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>requiring special mechanical keyboard Well youngster, you seem to be falling behind the latest trends. Maybe you're not as young as you think. Don't you know all the fashionable programmers/gamers are using mechanical keyboards?
All that clickety-clack must be so satisfying. And annoying to everyone else.
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All that clickety-clack must be so satisfying. And annoying to everyone else.
Not all mechanical keyboards are loud or clicky. I use one with Cherry Browns and mostly type without bottoming out the keys, and it's no louder than cheap keyboards.
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Interesting the pattern in this thread - I'm 57 and started in 1973! There's plenty of languages I've used over the years that I have no use for today, or hardly even remember: Basic, FORTRAN, assembler, Pascal. None of those languages even had exception handling, so it's hard to say that it influenced my thinking on the subject, except by forcing me to be familiar with the alternatives. Today it's C++ and C# that pa…
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?
Python is the interesting one of the bunch. I was exposed to it about 1995, when a coworker selected it as an embedded scripting language for our product. I didn't pay much attention to it at the time, as it was outside of my immediate responsibilities. It was selected again as an embedded scripting language at my next employer around 2003. This time I paid attention, and came to love it. It's the language that lets me turn my thoughts into results the fastest.
Thanks for asking the question, I've never stopped to think about my programming history in this much detail.
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…
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I can't imagine all the technologies and skills you guys have acquired. If I may derail the conversation a little bit, may I ask if/how you use the things you've learned today? I mean, is it things like paradigms that have stuck with you like OOP/functional/w\e, or do you always structure your exception handling in a certain way, no matter the language? Are there skills/technologies you've been using since you've sta…
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…
So much this. (From a soon-to-be geezer who's staring down 40 soon.)
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I guess I might as well pile on. Turned 50 last year. Got my first paycheck for writing code junior year of high school (writing BASIC code on a Commodore PET!) Working on my fifth startup now.
I can't imagine all the technologies and skills you guys have acquired. If I may derail the conversation a little bit, may I ask if/how you use the things you've learned today? I mean, is it things like paradigms that have stuck with you like OOP/functional/w\e, or do you always structure your exception handling in a certain way, no matter the language? Are there skills/technologies you've been using since you've sta…
For me it's always been about problem solving rather than simple fascination with some particular technology. If I can solve a problem with a keyboard macro in Emacs, great. If it requires Perl or Java or javascript, so be it.
I try to use the tool that's appropriate. If I can solve a problem quickly and move onto something more interesting, one-and-done.
If I have to stop and learn something new (e.g., WKWebView in iOS ObjC) to get my task done, so be it, and I'll put in some late nights to get there because at my age, I'm a bit paranoid about looking bad so I try to give the good folks at HQ no reason to doubt me. I spend a lot of time on Stack Overflow and Youtube doing concentrated learning.
But the real thing is what others have also mentioned: properly defining a problem that needs to be solved, proper communication, keep good records, and try to maintain transparency, honesty, and pleasant comportment at all times.
Honestly the older I get, the less I notice people's age. If someone half my age knows something I don't, then the way I see it, they have something to teach me. I've been to many conferences and watched many youtube tutorials where the teacher was very young (from my wizened perspective) but the information is why I'm there and that's all I care about.
What do I think about young people? (you didn't ask but I'm saying it anyway)
I love young people. They have so much spirit, so much energy and creativity. I keep hearing critical (snarky) things about millennials this, X-gen that. But I don't see it. The young people I've been around (for a while I was back in school full time, surrounded by 20-somethings and a few 30-somethings) were a joy. Fun, humorous, inquisitive.
Everyone has his faults, not least myself, and I believe as we get older we become more tolerant of others' faults and shortcomings. In fact that may be the single hallmark of growing older (apart from physical issues).
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Something I've found as I've gotten older, though, is that I have a stronger and stronger sense of wasted time every time I have to learn a new way of doing the same thing . Particularly if the new way involves a bleeding edge leaky abstraction. Because every hour I spend investing in a new stack and its details is an hour I can't spend thinking about product-level details, can't spend learning more learning about or…
That is one of my biggest concerns. A lot of the new tools are just different, not better. But you're expected to know all of them. It's also hard to predict what will be popular five years from now. I thought that using Javascript on the server was pants-on-head retarded, but it's very popular, with no signs of passing on.
Well, there's no law against things being both terrible and popular. It is quite common.
I am 55 and have been programming computers since 1975 when I was 15 years old. Do the math, I have been programming now for 40 years. Recently, I had a conversation with someone else about this topic and I told them that I have never been so excited about my career, the field of computer science, and most importantly the opportunities that exist today in the field of technology. The excitement surrounding too many t…
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Most companies aren't using the trendy new languages and tools. The bulk of jobs today are for C++ ('83), Java ('95), Javascript ('95), Python ('91), and maybe C# (2000).
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…
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Yeah; totally! You're only 30 and already happy with your life!? That's way too fast dude! You really need to feel incomplete and unsatisfied for at least a decade or two more! /s
He didn't say he was happy with his life. If that's all he said it wouldn't be ridiculous, obviously.