"There are other, more important needs in my life that are not related to programming languages.
What I’m most scared of, though, is being left behind."
At least there is a choice. Also being creative is one of the important needs IMHO.
The Developer's Dystopian Future
161–170 of 209 posts
Re: The Developer's Dystopian Future
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Learning a new framework that does the same thing like layout or user design; it's not like learning music and digging into a deeper discipline like moving from acoustic strumming to jazz improvisation, it's just learning new keywords to do the same crap because the old keywords have been remapped. Perhaps you should look into Haskell, Clojure or Erlang for a change?
I love HN. In response to a complaint about learning new frameworks, you suggest three other alternatives.
They are all languages (not frameworks), which are valid analogies to the guitar metaphor. They are so different from your usual C-like languages that they will be challenging to learn (and likely fun also)
Re: The Developer's Dystopian Future
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
I love HN. In response to a complaint about learning new frameworks, you suggest three other alternatives.
All but one are profoundly old, yet making a come back.
Haskell is from the 80s. Erlang is also pretty old, and Clojure is a Lisp, the second oldest programming language around. Which is the `but one'?
Re: The Developer's Dystopian Future
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
I reminded a co-worker last week as he was figuring out whether to use Grunt or Gulp - Computers aren't the thing. They're the thing that gets us to the thing. - Quoted from Halt and Catch Fire. Photography has its own version of the same quote. Amateurs worry about equipment, Professionals worry about time, Masters worry about light. User do not care about the technology used, they care about results.
Same thing bro with musicians, "Amateurs are gear-heads, pro's worry about techniques, and masters tries to listen to the sound"; traders/gamblers, "Amateurs focus on their winning, pro's worry about preserving their capital and masters worry about executing their performance where losing and winning money is only a side effect," and ad infinitum.
And in war, strategy, logistics, capability.
Re: The Developer's Dystopian Future
#165Honest, legitimate post that I very much enjoyed. However I do think posts like this feed in ageism. I say this because it posits that the change is that the author is older and has more things to do, therefore they've fallen out with technology. The take-away invariably being that people who are older and have more things to do have fallen out with technology, whereas the young are still with it, whatever it is. Let…
"They left work and played volleyball and worked on their tuner car and went to family events and so on. They learned exactly what was specifically necessary for their job today and tomorrow. Never beyond.
Most of them were 20-ish year olds."
Any idea what happened to your colleagues?
Re: The Developer's Dystopian Future
#166Re: The Developer's Dystopian Future
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the context of web applications, what do Haskell or Clojure bring to the table that makes them worth the learning curve?
Ignoring the joy of writing software with much more powerful abstractions for a moment (Python, Ruby, JS, PHP all look like jalopies now compared to Haskell) out has very real industrial benefits: Write software faster with fewer bugs, easier to maintain down the road because the "mental model" is maintained in the types by the compiler, it's more succinct, it's fast, some of the world's brightest computer scientists…
> Ignoring the joy of writing software with much more powerful abstractions for a moment (Python, Ruby, JS, PHP all look like jalopies now compared to Haskell)
Just out of curiosity: Which abstractions are we talking about here that Haskell doesn't have? OO?
Re: The Developer's Dystopian Future
#168I think this is down to education. The move from designer to developer is possible down a narrow stack in the context of rare skills in demand (financing the learning curve on that stack). The challenge that developers from this track face is that when they have to transfer their experience from one stack to another they lack the intellectual framework that CS graduates spend 2 years having beaten into them.
All that stuff about types, functional programming, logic programming, modeling, proofs... It helps you understand things - if nothing else as a shared short hand for communication, but really as a deep set of concepts.
Re: The Developer's Dystopian Future
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
All but one are profoundly old, yet making a come back.
Haskell is from the 80s. Erlang is also pretty old, and Clojure is a Lisp, the second oldest programming language around. Which is the `but one'?
If you put it this way, Clojure is old too I guess.
Re: The Developer's Dystopian Future
#170If you're a developer and you absolutely loathe learning new technologies then you're in trouble, I'd find a new career. Otherwise, I think the key is striking a balance between recognising the hype and fads, then spending time learning the new technologies that are going to stick around, because they provide a substantial benefit over their predecessors.
Give technologies a chance to mature before you jump in. Look at what actual companies/sites are using, not just what people on HN say is cool.