need changes to their internal mess of stuff, so they hire programmers for that.

But then it still depends on the size of that in-house programming organisation. If it is just a few guys, then the team lead needs to take on those roles as well as code. If it is larger, then there should be some specialisation and professionalism in the non-coding roles.

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

#92

Post by abecedarius »

jackhack wrote: post #39

I didn't see anybody mention compile times. Today, it is instant -- click to run. My first programming job - our product was a CAD package for Windows 2.1 and the new v3.0 beta. It took 9 hours to do a full recompile on our fastest computer, a fancy new 486dx-33 with 8MB of RAM! NINE HOURS TO COMPILE. Now I get impatient if it takes more than 15 seconds to compile, build the firmware image, download it to hardware an…

It depended on what you coded with. I used Turbo C a bunch on my own, and polyFORTH for what paid work I did in the 80s, and they were both lightning fast.

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

#93

Post by infinite8s »

Qantourisc wrote: post #79
jandrese wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Anecdotal evidence of "just gluing libraries": I once had users complain about a web-application being slow. As it turns out, it needed 1 second to generate 1KiB of data. They must have been using some sort of slow ORM in the back-end doing 1 DB query per FK.

That's not a slow ORM. That's literally the model of every single ORM I've seen! Sets, who needs them!

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

#95

Post by aanm1988 »

faragon wrote: post #84

Main difference, IMO: now you're at least 10 times more productive. No waiting for floppy discs nor 75-125KB/s hard disks (!), better tools (better SCMs, compilers, etc.), using the Web for searching (ideas, fixes, help, etc.). If it was fun back then, now is amazing -:)

Nah, you just feel that way because you aren't really building anything.

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

#96

Post by Nokinside »

crazygringo wrote: post #38

This really brings me back. I used to write "algorithms" all the time, then at some point it just turned into debugging SQL queries. When I was younger, it was so much more "real" programming. But it's easy to look at things with rose-colored glasses, because there were two huge problems. First, programming was sooo much slower . Nowadays there's a function or a library for everything. Back then, if you wanted to ser…

>What I remember is a majority of every day spent debugging mysterious problems with OS calls and libraries,

Ah. Not everyone had same experiences. Being Windows programmer was total hell in the 80's and 90's. OS API was battleground for Microsoft. They introduced all kinds of things to break competing software.

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

#98

Post by return0 »

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…

Maybe that's what people are missing: the emotional thrill of it. How often do you find yourselves fixing a bug for days and nights? Almost every possible bug is now a few web searches away.

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

#99

Post by rdiddly »

Can't help but see the parallel between this craft and many other crafts. In the beginning the people doing it are independent, isolated artisans. You might've been the one guy in your village who knows how to, let's say, make barrels. Except for maybe your own sons, whom you yourself taught. In fact the skill is so uniquely identified with you and your family, people actually go ahead and make it your surname - William the cooper slowly becomes William Cooper.

Fast forward to let's say the early 1900s, and people have figured out how to automate and mass-produce barrels very efficiently, such that there's really nothing much to it anymore. It becomes a question of your materials-sourcing abilities. One person can make lots more barrels a lot more easily, and do it better than you can. Because of this, most people just buy a barrel when they need one; they don't make them by hand anymore.

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

#100

Post by throwaway7645 »

This is exactly why MIT stopped teaching Scheme/Lisp. Graduates could think and reason about programming well, but Python is a much better intro to the world of modern programming: 1.) what is my problem 2.) stack overflow 3.) get libraries 4.) read bad documentation of library 5.) hack solution together with vague understanding of black box libraries
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