What kind of programming do you do these days?
Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?
151–160 of 555 posts
Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?
#152It’s interesting you can be a little bit more than twice my age, but have 6 times as much professional experience.
Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?
#153hello dear Gene,
Wow, I wasn't even born in 1963 (1965 issue here), and I really got into programming around 15 or so, so 40 years and counting on this end. Super impressive that you still enjoy coding and do not plan to retire.
These days I only code for myself, I've stopped doing commercial work but will occasionally help out in places where my particular combination of talents is useful. I also don't plan on giving it up at all but you never know what the future will bring and I'm very sure that my mental faculties are not at the same level where they were 20 years ago, nor do I get as fired up about a cool algorithm as I did back then.
Being born around that time and seeing all this development has been a ride that I would not trade for anything else except for - retrospectively - a career in music (which still is my first love) or - corny, but timely - being an astronaut. But not to fly circles around the earth. So all things considered I feel both lucky and privileged and I wonder if those are things that you share or would care to talk about.
best regards & a very warm welcome to HN.
Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please don't say implementing JavaScript on punchcards.
No. Coding JS on keyboard is already bad enough.
It's a bit sad that people today still "fanboy" against a lang, like a lot of people still do for PHP (which has absolutely improved from the absurdity it was). JS followed the same path, ES2016 is an absolute dream to code on.
Maybe I'm biased? PHP paid my bills for a long time and currently I'm a front-end developer that works mostly with Angular (but sometimes I jump into the .NET Core backends). I love JS and TS, they evolved nicely along the years.
Nothing against being a fanboy for one specific lang, but thinking "X" language is bad/joke/nightmare isn't nice and makes people that work with them look like losers, which they aren't.
Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?
#155In my company, we can get "Senior Developer" title after 3 to 4 year experience. What your current title?
Real senior developers with lots of experience are usually shown the finger in our industry. There’s no such title to reflect 57 years of experience; i’ve heard it unofficially refered as baggage
Yeah, your titles become more amazing until around 40 years of age, then they start degrading again.
Of course, if you stay where you are your salary doesn’t, so :/
Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?
#156Knuth was being paid by Burroughs to implement an Algol-58 compiler in 1960. He’s still programming, and seems to have advice for others on the subject. But I don’t expect to see him here. Congratulations on being in that company, and may it long continue.
Partly cribbed from my comment downthread: I think I'd classify Knuth as the slightly different "longest working computer scientist". He's known for his quote "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." Or perhaps I'd classify him as the somewhat more sycophantic "longest working genius" or "longest working cool guy". Heck, Knuth was uniquely awarded a master's degree for his bach…
That's the way he likes to paint himself. From a lecture he gave at my university I remember that he said something along the lines of, that he usually came up with the idea and others wrote the code. From the experience out of the same lecture, however, I can tell you first hand that he knows his way around code and that he can code. The lecture was indeed more of a hands on workshop with Knuth spending most of the time in Emacs coding MMIXAL assembly - pretty low level stuff actually.
Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?
#157Respect! That's truly inspirational. At barely half the experience with 30 years I keep wondering about what next. I still do plenty of programming in C (which, along with Z80 and 8086 assembly, is what I started with), Python and JS with some dabbling in Go. I find the problem solving part as invigorating and exhilarating as ever. What I do struggle with is the 100x additional lines of code which will be needed to m…
Maybe aim to see things in a different perspective. You making that code usable by others means others will benefit from your work.
So 1) you benefit from the work by having fun 2) others benefit from your work by using it to solve their problems or building things they find fun
Usability is also a problem worth solving. It's just a different problem.
Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?
#158Margaret Hamilton started her first job in 1959 and is still working: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_(software_en... Depending how and whether you count academia, Donald Knuth may have a slightly longer career: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Knuth Feels like a decent chance you're third, then. Certainly you're one of the longest-working programmers. Best of luck. :)
Margaret Hamilton is an inspiration, but is she actually still working at age 83? I can't find anything that would indicate she is. For something like the "longest-working programmer" I'd expect them to have been actually "work"-working during that time. And I think I'd classify Knuth as the slightly different "longest working computer scientist". He's known for his quote "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have onl…
She's the CEO of Hamilton Technologies: http://www.htius.com/
Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?
#159Started in 1978. No longer program professionally (much) but still do it for fun.
Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?
#160hello dear Gene, Wow, I wasn't even born in 1963 (1965 issue here), and I really got into programming around 15 or so, so 40 years and counting on this end. Super impressive that you still enjoy coding and do not plan to retire. These days I only code for myself, I've stopped doing commercial work but will occasionally help out in places where my particular combination of talents is useful. I also don't plan on givin…
I am a little older and maybe a little more than 40 years experience. I still love it and program at home and work. I still get excited about new stuff or learning a new platform (I am setting up Hashicorp Vault at the moment, awesomely interesting). My first love was electronics, which I still do at home, so maybe my experience is a little different. The last few years I have been learning abstract algebra and some nuclear physics. At this stage I can't imagine ever stopping.