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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

#81

Post by ghaff »

gmarx wrote: post #36

Another huge difference was how slow compilers were. Programming is a completely different task when you don't mind hitting compile. I remember programming as a kid in the 1980s with my older brother. He would hit compile and we would wait and wait and wait and finally get an error. After a few times he would slam his fists on the keyboard in frustration. These days I sometimes compile rather than looking up the corr…

At the risk of dating myself, when I took my first (FORTRAN) programming course in college, you ran batch jobs from punch cards. Make more than a couple mistakes and you were out of CPU time. This involved begging the grad students running the facility for additional CPU time which they grudgingly gave while making it clear what they thought of freshmen who couldn't get a program right on the first try. :-)

The school swapped out the IBM 360 for a VAX a year or two later.

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

#82

Post by Clubber »

tetraodonpuffer wrote: post #16
natoliniak wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>there was the thrill of discovery, in a rather low-level sort of way Same here, but whenever I embark on a new project today I remind myself of this mantra: "Do not reinvent the wheel" Someone out there has probably already solved your problem, so why not speed up the process and use the fruit of their brain power as a tool to speed up your process? Carpenters or mechanics do not invent a new type of hammer or drill…

to me this is more like you learned to be a woodworker because you liked actually creating things with your hand tools, and now all day long is just using a CNC router is copy-pasting CNC patterns from cncoverflow and then glueing the machined wooden pieces together. it's not woodworking anymore, it's glueing and google-fu to find the best patterns on cncoverflow, together with maybe some shim-building here and there…

That's a great analogy. Its as if programming moved from creating to assembly. (The act not the language)

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

#83

Post by kakarot »

adrianratnapala wrote: post #62
greggman wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

three.js is a quite robust WebGL framework. I'll let JS Magic Leap be your homework.

Sometimes libraries and frameworks make our lives easier. I'm glad the tools exist. I had much more fun writing all the little systems that go into a working WebGL app, and working with WebGL API directly, than using any of the popular libraries. But good luck teaching any meaningful amount of WebGL to a group of students who don't even know what HTML stands for without a library like three.js

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

#84

Post by faragon »

Main difference, IMO: now you're at least 10 times more productive. No waiting for floppy discs nor 75-125KB/s hard disks (!), better tools (better SCMs, compilers, etc.), using the Web for searching (ideas, fixes, help, etc.). If it was fun back then, now is amazing -:)

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

#85

Post by rdiddly »

hathawsh wrote: post #18
tetraodonpuffer wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

to me this is more like you learned to be a woodworker because you liked actually creating things with your hand tools, and now all day long is just using a CNC router is copy-pasting CNC patterns from cncoverflow and then glueing the machined wooden pieces together. it's not woodworking anymore, it's glueing and google-fu to find the best patterns on cncoverflow, together with maybe some shim-building here and there…

I just searched for cncoverflow based on your comment. I was disappointed to find it doesn't exist. It sounds cool. ;-)

There are places like thingiverse.com and shapeways.com though, where people share & buy designs, mostly intended to be 3D-printed.

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

#86

Post by gmarx »

jandrese wrote: post #50
gmarx wrote: post #36

Another huge difference was how slow compilers were. Programming is a completely different task when you don't mind hitting compile. I remember programming as a kid in the 1980s with my older brother. He would hit compile and we would wait and wait and wait and finally get an error. After a few times he would slam his fists on the keyboard in frustration. These days I sometimes compile rather than looking up the corr…

You can always add Boost to your project if you pine for the days of slow compiles.

Haha- I couldn't be happier to be rid of it. I used GWT for a couple of projects. It's a good useful thing but it was like being back in the 80s (or mayber early 90s)

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

#87

Post by ccrush »

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…

>One problem with today's coding environment from an enjoyment perspective is that if something is fun, it will probably be written and packaged into a library.

People don't write code for free because it's boring. Open Source is all about making something cool. No surprise that cool code gets packaged in an OSS library.

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

#88

Post by ngokevin »

kakarot wrote: post #83
adrianratnapala wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

three.js is a quite robust WebGL framework. I'll let JS Magic Leap be your homework. Sometimes libraries and frameworks make our lives easier. I'm glad the tools exist. I had much more fun writing all the little systems that go into a working WebGL app, and working with WebGL API directly, than using any of the popular libraries. But good luck teaching any meaningful amount of WebGL to a group of students who don't e…

See https://aframe.io

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

#89

Post by chadgeidel »

golergka wrote: post #76
jandrese wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course when you're gluing libraries together it is hard to know what they're doing under the hood. There are a lot of libraries with catastrophically stupid design decisions hidden behind the API, and then when everything runs like shit you find yourself having to dig into the libraries until you find the problem.

I feel that you're driving "we're just gluing libraries" argument to the point of absurd. Do you think that designing database schema and queries that run over it is something that is extremely rare and high-level in modern web development?

It's not rare, yet I find myself redoing this over and over with every job. Web apps that are a HTML table fronting a CRUD back-end and simple database schema are all too common.

I hear you saying "well, that's your fault you keep working at those companies" - and that's not too far from the truth.

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

#90

Post by elihu »

While I would much rather write code in our modern environment and with modern tools, I think programming as a profession is getting more unpleasant due to much higher expectations and lower development budgets, and because a software developer's time is increasingly taken up by (usually necessary) non-programming tasks.

I suppose that's one reason why creating a startup is so attractive to software developers; it's a means by which productivity improvements work for them by allowing them keep more of the wealth they create, instead of against them by setting a higher and higher productivity bar that must be met each year just to keep the same job.

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