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The Biggest Difference Between Coding Today and When I Started in the 80s

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Re: The Biggest Difference Between Coding Today and When I Started in the 80s

#61

Post by adrianratnapala »

eksemplar wrote: post #20
tetraodonpuffer wrote: post #15

As somebody else who started coding in the mid 80s I feel this is one of the disconnects of the interview process: interviews evaluate you on the basis of an "80s programming model" where if you needed a red black tree library, you likely had to write it on your own. It would be a lot more representative of today's work if you were asked: given these 3 github repos with packages that all purport to do X, which one wo…

I get why some places would want to test your programming skills, I mean, google does a lot of 80's style invention talked about in the article. But for 90% of programming jobs, you're better off with a gaffatape programmer who brings social skills as well as business understanding. Especially outside of full software companies, the ability to evaluate business processes as well as digitizing them is simply invaluabl…

I'd say that skill set is useful for the 10% of jobs where programmers are pretty close to being their own managers.

Really it is better if "product owners" (or whatever) could actually do their job and talk to clients to distil out requirements that are clear and achievable. After that, the kind of programmer right for the job depends on, well, the job.

Re: The Biggest Difference Between Coding Today and When I Started in the 80s

#62

Post by adrianratnapala »

greggman wrote: post #46
jfv wrote: post #14

I miss that too (90's for me). Honestly I don't enjoy programming much anymore for this reason. I remember when it was normal for people to write their own data structures for their programs -- and while not "practical," there's a certain joy you get debugging your own sorting implementation that you don't get, say, copying and pasting frameworks' error messages into Google. One problem with today's coding environmen…

Seriously? I see SOOO many people making AMAZING things gluing stuff together. Maybe they're gluing together three.js with WebVR. Maybe they're gluing together the JS Magic Leap support with a Kintec and an arduino. I see artists making art throwing together Unity with a few plugins for networking etc. Sound way WAY more fun than me writing 10 moveto rand(320), rand(240) 20 lineto rand(300), rand(240) 30 goto 10 If y…

Well at least I understand what your three lines of code do. Though not why you want them.

I don't however understand what "three.js" is or what "JS Magic Leap" or... well let's just say I couldn't understand what any of those thing you say are SOOO AMAZING.

Of course they might be amazing, I wouldn't know. But it has the smell of breathless chearleading.

Re: The Biggest Difference Between Coding Today and When I Started in the 80s

#63

Post by marssaxman »

user5994461 wrote: post #35
marssaxman wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this has worked well for me. Stay out of web development and it's not hard to spend your time doing "real" programming. Embedded work is especially good if you feel nostalgic about 80s-style PC hacking - the downside is that product cycles are limited by the hardware side, so the pace can feel really slow.

> Embedded work is especially good if you feel nostalgic about 80s-style PC hacking. True, and reciprocally, it is terrible if you hate it. Back to the world of having no debugger, zero tool, potentially no auto completion and unable to do a print. I still remember an old embedded IDE, when I scrolled down or up with the mouse, the code sometimes becomes a screen of garbage. It's not a display bug, if you save the fi…

Yeah, that's true - but the primitive conditions are a constraint that breeds creativity. I love to build tools, and embedded systems work offers lots of excuses for what would be called "reinventing the wheel" if you did it on a PC. No print? I'll write my own! No debugger? I'll build one! No autocomplete? Don't care, I never use it anyway! IDE sucks? Ehh, whatever, I'll use the terminal! Serial port driver doesn't work? Bootloader crashes? No idea what's going on? Well... okay, I'll debug it by making this LED blink!

But yeah, if that's not what gets you going, then embedded work is not for you.

Re: The Biggest Difference Between Coding Today and When I Started in the 80s

#64

Post by PeterisP »

AtheistOfFail wrote: post #60
flyaway wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It would be a lot more representative of today's work if you were asked: given these 3 github repos with packages that all purport to do X, which one would you pick for this set of requirements and why? I play this game with my students on the second day of class, along with "read all these people fighting on StackOverflow and tell me the answer you have the most faith in." They split 50/50 between terrified and su…

There was actually a web page that would answer your stack overflow answer by running and benchmarking all of them. There was also a plugin that would allow you to directly grab code from stack overflow and put it right into your project, kinda of like a search engine for laziness (I think it was an Atom plugin)

There's stacksort, a sorting algorithm that searches StackOverflow for sorting functions and runs them until it returns the correct answer.

