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The Developer's Dystopian Future

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Re: The Developer's Dystopian Future

#171

Post by CmonDev »

enraged_camel wrote: post #127
lohankin wrote: post #119

The author specifically mentions Angular - probably that was the last straw. I want to tell you: I feel your pain! You are not alone! I've been in the field for almost 35 years, and I think I've seen a lot. But Angular really stands out. It's absolutely the worst kludge ever unleashed into the field with so much hype, I can't remember anything like this since EJB, but EJB is a nice piece of engineering compared with…

Funny you mention that. Just today I was doing some research about Angular, Ember, Backbone, etc. The fundamental question I was trying to address was, why would one need a client-side MVC framework in the first place? After reading several lengthy articles, as well as looking at some documentation, I just couldn't grasp it. They all seem... off.

You get a cute spinner animation instead of a blinking page. Thick client is coming back. Also JS developers are cheaper, although good ones are hard to find, because everyone likes server-side.

Re: The Developer's Dystopian Future

#172

Post by goodgoblin »

As we get older it gets harder and harder for our brains to learn new things, but it also gets harder for our bodies to do a lot of things. Rebounding from injury or a night of heavy drinking is much tougher. Staying in shape becomes an almost part time job. You have to go to the gym and watch what you eat just so you don't get overweight.

Think of learning new programming frameworks or languages like going to the gym. Studies have shown that learning new things throughout your life can prevent Alzheimer's disease.

Re: The Developer's Dystopian Future

#173

Post by dasil003 »

59nadir wrote: post #167
Ixiaus wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I believe he meant Haskell's abstractions are more powerful.

Re: The Developer's Dystopian Future

#174

Post by jeroen94704 »

SoftwareMaven wrote: post #26

So I'm in the 40+ crowd, and things are different from when I was a 20-something. But learning new stuff isn't a problem. I pulled Angular into the new project I'm building at work. I've moved from C to C++ to Java to Python and am now playing with Racket (Python generators have nothing on define-syntax :). My point is not to say I'm better than the author. I'm nothing special. My point is that there isn't a magical…

"My hunches have gotten better" is perhaps the best description of the value of experience.

I am 38 myself, and sometimes, when I am surrounded by a new batch of fresh 20-somethings, I feel a little like the author of the original article. They need only a couple of hours to understand a new framework or tool to an extend that I feel would take me days or weeks. And they think nothing of burning the midnight oil for whatever reason, while I really have to get home in time to pick up the kids from daycare.

But then they suddenly make a design decision I just know is never going to work out. Not because I'm smarter (it's probably the other way around), but because I saw a similar mistake being made 10 years ago. Or maybe it's not even that explicit, and a certain solution just "feels" wrong even before I can clearly articulate why.

Re: The Developer's Dystopian Future

#175

Post by eru »

CmonDev wrote: post #169
eru wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Though to be honest, Lisp has come a long way since the 50s.

Re: The Developer's Dystopian Future

#176

Post by rwallace »

clumsysmurf wrote: post #132

I started programming in 5th grade, and still love it after 40. But the world has so many large problems these days. I think many people decide at some point, there is more reward and more meaning in working on those things, than following the latest Android API diffs. Technology is still interesting to me, but only as a tool to accomplish more important things. Unfortunately, as a software developer - I view the mos…

Are there any energy startups, materials science labs etc. who need modeling, simulation, data processing done, don't have funds to pay market rate for a good programmer and are stumbling along with physicists and chemical engineers having to divert some of their time into trying to debug code?

I'd be surprised if there aren't some. Maybe find one and offer assistance?

Re: The Developer's Dystopian Future

#177

Post by dwd »

pling wrote: post #151
daemin wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So your boss is basically telling you to learn all of these things so that you will remain a cog in the machine. Like running really fast trying to move ahead, but really you're just on the treadmill and staying in the same place.

That's a great way of putting it. It's exactly where I feel I an now. I wish I did C more often. Most of that knowledge has longevity.

My first website made CGI calls to an API written in C. 17 years later, I'm using the same basic model, except with Go.

Re: The Developer's Dystopian Future

#178

Post by thehal84 »

personZ wrote: post #11

Honest, 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…

I share the same sentiment and thoughts. Have you ever read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance? If not I recommend it, been a great book to read and think about over the summer.

Re: The Developer's Dystopian Future

#179

Post by sequoia »

personZ wrote: post #11

Honest, 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 had interests besides developing work skills.' You say this like it's a bad thing. This is a very disturbing aspect of HN/startup culture: the disdain for reasonable life-work balance & non-obsessive programmers.

Life goes by fast, I hope you're stopping to smell more than just the new programming frameworks. :)

Re: The Developer's Dystopian Future

#180

Post by antjanus »

rayiner wrote: post #41
thegeomaster wrote: post #25

I'm not even legally an adult, and I feel like things are moving too fast for me. At 17 years. I guess I shouldn't feel like that, but I can't help it. I started with VB6 as a kid, 6 years ago. I moved onto C++, then learned about 3D graphics and game engines, then learned HTML, CSS, JavaScript, gotten into web development, learned Photoshop, some basic design, working with Linux, PHP, a little of C#. Recently tinker…

Relax. One of the lovely things about being older is having the confidence to be able to be able to point out that the latest fad is just a warmed-over rehash of something old. It's important to keep up with the new things, but the fact of the matter is that there is very little in the world of software development that's actually new. Swift? Please. If you know ML (1970's), Smalltalk (1980), and Objective-C (1983),…

I definitely agree with you on this point. A lot of the "new stuff" is just a rehash of the old or a new implementation in a different language of something that's been around for forever.

I'd say the front-end MV* stuff is a great example of this. I started out with KnockoutJS a few years ago and that's all but dead by now. Was it a waste? No, not really. It was pretty easy to go from Knockout into Angular. Sure, some concepts are different, but the ideas are the same. Moving on from that, I picked up VueJS pretty quickly and after tinkering with its Component-based example, I saw that it's pretty much almost the same as Polymer. BAM! All of these frameworks wrapped up in a nice package.

And what's behind it all? An idea. The concepts behind all of these are the same. Same goes for working with PHP vs Ruby, same concepts, different syntax, slightly different ecosystem. NodeJS (as much as I love to say how amazing and different it is), is pretty much the same as Ruby and PHP and Python except for its damned callbacks.

And then there are things like underscore (which is pretty much an array manipulation library), and backbone (which is just a library that gives you the MVC of javascript) etc.

All of it old concepts, and all of the similar libraries work very similarly. There's no need to relearn everything from scratch once you get the patterns and concepts down.

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