5 ms·

I can think of at least 2. 1) A young company, light on technical background, has build a castle on webscale sand. A few of the smarter young folks have become

I can think of at least 2. 1) A young company, light on technical background, has build a castle on webscale sand. A few of the smarter young folks have become experts in this system, and get a lot of clout by solving "difficult" problems. Suddenly an old guy comes along and says "lets just use MySQL and CREATE INDEX". Basically, he's been there, done that, and realized that J2EE + MySQL will get the job done with a minimum of fuss, or that the "simplification" that comes from denormalizing carries a huge maintenance penalty. This old guy threatens the young "experts" - if the system is rebuilt according to industry standards, suddenly they are just another dev. 2) The old guy hasn't kept up with the times, and is stuck in ancient (and outdated) ways of doing things - manual management of memory, FooBarFactoryFactory, etc. You can't transpose these justifications onto non-Asian minorities, women, etc. A non-Asian minority or female 25 year old is fundamentally equivalent to a white/Asian 25 year old male. Nodejs is equally "close to the metal" regardless of your demographics. Tech in 1996 was radically different - a CD ROM filled with a small subset of wikipedia was actually a huge technical challenge. As a result the old guy really is different. On a personal note, at my current company I'm both the oldest techie and also the only techie who isn't a member of the majority ethnic group (sliced in US terms, at least). My age is a significant factor - I'm sometimes out of touch (I know fuckall about angular.js) and sometimes I'm the voice of experience (we should have a metrics server and use it for all the things). My ethnic diversity is completely irrelevant.

yodsanklai 11y ago
> The old guy hasn't kept up with the times, and is stuck in ancient (and outdated) ways of doing things - manual management of memory Garbage collectors have been around since the 60s with LISP. I find it amusing to see that the first language I was taught in an academic setting in 1996, Caml Light (ancestor of OCaml), is still very relevant today!
- arethuza 11y ago
  I had to write a garbage collector to get my SK combinator evaluator to run on a Unix mini (HLH Orion) in '88. Glad to see that functional languages eventually caught on though! I wish my application to Linn to work on the Rekursiv hardware had gone a bit further though...
  - rjsw 11y ago
    The HLH Orion ran garbage collected Cambridge Lisp from fairly early in its development.
    - arethuza 11y ago
      I wonder if they used their fancy bit-slice technology to change the CPU instruction set to be better suited for Lisp? [NB I am resisting the temptation to comment on the assertion that Lisp is a functional programming language! ;-)]
      - rjsw 11y ago
        I think there were extra instructions for Lisp, it certainly ran the Gabriel Benchmarks faster than you would expect for the advertised clock speed. I only spent a day talking to John Fitch about the implementation and most of that was looking at his bindings to the GUI from Lisp. Cambridge Lisp was written in BCPL which was one of the languages provided with the machine so you probably wouldn't want to completely replace the instruction set.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  Pretty much everything that is "new and hot" was done in 60s and 70s with Lisp and Smalltalk, only smarter and better. Hell, even a day or two ago we had an article pointing out that React is basically rediscovered WinAPI. The old guard that seems to be behind the current trends may in fact be ahead, because they've seen how things went in the previous iteration. As the saying goes, every field learns from its history - except software development.
  - yummyfajitas 11y ago
    This is true only for a very narrow set of "new and hot". Lisp and Smalltalk did not "do" the modern, statically typed, inference and category theory heavy languages that are rapidly growing. Dependent types were not "done" in Lisp/Smalltalk. There are also a lot of "new and hot" things which are not programming language features at all - e.g., the lambda architecture, the rise of bayesian inference, and other such things. Even relational databases - so old that it's easy to forget they were "new and hot" (with good reason).
    - yodsanklai 11y ago
      > statically typed, inference and category theory heavy languages that are rapidly growing. All of this is quite old too. As I said, I learned ML as an undergraduate in 96, 20 years ago. Back then, many "hackers" laughed about such languages. Actually, that's why I think a more foundational CS curriculum is a good thing, as opposed to those that are heavily based on technologies.
csixty4 11y ago
> The old guy hasn't kept up with the times, and is stuck in ancient (and outdated) ways of doing things - manual management of memory, FooBarFactoryFactory, etc. Interesting you brought this up, because I've noticed two different approaches to this from older developers. One group is exactly like you describe, still tracking every single precious byte their code uses. The other is like "my first PC had one megabyte and cost $3000 so don't tell me I can't allocate half a gig to this process here's $5 just go buy some more RAM!!".
- TimMeade 11y ago
  I guess it's a little bit of both. First PC was $3000 (80286-16) and had 1 mb ram. What is held over from the old days is efficient code. Not just big huge blocks that are unknowns. Ability to profile and REALLY debug, particularly profiling. Each cycle counts as much today as it did then. Seems most newer programmers were never taught that. Even web code at scale need to be clean and quick.
pervycreeper 11y ago
>The old guy hasn't kept up with the times, and is stuck in ancient (and outdated) ways of doing things That dovetails nicely with "culture fit", and both points are also unfair and possibly untrue stereotypes. So I wouldn't count them as counterexamples to the above maxim.
- yummyfajitas 11y ago
  This claim might be right or wrong (I've seen cases where it's true and cases where situation (1) is portrayed as (2)), but the point is it's not analogous to non-Asian minorities or women. People complain that old guys program like they never left the 90's. No one complains that an ethnically Mexican person never left Mexico, or that someone "programs like a girl". The only code related ethnic stereotype I've ever heard is about Russians/Ukrainians/other slavs; a lone wolf writing efficient, high quality, extremely monolithic code, usually in a non-trendy language (PHP, C, C++, sometimes Erlang or old school Lisp).

