251–260 of 555 posts
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> This isn't a competition. Except it is, as that is the single goal of this thread: Find out who is the longest serving Programmer, not the oldest guy doing something with IT. His remark is not wrong in that context.
But it is unnecessary, pedantic and mean. We can all read the programmer/analyst's post for ourselves; we don't need an interpreter.
I am 80 years old and still working full time in IT. Although I evolved from pure programming to project management and business analysis the past few years. Originally started out working at Cape Canaveral as a radar and telemetry engineer and moved into programming after I left there. Whenever I interview, I completely ignore the age issue. If the interviewer is to dumb to recognize the value of my knowledge and ex…
I am sorry, but you are not a programmer anymore. You are a project manager or a business analyst. The reason you are able to completely ignore the age issue is because there's no ageism in hiring business analysts and project managers. The ageism is visible in hiring programmers, which most certainly you are not. You might "dabble" in code outside of work in your own spare time, but that doesn't make you a professio…
They transitioned from "pure programming" only in the last few years. Most of the long-time programmers that I've known that transition to other roles keep programming. Some of them were absolutely brilliant programmers and it's a hard decision organizationally to take their time away from coding and put it into some other area.
I've also known "professional programmers" that 1) don't seem to care about code much at all and 2) aren't writing much code at all, sloppy or otherwise.
I think the label "programmer" can be descriptive of all sorts, and has more to do with how often the skill is deployed and less to do with job title/role.
Just because your job title is "head chef" doesn't mean you don't still cook...in fact there's a good chance you can still run circles around your line cooks even if managing the kitchen means your knife skills are not as good as they once were.
This is pretty cool. Definitely worth documenting I think.
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OP asked longest-serving programmer. That doesn't involve people who switched to management or some other position like CEO.
You don't know that. I have served as CEO and still coded every day.
Having said that no matter what role it's good to code everyday.
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"I am sorry, but you are not a programmer anymore" Your gatekeeping is not welcome here. This isn't a competition. "The reason you are able to completely ignore the age issue is because there's no ageism in hiring business analysts and project managers. The ageism is visible in hiring programmers, which most certainly you are not." and your unfounded conclusions aren't welcome either.
> This isn't a competition. Except it is, as that is the single goal of this thread: Find out who is the longest serving Programmer, not the oldest guy doing something with IT. His remark is not wrong in that context.
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I guess not smoking, no drugs and regular exercise. I really enjoy what I do - the challenge of achieving an analytical objective with limited resources has always given me great satisfaction.
How much exercise, and have you always been physically active? [I'm more than halfway to your experience but definitely missing this aspect.]
Welcome to HN and for making this place more magical by your presence. Have seen other very senior programmers here over the years. Paul Lutus comes to mind now[1]. One question: Do you go through a mid life crisis in programming in your 40s/50s? My story (just felt like sharing): I am in my 40s and have been programming for 30 years (I first wrote in Fortran in my Engineering College, 1st semester). Later profession…
I used GraFORTH and TransFORTH so much...
I'm in my 50's now, started my career during college, writing educational software for Apple II clones (not in FORTH, sadly). Now mostly Python, since the early 2000's, with little bits of other languages here and there.
I find HN delightful for the diversity we see here.
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But it is unnecessary, pedantic and mean. We can all read the programmer/analyst's post for ourselves; we don't need an interpreter.
By that logic we should only have single depth in comments. Everyone is reading every comment for themselves.
In addition that unnecessary post asserted personal things not in evidence, giving the most uncharitable interpretation which is actually in direct violation of this site's standards and practices.
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Strong/weak and dynamic/static. JS is dynamic, but variables will always have a type, which is memory safe - which makes types strong.
I thought weak/strong typing is more about how explicit/implicit type conversion is. In PHP and JS it's almost always implicit and they don't warn you for mixing most types, whereas e.g. Python will complain. That's one thing I don't enjoy with PHP/JS. A lot of certainty goes out of the window with it.
'1'+1=2 prevents a lot of errors. The languages tries to help you along compared to an harsh error. Maybe you want a harsh error.. halting everything until you declare a new variable with the same type and have to go through a manual conversion. For me let the language handle that. If you are tdding anything unexpected will be caught anyhow if you are worried how things convert.
It's like rust in terms of memory management vs c. It handles it for you..
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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,…
Would you agree that a language X can be objectively superior to language Y? I worked with PHP professionally for some 10 years, with very competent colleagues from whom I've learned a lot. The PHP ecosystem with Composer and Symfony components is quite good. Still, PHP itself is a terrible language. I have less knowledge but a similar opinion of JavaScript. Doesn't mean people working with PHP or JavaScript are lose…
Is COBOL terrible or C Or Go?