I recently found that every programmer has to discover what it is like to create a new exciting thing and watch it fades into obscurity.
i.e. Life is all about reinventing your own wheel.
Reflections of an “Old” Programmer
61–70 of 339 posts
Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer
#62I'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…
What's the last truly new thing you can think of? I'm interested because I am young (22) but have studied programming language paradigms and history and I also agree a lot of "new" stuff is old.
Not exactly "new" but:
Being able to spend ~$30 on a system powerful enough do everything faster than you could years ago for thousands of yesterday dollars. The feeling of not being limited by computing power for every thing is incredible. Vice versa, feeling like you aren't imaginative enough to utilize modern day power available, it's a great time to push your mind harder to take advantage of it.
Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer
#63[deleted]
Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer
#64I'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…
What's the last truly new thing you can think of? I'm interested because I am young (22) but have studied programming language paradigms and history and I also agree a lot of "new" stuff is old.
I work on navigation software (http://project-osrm.org/).
Many of the algorithms we're implementing (or at least considering) only exist in recently published papers, or sit behind unpublished APIs. There have been huge improvements in graph route-finding algorithms in the last decade, so much of it is new, interesting and it's far from run-of-the-mill implementation.
I'm 38 - I spent the first many years of my career doing CRUD development, first in Perl (late 90's), then Java/PHP (2000's). I skipped the JS craze, and now I'm enjoying my work more than ever improving my C++ skills (last time I touched C++ was 98, modern C++14 is a huge improvement) and working on backend, specialized algorithm implementation. It's great!
Experience is the best teacher. Kids don't listen to their parents, new developers don't listen to the greybeards until it's too late. This is the way things are :-)
Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer
#65I get where the guy is coming from, I'm right there as an old guy. On the other hand, I think there is a bit too much fatalism in the article. Sometimes the kids are being stupid, and they need to be told so. The vast majority of web apps could be built in 1/10th the code with server-side rendering and intercooler.js. All this client-side crap is wasted when you are trying to get text from computer A into data-store…
Old guy here too. When I was a younger guy and first saw the web, after making a few web pages I naturally wondered "how can I program this?" At the time, the old guy programmers were old mainframe / terminal architecture guys, where a dumb terminal (teletype or monochrome) sent text to and from a smart "central processing unit". It was natural for them to follow server-side patterns, and invent PHP, NetObjects, ColdFusion etc. But as I'd started out in the eighties with BASIC, Pascal, Delphi, VB etc. writing stuff that ran on these "personal computers" I tended to think more about writing UIs that ran where the user actually is. Although I dabbled with various server techs, my real interest was on the front end, with Applets, ActiveX, DHTML, WebClients ... all ultimately flops of course. Then Flex RIAs, which ruled for a couple of years but were killed by mobile.
I mainly work with Angular now, React didn't quite float my boat, functional approach without a proper functional language. Elm is much more interesting, but the work they're doing on pairing React with oCaml / Reason could change that.
In short, I don't have a problem with keeping up with the new stuff - I'm glad it's finally catching up with where I was years ago:)
Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Twentysomething year old here, so you know, not like you don't have a point but: >the other reason is because it's easy/boring as hell I legitimately think front end development is not only very fun, it can have some really challenging aspects. I wouldn't think there's any programming challenge that is inherently easier because it's on web as opposed to something else. Of course I bet there are domain-specific tasks…
Well, sorry, but... it is. Maybe you find it interesting, that's subjective, but there's no real technical challenge in front end stuff. You're not solving hard engineering problems; you're pasting together libraries other people wrote on top of libraries other people wrote (and on it goes) and searching google to figure out why your opaque stack doesn't seem to be working. Developing a good UI is difficult, no quest…
Oh don't even get me started on front end development. A few times I've actually had the opportunity to make some really brilliant JavaScript optimizations only to have any performance gain made totally irrelevant by business loading up the page with a ton of totally non-performant ads.
Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer
#67I started programming when I was 7, I'm 45 next month :) The one thing in the programming world that is almost 100% applicable to almost every article like this ( and many other topics ) is..... it depends. I'm fortunate in that for most all my career I have spanned many technologies from embedded systems to the latest crazes on the web. Mostly what becomes redundant is language syntax and framework. If your programm…
Good point about "super valuable" maintenance skills. Some well paid COBOL programmers still, I hear.
Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Twentysomething year old here, so you know, not like you don't have a point but: >the other reason is because it's easy/boring as hell I legitimately think front end development is not only very fun, it can have some really challenging aspects. I wouldn't think there's any programming challenge that is inherently easier because it's on web as opposed to something else. Of course I bet there are domain-specific tasks…
Well, sorry, but... it is. Maybe you find it interesting, that's subjective, but there's no real technical challenge in front end stuff. You're not solving hard engineering problems; you're pasting together libraries other people wrote on top of libraries other people wrote (and on it goes) and searching google to figure out why your opaque stack doesn't seem to be working. Developing a good UI is difficult, no quest…
"but there's no real technical challenge in front end stuff."
oh boy, you are so wrong! as an old fart having spent a number of years building UIs, can tell you, this is hard! information layout, controls, flow - it can be tangled into a total CF, or it can be seamless. you are not pasting libs on top of libs - that is the job of a monkey, front or back end alike. normal devs start their day with talking to end users and listening to their pain. then they spend rest of the day trying to alleviate it. monkeys spend their days thinking how they can add to user's pain by pasting more layers of crap.
engineering is an important part in back end, front end or in cleaning the toilets. it is not what you do, it is how you do it.
Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer
#69Depends where you work, some will help you gradually learn new stuff. But if you are a contractor, you'd need to learn to keep up. That's why hey are paid more
Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer
#70Please. Reduction to absurdity isn't a valid argument. Are those folks working at large scales? Are they tuning DB's for applications which have to handle hundreds of thousands or millions of transactions per second? I don't imagine you actually know what you're talking about here.
Reduction to absurdity isn't a valid argument. The Wik says Aristotle called it " ἐις ἀτοπον ἀπαγωγή " and reductio ad absurdum has been considered an important and valid form of argument for at least 2500 years. [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum
That's nice. Not here though. Equating the technical complexity of learning a UI framework and designing back end systems is just silly and you know it.
This is also not a form of reductio ad absurdum which fits the definition; it's just a silly linguistic reduction which excludes many important details.