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Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

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Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#211

Post by jerf »

progman wrote: post #201
toxik wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm 26, and modulo the kids, this is how I feel as well. I've been programming professionally for almost ten years, and I feel less and less pressure to keep up with the latest packages on NPM or whatever the flavor of the month is. It's much more interesting to know what has been tried before, and why that didn't stick. Like this newLISP thing, why should we suddenly start writing Lisp? The language is older than C,…

> why should we suddenly start writing Lisp? The language is older than C, for god's sake. If so many "modern" languages still copy features from Lisp (hello C++) then why not use the real thing? All those nice "new" features which Python and C++ are praised for (lambdas, closures, list comprehensions) have been available for almost 50 years. Lisp was way ahead of its time. It just lacked the hardware power which we…

"If so many "modern" languages still copy features from Lisp (hello C++) then why not use the real thing?"

Because if it hasn't "succeeded", for suitable definitions of "succeeded" in 50 years, as an old fart approaching 40 myself my assumption is that there is a good reason. I was much more willing to believe the "everybody else is just stupid and can't see the obvious brilliance" reason when I was younger, but as I've learned more, I've learned just how many factors go into a language being successful. Lisp may have all the features, but there are also good reasons why it has never really quite taken off.

That said, it is also true that using languages that bodge Lisp-like features on to the side after several decades of usage is generally inferior to languages that start with them. It's one of the reasons I'm still a big proponent of people making new languages even though we've got a lot of good ones. (I just want them to be new languages somehow; a lot of people just reskin an existing language with a slightly different syntax and then wonder why nobody uses it.)

But they've all been listed before, and I don't expect me listing them here will change anything, so I'll skip it here.

(I did a quick check on Google Trends; Clojure seems to not be growing. It's not shrinking, but it's not growing. That was Lisp's best chance for growth I've seen in a long time, and that window has probably now closed.)

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#212

Post by rb808 »

I recently went for a C++ job which I hadn't done for 10 years. Most of the questions I was asked were the same ones we had in interviews in the 90s. It actually felt really nice, I just wish there were more good C++ roles around - would be nice to live in a world that doesn't radically change every few years.

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#213

Post by SticksAndBreaks »

pjc50 wrote: post #157
delinka wrote: post #13

I'm a bit older than the author. Every time I feel like I'm "out of touch" with the hip new thing, I take a weekend to look into it. I tend to discover that the core principles are the same, this time someone has added another C to MVC; or the put their spin on an API for doing X; or you can tell they didn't learn from the previous solution and this new one misses the mark, but it'll be three years before anyone noti…

There's an eternal war between "avoid reinventing the wheel" and ahistorical "not invented here", isn't there? Because the profession is so heavily skewed towards the young and self-taught, people don't seem to know about the solutions of a decade ago and their merits and demerits. This is partly why software componentisation as "parts catalog" has never really taken off. It's easier to reimplement or independently r…

>There's an eternal war between "avoid reinventing the wheel" and ahistorical "not invented here", isn't there?

There is a iternal itteration between reading disgusting Documentation (nonexistant one) and finding the hidden shortconmings of existing solutions - and just doing the only "open source" that is accepted in every company- rewrite it yourself.

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#214

Post by jhall1468 »

Chris2048 wrote: post #194
jhall1468 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So far everything I've seen you post has been either a humblebrag or a serious need to feel superior to those of us that do the "easy" work. How much are the big 4 paying those of us that don't have hard jobs?

> How much are the big 4 paying those of us that don't have hard jobs? Expect the gravy train to end eventually. I feel the web-dev scene is already too competitive.

Good engineers will always be paid extremely well, regardless of what their domain is. Web dev is competitive at the low end of the market, but certainly not so at the high end.

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#215

Post by dep_b »

I don't know. I'm in this still somewhat hot new thing called mobile and now I'm supposed to understand how to debug C-code and all that "old bullshit". It even drops me into a view sometimes that's straight from my C64 assembler cartridge full of labeled MOV, LDA calls and all that stuff. I really wish I dug a bit deeper then than writing adventures in BASIC back then!

I don't think knowing how a computer actually works will ever go out of fashion. Now there's Falcon framework for PHP for example, full of speedy functions written in C by smart people that actually knew what was happening beyond the stuff they typed into their .php files.

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#216

Post by jhall1468 »

wvenable wrote: post #119
jhall1468 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hasn't improved websites much? I remember the days of iframes and jquery monstrosities feigning as web "applications". The idea o a web-based office suite on the web would have been laughable 20 years ago. My guess is you haven't actually built a real web application. The progress we've made in 20 years is astounding.