An implementation is here https://gkoberger.github.io/stacksort/

Re: The Biggest Difference Between Coding Today and When I Started in the 80s

#65

Post by beliu »

As a programmer, I often feel the funnest part of the job is when you're writing new code, but at the same time, it's often more efficient to search for an existing library. This internal conflict between what's enjoyable and what's efficient often leads down a path of least enjoyment and efficiency (e.g., writing a library whose functionality already exists and then seeing it die and replaced by open-source alternatives after many person-years of wasted effort).

As a side note, I'm one of the creators of a tool called Sourcegraph (https://sourcegraph.com) and this post actually captures a big part of the problem we're trying to solve. Being able to jump to def and find references / usage examples across open source makes reading / understanding / grokking code a lot more fun and efficient. Would love to hear people's thoughts.

Re: The Biggest Difference Between Coding Today and When I Started in the 80s

#66

Post by PeterisP »

adrianratnapala wrote: post #61
eksemplar wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get why some places would want to test your programming skills, I mean, google does a lot of 80's style invention talked about in the article. But for 90% of programming jobs, you're better off with a gaffatape programmer who brings social skills as well as business understanding. Especially outside of full software companies, the ability to evaluate business processes as well as digitizing them is simply invaluabl…

I'd say that skill set is useful for the 10% of jobs where programmers are pretty close to being their own managers. Really it is better if "product owners" (or whatever) could actually do their job and talk to clients to distil out requirements that are clear and achievable. After that, the kind of programmer right for the job depends on, well, the job.

What clients? The vast majority of programmers and programming quantity happens in in-house functions in non-tech companies. There's no "product owners", there are business functions that need changes to their internal mess of stuff, so they hire programmers for that.

Re: The Biggest Difference Between Coding Today and When I Started in the 80s

#67

Post by ndh2 »

This reminds me a lot of Handmade Hero. https://www.youtube.com/user/handmadeheroarchive For educational purposes, Casey Muratori codes a complete game from scratch, pretty much without any libraries (Win32 and OpenGL).

In one of the videos he said that he doesn't use the internet at work. Hates it. When he has a question, he writes it down. When he needs to learn something, he googles it at home, downloads a bunch of articles as PDFs, then goes through them at work, but offline.

Re: The Biggest Difference Between Coding Today and When I Started in the 80s

#68

Post by mrec »

usrusr wrote: post #48
mrec wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very true, and I'm wondering now why this wasn't a Thing in the old days. The obvious answer is "no distribution mechanism for shipping libraries separately from the machine/OS/compiler/interpreter", but that's not entirely true. The pre-internet Amiga had a thriving public domain and shareware scene where volunteers would advertise in the magazines and you could pick and choose apps/demos/games for the price of post…

Take a look at early open source licenses, those that did not make it into the present (e.g. the POV-ray licence). Even people who opened their sources where often fiercely protective of their creations. Today it's usually all about protecting the creator (from various kinds of litigation), only the GPL adds a bit of impersonal "for the cause" flavor. The extinct licences, in contrast, were often bristling with prote…

> Letting your code free won't take that away from you, at least not as long as you care.

Good point, and maybe this genuinely wasn't true back then. It would have been much easier to pass someone else's code off as your own back before Google and Github and GrepCode and so on.

Re: The Biggest Difference Between Coding Today and When I Started in the 80s

#69

Post by hashmal »

user5994461 wrote: post #37
jhayward wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to seem sarcastic, since this is a genuine question: What are the positive aspects that would induce you to work or stay in such an environment?

You can code all day and stay in your corner without any external hassle. That process being enforced will ensure that most code is buggy and development is totally unproductive. That will usually create an environment where noone expect anything from developers and you have zero accountability. if it all goes well, you can toy around all day and not have to ship anything, still getting a paycheck, and not risking th…

sure, but… what about the mirror?

Re: The Biggest Difference Between Coding Today and When I Started in the 80s

#70

Post by alkonaut »

pointernil wrote: post #53
alkonaut wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think if you miss doing proper algorithmic coding and feel stuck gluing frameworks between a db and a web browser, you should just try to avoid web related development. In embedded, desktop, games and a ton of other disciplines, there is lots of old school and fun dev and a minimal amount of CRUD boilerplate.

Okay, pure anecdotal but: exactly the same "complaint" including exactly the same advice (minus the "web" ) could be found some 20 years ago. Not only it seems the field is not "structurally" changing much, it seems people are people, still ;) ... and "CRUD" moved to the web.

Yes there has always been demand for what today is the archetypical web app. Data input. Data washing, data into DB, data out of DB data presentation. Basically the same CRUD we do in webapps, but just a DOS interface, VisualBasic form... That's what you don't want to do.
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