I'm 46 but same. I'm not quite as melancholy about it, but I do feel a lot of this.
I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed
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Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed
#232Same as assembly programmers felt when C came along I guess
Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just told my gardener to cut the grass and work on some flower installations. I'm so excited about gardening again. Can't wait to do some. Employing a gardener to do my gardening for me is really making me enjoy gardening again!
this is a great analogy despite it possibly coming off as snark. I think it's hard for some people to grasp that programmers are motivated by different things. Some are motivated by shipping products to users, others are motivated to make code that's a giant elegant cathedral, still others love glorious hacks to bend the machine into doing things it was never really intended to do. And I'm sure I'm missing a few othe…
I agree with this, I put myself in the "glorious hacks to bend the machine into doing things it was never really intended to do" camp, so the end game is somthing cool, now I can do 3 cool things before lunch instead of 3 cool things a year
Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed
#234Don't program as a career, but am also 50 and programming since TRS-80. AI has transformed this era, and I LOVE IT! I can focus on making and not APIs or syntax or all of the bootstrapping.
I wondered when I would see someone else mention TRS-80. Recall those days like yesterday "Hey Mah! It works!"
Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed
#235Wow... I really relate to this. I'm 50 as well, and I started coding in 1985 when I was 10... I remember literally every evolutionary leap forward and my experience with this change has been a bit different. Steve Yegge recently did an interview on vibe coding ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuJyJP517Uw ) where he says, "arch mage engineers who fell out-of-love with the modern complexity of shipping meaningful code…
I just told my gardener to cut the grass and work on some flower installations. I'm so excited about gardening again. Can't wait to do some. Employing a gardener to do my gardening for me is really making me enjoy gardening again!
Imagine though instead of 1 garden you can make 10 or 30 gardens in the same time that are more extravagant than your 1 garden was. At any point in time you can dive back in 1 of them and start plucking away
Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed
#236Was this text run through LLM before posting? I recognize that writing style honestly; or did we simply speak to machines enough to now speak like machines?
Yes. This is absolutely chatgpt-speak. I see it everywhere now. It's inescapable.
At least this appears to be largely human authored and have some substance, which is generally not the case when I see these LLM-isms.
Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed
#237I'm ~40ish but middle career and not in management. I envy this author, whatever joy he found in solving little puzzles and systems was extinguished in me very early in my career in an intense corporate environment. I was never one to love fussing much with code , but I do love solving system scale problems, which also involve code. I don't feel I am losing anything, the most annoying parts of code I deal with are no…
Some may feel that it is a luxury to feel passionate about one’s profession, but for me a life without that is pretty depressing. A society should strive to make fulfillment in a profession possible for everyone.
Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed
#238I think it's the loss of control.
Even if you can achieve awesome things with LLMs you give up the control over tiny details, it's just faster to generate and regenerate until it fits the spec.
But you never quite know how long it takes or how much you have to shave that square peg.
Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed
#239>"The abstraction tower
Here’s the part that makes me laugh, darkly.
I saw someone on LinkedIn recently — early twenties, a few years into their career — lamenting that with AI they “didn’t really know what was going on anymore.” And I thought: mate, you were already so far up the abstraction chain you didn’t even realise you were teetering on top of a wobbly Jenga tower.
They’re writing TypeScript that compiles to JavaScript that runs in a V8 engine written in C++ that’s making system calls to an OS kernel that’s scheduling threads across cores they’ve never thought about, hitting RAM through a memory controller with caching layers they couldn’t diagram, all while npm pulls in 400 packages they’ve never read a line of.
But sure. AI is the moment they lost track of what’s happening.
The abstraction ship sailed decades ago. We just didn’t notice because each layer arrived gradually enough that we could pretend we still understood the whole stack.
AI is just the layer that made the pretence impossible to maintain."
Absolutely brilliant writing!
Heck -- absolutely brilliant communicating! (Which is really what great writing is all about!)
You definitely get it!
Some other people here on HN do too, yours truly included in that bunch...
Anyway, stellar writing!
Related:
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/11/11/the-law-of-leaky-a...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Babel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction_(computer_science)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction
https://ecommons.cornell.edu/entities/publication/3e2850f6-c...
Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just told my gardener to cut the grass and work on some flower installations. I'm so excited about gardening again. Can't wait to do some. Employing a gardener to do my gardening for me is really making me enjoy gardening again!
Well it's more like employing a gardener makes me enjoy landscaping again. It's not like we ever found writing words on a keyboard all that great, it's fundamentally just about having an idea and turning it into something real.
Speak for yourself. I have always loved the act of intentionally typing (converting my thoughts into structured text).