Browsers have improved greatly and new web development frameworks are necessary to make use of those improvements but the actual process of building usable web application doesn't seem that improved. It's certainly not any easier to achieve pretty much the same results. > The idea o a web-based office suite on the web would have been laughable 20 years ago. What's laughable is how much effort has gone into rebuilding…

20 years ago there was exactly one multiplatform office suite, and if you think StarOffice was better than the current incarnation of Google Apps I'm not sure how to respond to that outside of laughter.

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#217

Post by jerf »

pjc50 wrote: post #157
delinka wrote: post #13

I'm a bit older than the author. Every time I feel like I'm "out of touch" with the hip new thing, I take a weekend to look into it. I tend to discover that the core principles are the same, this time someone has added another C to MVC; or the put their spin on an API for doing X; or you can tell they didn't learn from the previous solution and this new one misses the mark, but it'll be three years before anyone noti…

There's an eternal war between "avoid reinventing the wheel" and ahistorical "not invented here", isn't there? Because the profession is so heavily skewed towards the young and self-taught, people don't seem to know about the solutions of a decade ago and their merits and demerits. This is partly why software componentisation as "parts catalog" has never really taken off. It's easier to reimplement or independently r…

"This is partly why software componentisation as 'parts catalog' has never really taken off."

Well, that and the fact that OO turned out to not be a very good mechanism for building the parts catalog on. In the end I'd judge it as only slightly more successful than procedural programming on that front.

For instance, Haskell's "part's catalog" is somewhat smaller than other languages. But the parts do what they say they will, and generally go together pretty well once the community is done chewing on them and fixing them up. (Here I mean fundamental tools like parsers or text template systems, not merely "libraries to access this API" or "bindings to this particular library.) All those restrictions that go into Haskell are there for a reason.

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#218

Post by jhall1468 »

raarts wrote: post #112
jhall1468 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hasn't improved websites much? I remember the days of iframes and jquery monstrosities feigning as web "applications". The idea o a web-based office suite on the web would have been laughable 20 years ago. My guess is you haven't actually built a real web application. The progress we've made in 20 years is astounding.

I call BS. The progress that was made in the late eighties/early nineties was much more astounding. Going from character screens to fully event driven, windowed graphics mode was a much greater and more impressive change in a shorter time-frame. the that time you had to learn a lot of new stuff in a short time too.

What exactly are you calling BS on? Nothing I said conflicts with your comments at all. It's not like progress can only happen once...

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#219

Post by jhall1468 »

indy wrote: post #125
jhall1468 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hasn't improved websites much? I remember the days of iframes and jquery monstrosities feigning as web "applications". The idea o a web-based office suite on the web would have been laughable 20 years ago. My guess is you haven't actually built a real web application. The progress we've made in 20 years is astounding.

Do the web based office suites use these new libraries and frameworks? (React, Angular, Webpack etc) Genuine question as I thought that companies like Google use their own in house libraries like Google Closure which have been slowly built up over many years.

Probably not Google Apps. But Angular is a Google developed framework.

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#220

Post by progman »

jerf wrote: post #211
progman wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why should we suddenly start writing Lisp? The language is older than C, for god's sake. If so many "modern" languages still copy features from Lisp (hello C++) then why not use the real thing? All those nice "new" features which Python and C++ are praised for (lambdas, closures, list comprehensions) have been available for almost 50 years. Lisp was way ahead of its time. It just lacked the hardware power which we…

"If so many "modern" languages still copy features from Lisp (hello C++) then why not use the real thing?" Because if it hasn't "succeeded", for suitable definitions of "succeeded" in 50 years, as an old fart approaching 40 myself my assumption is that there is a good reason. I was much more willing to believe the "everybody else is just stupid and can't see the obvious brilliance" reason when I was younger, but as I…

The reason why Lisp is not mainstream is its power. It makes writing DSLs extremely easy so that everyone can write his own DSL to solve a certain problem. Such style of writing however makes Lisp code unsuitable for group working, and hence unmaintainable. It explains (imho) why there are so many unmaintained Lisp projects.

Clojure has a different problem. It is based on the JVM infrastructure which was (imho) an unfortunate decision. Access to Java features is nice but dealing with Java stack traces is not fun. Also the usual startup time of clojure apps in the range of seconds is not acceptable (Tcl/Tk apps start in a fraction of a second). AFAIK clojure is also not suitable for mobile app development. The clojure developers should have used their own VM, or they should have provided a Clojure/Lisp compiler for native compilation. LuaJit has demonstrated how incredibly fast a suitable VM can be.

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