yodsanklai 11y ago

> The old guy hasn't kept up with the times, and is stuck in ancient (and outdated) ways of doing things - manual management of memory Garbage collectors have been around since the 60s with LISP. I find it amusing to see that the first language I was taught in an academic setting in 1996, Caml Light (ancestor of OCaml), is still very relevant today!

arethuza 11y ago
I had to write a garbage collector to get my SK combinator evaluator to run on a Unix mini (HLH Orion) in '88. Glad to see that functional languages eventually caught on though! I wish my application to Linn to work on the Rekursiv hardware had gone a bit further though...
- rjsw 11y ago
  The HLH Orion ran garbage collected Cambridge Lisp from fairly early in its development.
  - arethuza 11y ago
    I wonder if they used their fancy bit-slice technology to change the CPU instruction set to be better suited for Lisp? [NB I am resisting the temptation to comment on the assertion that Lisp is a functional programming language! ;-)]
    - rjsw 11y ago
      I think there were extra instructions for Lisp, it certainly ran the Gabriel Benchmarks faster than you would expect for the advertised clock speed. I only spent a day talking to John Fitch about the implementation and most of that was looking at his bindings to the GUI from Lisp. Cambridge Lisp was written in BCPL which was one of the languages provided with the machine so you probably wouldn't want to completely replace the instruction set.
TeMPOraL 11y ago
Pretty much everything that is "new and hot" was done in 60s and 70s with Lisp and Smalltalk, only smarter and better. Hell, even a day or two ago we had an article pointing out that React is basically rediscovered WinAPI. The old guard that seems to be behind the current trends may in fact be ahead, because they've seen how things went in the previous iteration. As the saying goes, every field learns from its history - except software development.
- yummyfajitas 11y ago
  This is true only for a very narrow set of "new and hot". Lisp and Smalltalk did not "do" the modern, statically typed, inference and category theory heavy languages that are rapidly growing. Dependent types were not "done" in Lisp/Smalltalk. There are also a lot of "new and hot" things which are not programming language features at all - e.g., the lambda architecture, the rise of bayesian inference, and other such things. Even relational databases - so old that it's easy to forget they were "new and hot" (with good reason).
  - yodsanklai 11y ago
    > statically typed, inference and category theory heavy languages that are rapidly growing. All of this is quite old too. As I said, I learned ML as an undergraduate in 96, 20 years ago. Back then, many "hackers" laughed about such languages. Actually, that's why I think a more foundational CS curriculum is a good thing, as opposed to those that are heavily based on technologies.

csixty4 11y ago

> The old guy hasn't kept up with the times, and is stuck in ancient (and outdated) ways of doing things - manual management of memory, FooBarFactoryFactory, etc. Interesting you brought this up, because I've noticed two different approaches to this from older developers. One group is exactly like you describe, still tracking every single precious byte their code uses. The other is like "my first PC had one megabyte and cost $3000 so don't tell me I can't allocate half a gig to this process here's $5 just go buy some more RAM!!".

TimMeade 11y ago
I guess it's a little bit of both. First PC was $3000 (80286-16) and had 1 mb ram. What is held over from the old days is efficient code. Not just big huge blocks that are unknowns. Ability to profile and REALLY debug, particularly profiling. Each cycle counts as much today as it did then. Seems most newer programmers were never taught that. Even web code at scale need to be clean and quick.

pervycreeper 11y ago

>The old guy hasn't kept up with the times, and is stuck in ancient (and outdated) ways of doing things That dovetails nicely with "culture fit", and both points are also unfair and possibly untrue stereotypes. So I wouldn't count them as counterexamples to the above maxim.

yummyfajitas 11y ago
This claim might be right or wrong (I've seen cases where it's true and cases where situation (1) is portrayed as (2)), but the point is it's not analogous to non-Asian minorities or women. People complain that old guys program like they never left the 90's. No one complains that an ethnically Mexican person never left Mexico, or that someone "programs like a girl". The only code related ethnic stereotype I've ever heard is about Russians/Ukrainians/other slavs; a lone wolf writing efficient, high quality, extremely monolithic code, usually in a non-trendy language (PHP, C, C++, sometimes Erlang or old school Lisp).