221–230 of 244 posts
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Because loudness equates to competence?
Just a feeling of productivity, from producing so much noise. But it really is satisfying, if you haven't tried it. And I've found that you start wanting to type faster, to create even more noise. So it might actually make you more productive, in a weird way.
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It's a ridiculous term which I suppose is supposed to make people feel less guilty about having extremely comfortable, high paying, and overall relatively easy jobs, when they know that millions of others are struggling in jobs they hate, are drastically underpaid, or can't even find jobs. A common version of this is to complain about a lack of vacation time (even though you have 4 weeks, plus holidays, plus sick tim…
I thought golden handcuffs were typically referring to vesting options in a company. I know I have friends that don't want to resign themselves to a life of programming/software engineering/whatever you want to call it because they see a ceiling to their compensation, or career path. Theres only so many numbers they can tack on to your title before it becomes meaningless.
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Just curious, as you moved from language to language do you think there were any patterns as far as the timing of your moves? Did you jump into new languages as they emerged or wait for them to reach a stable mindshare within your peers? Or perhaps waited until you needed to pick up a new language in order to pay the bills?
Basic was what I started with, as did a lot of people from that era and after, just because it was simple and available. FORTRAN I tried on a lark, then got serious with it when I moved to the University mainframe. That's where I picked up the first of many assembly languages, after finding out it was the only way to take full advantage of the OS and achieve the best efficiencies. It's also where I learned Pascal, wh…
Throughout this thread, I've noted a distinct lack of dogma about everyone's evolution as a programmer. While I imagine there was some of it during the popular phase of many of these languages, it's nice to see mostly pragmatism in everyone's career journey.
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What have you done that makes you feel satisfied with your life? Just curious. I'm 37 and feel like I'm just getting started. Keep in mind that I have wasted very little time. Always working on some project here or there. Right now I'm planning my next fourty years. So it really makes me wonder how you can feel you are done.
Maybe it is exactly because I've "wasted" a lot of time on leisure activities so I have quite some fond memories. Did some nice things professionally, too.
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It's a shame, too, since C++14 is a far cry from 1983's C++ (or whatever version the majority of the segment of the industry which uses C++ is actually using), and the others are similar stories. One the one hand, I suspect ams6110 was referring more to those things we give names like "pattern," "architecture," and "paradigm," maybe even "stack," "platform," or "library" than to languages. On the other, my suspicion…
C++ dumping ten pages of unreadable error messages on you because you forgot a semicolon or misspelled an import? If that is C++14, I'd hate to see 1983's version.
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As a young person my biggest concern with hiring old people is that exact attitude: this is just like $IRRELEVANT_OLD_TECH. Yeah on the surface. $IRRELEVANT_OLD_TECH didn't catch on or it wouldn't be irrelevant but _why_ didn't it catch on? Powerbuilder failed, but was it because you couldn't write a good enough program that way on 1995s hardware? Or because it was ultimately a stupid idea? Somebody like me who has n…
> As a young person my biggest concern with hiring old people is that exact attitude: this is just like $IRRELEVANT_OLD_TECH. Leaving aside the (substantial) ageism issues here, it looks to me like your reading of the GP's complaint is incorrect. It's not a judgment that $NEW_TECH is going to not catch on or otherwise fail because it's just like $NOW_IRRELEVANT_OLD_TECH. It's the observation that much of the $NEW_TEC…
Further, most people seem to have little appreciation of the difference between order-of-magnitude gains and shuffling the dirt around. Certainly, there are those who are wrong in assuming anything new is just dirt-shuffling, but for anyone without experience, everything offers an order of magnitude. And this really is an engineering discipline---$NEW_TECH is never as good as its proponents say, but it the best trade off in some circumstances, while $OLD_TECH is never as bad (or good) as the "general consensus" would have you believe, while it is almost certainly inappropriate under some scenarios.
When I was a young man, a slightly older associate told me that "programming is a trap". What he meant is that if you are relatively smart, you can get a CS degree, get good at it, and go earn a fantastic income right out of school. I heard the words. I understood the words. I agreed with the words. Even now, 30 years later, I keep asking "is this a trap that I choose to remain in?" I still love programming, but it i…
I think that I understand. Programming is a trap because it is easy to be satisfied with writing code. It is fun and rewarding. But it may not be the most valuable thing you could be doing for your organization or for your career.
When I was a young man, a slightly older associate told me that "programming is a trap". What he meant is that if you are relatively smart, you can get a CS degree, get good at it, and go earn a fantastic income right out of school. I heard the words. I understood the words. I agreed with the words. Even now, 30 years later, I keep asking "is this a trap that I choose to remain in?" I still love programming, but it i…
You should quit now, and try working a multitude of other jobs. Come back to us and see if your definition of 'trap' has changed, or expanded. Software engineering is such an entitled world, it is ridiculous. As someone who has seen the world of menial work, I will never, ever leave it. I feel blessed. You should too. You just don't know it.
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Because loudness equates to competence?
Just a feeling of productivity, from producing so much noise. But it really is satisfying, if you haven't tried it. And I've found that you start wanting to type faster, to create even more noise. So it might actually make you more productive, in a weird way.
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No more BASIC, but I still code in Common Lisp whenever I can. And I'm using some library code that I wrote when I was in grad school 25 years ago. Once you grok Lisp, everything else is easy. You come to realize that the vast majority of what passes for "new technologies" is really just a re-discovery of something that exists (or is easily implemented) in CL. That makes it a lot easier (if a tad frustrating at times…
> no other language has co-opted yet. Check out Dylan, Julia, and my old hobby language Magpie[1]. [1]: http://magpie-lang.org/multimethods.html