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

Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

541–550 of 555 posts

Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?

#541

Post by jv22222 »

aws_ls wrote: post #199

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…

@aws_ls I wanted to surface this answer to a question about burnout answered by genedangelo. I is on page 2 here but I think it is relevant to what you are asking.

> genedangelo 1 day ago

> The one thing that comes to mind is to avoid the "hammer looking for a nail" syndrome. I see this all the time, especially in academia. Rather than worry about learning all the latest stuff, concentrate on solving the problem at hand in the simplest and most effective manner. If that requires you to learn new things, then that's a great time to expand your repertoire - working on a specific problem. Of course you have to strike a balance, but mainly concentrate on solving problems rather than being up-to-date on all the latest stuff and trying to find the proverbial nail for your new hammer.

Additionally, I am in a coder in my 50s and I have to say I am not going through any kind of mid life crisis in programming!

Like genedangelo, I just focus on problems that need to get solved and I really don't care how I solved it as long as I use a great tool that is meant for that job.

Super happy to learn a new tech if it makes sense for the problem.

There was a phase a few years ago where folks were using node.js to build all kinds of websites, including content heavy text based sites that would be better served as static html or dynmaic Ruby, PHP etc.

I think that's the classic mistake of a hammer looking for a nail and I can imagine it was really unsatisfying to build those kinds of sites with that kind of tech and might even contribute to burnout (just speculating).

Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?

#542

Post by tasuki »

wolco wrote: post #260
tasuki wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Terrible compared to what? What do you find a better language? What makes a language terrible for you? Is COBOL terrible or C Or Go?

Good questions, not sure I can answer satisfactorily :)

> Terrible compared to what?

Terrible compared to other available programming languages.

> What do you find a better language?

Lisps, Haskell, Erlang, Rust, but even eg Python, Ruby, C, Java.

> What makes a language terrible for you?

Allowing me to do unreasonable things and resulting in unreasonable behaviour. Eg JavaScript:

[] + {} == [object Object]

{} + [] == 0

> Is COBOL terrible or C Or Go?

Programming languages are products of their time and context.

When COBOL was created, it might've been the best there was. By now, I think COBOL can be considered worse than many alternatives. If someone decided to write a non-toy greenfield project in COBOL today, I'd be surprised and might question their sanity.

C has two things going for it: it's a simple language and it's close to the hardware. I wouldn't call it terrible.

Go, now I really dislike Go, but I think there might be situations where it's the right tool for the job. Simple web services perhaps?

PHP was terrible already when it was created. I don't hold that against Rasmus, he just wanted to get simple things done, and didn't even intend to create a full-fledged programming language.

JavaScript... Brendan Eich wanted to put Scheme scripting in the browser, but because Java was popular, he was told by management to make it look more like Java and also to call it JavaScript. Oh also he had like a two week deadline or something.

Yea, I dunno... good hard questions :)

Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?

#543

Post by necovek »

ido wrote: post #495
mnw21cam wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't be so sure. I did a load of gardening over the weekend, and it involved heavy things. I'm sure I got more exercise to more muscles in my body than I would if I had gone on a bike ride.

I'm guessing you mean motorbike and the person you're replying too thought you meant bicycle...

I am guessing they didn't: gardening can be serious work. It also depends on the type of gardening, the size of the garden, available equipment, etc.

Just like you can do a 3km/2mi leisure bike ride, or bike ride for strength (eg sprinting uphill) or endurance you can do the same with gardening.

I am also guessing you've never covered any serious area with a garden hoe. :)

Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?

#544

Post by necovek »

kenbolton wrote: post #525
purplezooey wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bike trips are more exercise than gardening, though..

I regularly kayak long distances in rough conditions, backpack, jump rope, practice yoga, play hockey aggressively with people half my age, and engage in calisthenics, and have been for ~20 years. Currently in my mid-40s, I am never more sore than after a few hours of pulling weeds in my garden.

And if you any taller than average, your back and bottom will hurt from short tool handles and constant crouching down and back up!

Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?

#545

Post by necovek »

Thanks for sharing!

I am exactly half your age and have been programming seriously for only for 25 years (if we consider talking over serial/COM ports at 1200 bauds or passing printer escape sequences from a DOS ncurses-like software written in BASIC serious :), and I can't imagine not programming in the future. Programming is the art of creating solutions for me, and I am sure you can relate!

