Tavish’s excessively long programmer biography • Hacker News Board

Re: Tavish’s excessively long programmer biography

#51

Post by erikpukinskis » Mon, Aug 15, 2016, 11:57 PM UTC

doug1001 wrote: post #50

I've been a developer for 20+ years (traditional CS/EE degree) and i think it's more difficult to be an excellent developer now than it ever has been. The sheer number of DSLs and the rate at which new ones appear and extant ones become less relevant is frightening. sure the barriers to entry to become a novice programmer are far lower compared to 20 years ago, but the flip side of the low entry barrier is a seductiv…

Yeah, I have 5+ years of full time Rails programming experience. I've been doing JavaScript full time for the last 3, and I just got turned down for a full stack job because I didn't have enough Rails experience. People are out of control with the platform knowledge demands.

Re: Tavish’s excessively long programmer biography

#52

Post by anexprogrammer » Tue, Aug 16, 2016, 2:52 AM UTC

pkd wrote: post #34

anexprogrammer wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah me too. If his bio is "excessively long", I dread to think how mine would turn out or have to be titled.

You should still write it! I would like to read people's experiences throughout the years and the things that shaped them. I am especially intrigued by people like you who got to taste technology while it was in its teens. I am sure a lot of other people would find value in it too.

Interesting. I'd have dismissed it as low interest, not having worked for Sun, SGI etc or on anything world-changing. My perspective is still coloured from where I started out though.

Re: Tavish’s excessively long programmer biography

#53

Post by bundze » Tue, Aug 16, 2016, 10:26 AM UTC

toolz wrote: post #23

bundze wrote: post #5

What's the point actually? I mean, I admire the diligence required to write it all down but how should this change my outlook on programming? The general idea is 'in order to be a good programmer, keep doing computer stuff'. Do we need extensive biographies full of details to learn this?

The point of writing this bio probably had comparable inspiration to your own when deciding if you should make this comment. You wanted to make the comment and thought other people might want to read it. Do we gain anything from your comment? No. Do we gain anything from the bio? Maybe not. Did that stop any of us from pushing text out onto the internet?

Good point. Can't argue with that.

Re: Tavish’s excessively long programmer biography

#54

Post by groovy2shoes » Thu, Aug 18, 2016, 10:32 PM UTC

mturmon wrote: post #38

bundze wrote: post #5

What's the point actually? I mean, I admire the diligence required to write it all down but how should this change my outlook on programming? The general idea is 'in order to be a good programmer, keep doing computer stuff'. Do we need extensive biographies full of details to learn this?

It's a good question. I came up much earlier than the OP did, so I enjoyed comparing his path to mine. His story gives some context to how younger developers think. For instance, the kind of small enthusiast projects he was doing (webpages and php) were different from mine (interpreters or games -- single-computer stuff). But there are still some similarities -- his reasons for learning vi(m) and (La)TeX were basical…

> His story gives some context to how younger developers think. For instance, the kind of small enthusiast projects he was doing (webpages and php) were different from mine (interpreters or games -- single-computer stuff).

For the record, I'm also a "younger developer", only about one year older than OP. I was never particularly interested in the Web or PHP or anything of the sort. What inspired me to become a programmer was primarily Nintendo (NES and later SNES) -- I wanted to make games. As a young child, when asked what I wanted to do when I grew up, I'd tell people that I wanted to "make MegaMan".

In my early teens, I became a fan of the Final Fantasy series, and like many others at the time, I enjoyed creating little Japanese-style RPGs. Hearing about some technique called "scripting", I decided to write my own interpreter, and fell in love. Since then, I've been primarily a PL geek with a deep interest in programming languages, compilers, interpreters, and related subjects (such as PL design, PL theory, type theory, etc.).

I've also dabbled in operating systems and other low-level systems programming stuff. For whatever reason, I enjoy very low-level programming (as in assembly language, no higher-level than C or Forth) and very high-level programming (as in Lisp, Prolog, ML, Haskell, etc.) -- anything in the middle (Java, for example) leaves me feeling utterly bored.