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

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

thecodist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 117 posts

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

#101

Post by rabidrat »

return0 wrote: post #98
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.

I frequently find myself frustrated by a bug for days and nights and too often eventually have to just work around it. Only the most common bugs are searchable. The rest are clouded by layer after layer of unnecessary dependencies.

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

#102

Post by throwaway7645 »

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…

What industry are you with?

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

#103

Post by dheera »

SCHiM wrote: post #72
zemo wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's because there's some truth in that. Remember the time when searching for ' would spit out a detailed error message containing the database name and query that failed? Or adding to your profile page would break everything for everyone? That was because everybody was writing their own stuff instead of relying on frameworks that handle fuzzy things like user input for you. Many webpages have gotten more secure, b…

There are ways to write your own code and not be stupid. Parametrize SQL queries, use libraries to strip HTML, and so on. Unit test your stuff. Have your server software throw a generic 500 for anything that isn't a 200 from your upstream socket.

I am not saying write everything from scratch. Just use only the stuff you have to.

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

#104

Post by busterarm »

acdha wrote: post #77
busterarm wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't even get OpenCV to install properly on my Mac, so there's that. That or GQRX/libsdr. Yay Python. If you have, please share!

Unless you have a really, really good reason, use Homebrew ( https://brew.sh/ ) and it's a simple "brew install opencv" or "brew install opencv3".

that failed for me last year when I tried, but it was after I tried and failed with gqrx which probably screwed things up. Will try again.

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

#105

Post by wvenable »

ourcat wrote: post #97

Absolutely THIS: "...and the real skill is in finding it, relating it to what you need, deciding if it is useful or adaptable, and if it is of a decent quality"

Definitely. I also think there is a lot of skill in knowing that something should already exist. I've seen a lot of really bad code which just more convolutedly implements something that exists in the standard library or is an easy download.

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

#106

Post by wvenable »

SCHiM wrote: post #72
zemo wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's because there's some truth in that. Remember the time when searching for ' would spit out a detailed error message containing the database name and query that failed? Or adding to your profile page would break everything for everyone? That was because everybody was writing their own stuff instead of relying on frameworks that handle fuzzy things like user input for you. Many webpages have gotten more secure, b…

If you're going to code something yourself, you have to be skilled enough to do it. Admittedly, one of the benefits of frameworks is that they allow low-skilled developers to produce reasonable and safe results quickly.

But if you are skilled, you can easily produce code equivalent or better than the average framework out there. And it will likely be simpler because you're only coding for your own use case and not every case that exists.

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

#107

Post by NotSammyHagar »

gmarx wrote: post #86
jandrese wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Haha- I couldn't be happier to be rid of it. I used GWT for a couple of projects. It's a good useful thing but it was like being back in the 80s (or mayber early 90s)

Google Web Toolkit was great for putting your java in your javascript. Those were the days. I didn't really know Java or JS that well but I could write stuff! We actually used it for projects at Google. Plus anything interesting in java was always not implemented in GWT.

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

#108

Post by NotSammyHagar »

Dirlewanger wrote: post #2

tl;dr: The good-ol' days were simpler back then, but today's amenities are nice too.

Well, my workplace didn't have an espresso machine in 1987 when I was writing apple basic games based on a crappy script. But you mean the tools are better now :-)

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

#109

Post by NotSammyHagar »

aanm1988 wrote: post #94

Anytime I read something like this I just want to quit the entire industry. It's depressing. It's all just shit now.

No, don't give up. I know a lot of people are doing a lot of assembling packages into building something, so there's little pride of craft. But there is still great handmade ('bespoke') software happening. In Seattle, there are jobs where you are writing something new, solving a problem. I think databases are where it's at.

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

#110

Post by wildpeaks »

greggman wrote: post #46
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 y…

I assume you meant Leap Motion instead of Magic Leap?
Post reply on HN