However, I do hope to retire early, to allow me to work down the long bucket list of ideas I have.

As with anyone in programming for so long, I am sure you have a similar bucket list :)

Thus, my question is: what has kept you at your jobs?

Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?

#546

Post by dang »

paulcole wrote: post #376
fsckboy wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no problem understanding your preferences and I don't question your choices, except for one: why would you spend time on news.ycombinator? I assume you find it ... fun?

I build up the karma of my accounts and then sell them.

I seem to recall you saying this before, and I assumed it was a joke, since someone who was doing that probably wouldn't say they were doing it, and it would devalue the sold account to leave a comment like that up.

But now users are asking me if this is ok. Obviously it's extremely far from ok, if true, so I need to ask: is it true?

Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?

#547

Post by zvr »

Cyph0n wrote: post #433
FearNotDaniel wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That depends a lot on where you live. In Austria, for example, where I lived for several years, academic titles carry a strong social cachet and are used absolutely everywhere - on your credit card, bills from the city council for cleaning out your bins etc. People with more than one PhD will be addressed as Dr Dr Firstname Surname, someone with a regular engineering degree is allowed to refer to themselves as Ing. S…

> Dr Dr Firstname Never seen that one before!

You get a "Dr." for each PhD.

Walter H. Schottky's grave in Pretzfeld says "Prof. Dr. Dr. e.h. Dr. e.c. Dr. e.h. Walter Schottky"

Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?

#548

Post by aws_ls »

jv22222 wrote: post #541
aws_ls wrote: post #199

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…

@aws_ls I wanted to surface this answer to a question about burnout answered by genedangelo. I is on page 2 here but I think it is relevant to what you are asking. > genedangelo 1 day ago > The one thing that comes to mind is to avoid the "hammer looking for a nail" syndrome. I see this all the time, especially in academia. Rather than worry about learning all the latest stuff, concentrate on solving the problem at h…

Thanks a lot @jv22222 for sharing your own perspective apart from highlighting @genedangelo 's reply.

Just to clarify, I am also not going through a crisis as such, thankfully. Just a doubt on future continued ability lingers on occasions.

What you say, makes sense to me. After a few decades, we just see some patterns repeating with different names - RPC -> CORBA -> RMI -> Web servcies (based on SOAP) -> REST (based on JSON) -> Google RPC (going again to binary style) ... and so on. Not being cynical. Things progress in a way, but also have echos of the past.

Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?

#549

Post by ido »

necovek wrote: post #543
ido wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm guessing you mean motorbike and the person you're replying too thought you meant bicycle...

I am guessing they didn't: gardening can be serious work. It also depends on the type of gardening, the size of the garden, available equipment, etc. Just like you can do a 3km/2mi leisure bike ride, or bike ride for strength (eg sprinting uphill) or endurance you can do the same with gardening. I am also guessing you've never covered any serious area with a garden hoe. :)

you're right, i haven't!

Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?

#550

Post by gregjor »

boomlinde wrote: post #474
gregjor wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but company policy and interview decisions don't necessarily match.

That quickly turned metaphysical. If company policy is neither enforced nor followed, is it really company policy? If so, "company policy" is just an abstract term that doesn't necessarily reflect the company in any way. It really boils down to what I've already said. A company is its staff. What its staff does and accepts other staff doing is ultimately its policy. Anything else that they might have written down int…

I didn't mean to get metaphysical. In my experience interviewing for software dev jobs, the interviews are usually conducted by the IT/software dev staff and the hiring manager, not the entire company staff. HR may or may not get involved, but usually they aren't making a hiring decision. The company may gladly hire a 50-something manager, or accountant, but the group of developers interviewing someone my age will have a bias against an older programmer, regardless of policy or whom they might agree to hire in some other role.

The company (and the law) have rules about discrimination and fairness, but when a group of 20-somethings interviews an older programmer those rules may not matter. Fixing age discrimination probably shouldn't focus on laws and company policies, no company has a policy condoning age discrimination that we need to fix. It's the software dev culture that equates age and experience with "not a good fit," for whatever reason. I have my own theories what those reasons amount to but regardless of why I think it happens, it clearly does.

Post reply on HN