6 ms·
Ah, "Grey beard". The term Microsoft used to separate the old from the young at a conference when they first introduced the .NET framework. Classic "old bad, go
by ourmandave 10y ago
Ah, "Grey beard". The term Microsoft used to separate the old from the young at a conference when they first introduced the .NET framework. Classic "old bad, good new" sales.
As in, "you Grey Breads remember using C++ and MFC, etc."
Yes I remember. Because it was yesterday just before I came to your conference!
I still went home and started learning what the hell XML was though. =(
- newjersey 10y agoI still can't wrap my head around the fact that we have developers who work on .NET and have never touched either WinForms or WebForms. And I am relatively young.
- douche 10y agoWebForms can die in a fire, and thankfully has, for the most part, but WinForms is still plenty good enough for cranking out quick and dirty tools. Maybe I'm old, or it's just because I started out in high school doing VB6 forms applications, but I still prefer it unless I have a good reason, over WPF. WinForms is also a pretty thin layer over Win32 controls, as well, so if you have to switch between .Net and native C/C++ Windows dev, it's less of a context switch.
- themartorana 10y agoWebForms changed the game. ASP was a sub-subset of VB, but WebForms with C# made websites full-scale eventful and stateful programs for the first time. I had never felt such power and freedom programming for the web. Yes, some people would put humongous data structures in view state, and yes, more-better solutions have arisen, but WebForms deserves your respect!
- robin_reala 10y agoIt really doesn’t. I’ve never seen a good WebForms site / app and I’ve always dreaded working with them. They were a regressive step.
- insulanian 10y agoIf you worked long enough with WebForms, then you'd know what an inefficient, slow and complicated event-hairball it is. I curse every time I have to go back to any old WebForms-based project to do some changes.
- flukus 10y ago> WebForms with C# made websites full-scale eventful and stateful programs for the first time. And that is why it can go die in a fire!
- ourmandave 10y agoWe do a lot of new development in Winforms. Ironically, it's our migration path away from green screen programs.
- th0waway 10y agoI've never really understood the problem with green screen programs: for most businesses, a green screen is perfectly usable, and it has the added bandwidth of low bandwidth requirements. A company I worked for uses Windows apps hosted in a Citrix environment. A green screen would lower the bandwidth requirements and remove a lot of the parasitic drag between servicing the customer and storing data.
- markbnj 10y ago>> I still can't wrap my head around the fact that we have developers who work on .NET and have never touched either WinForms or WebForms. >> And I am relatively young. I still can't wrap my head around the fact that we have developers who worked on WinForms and never used MFC or ATL or wrote C code to the Win16/32 API :). And I'm... er... used to be young.
- deathanatos 10y agoI'm in my 20s, and when I was starting it was the Win32 API, in C. It really wasn't that long ago.
- greggman 10y agoUnity3d is probably exposing tons of people to .net without winforms
- fuzzy2 10y agoNot all development involves GUIs. Well, let’s go even further and say most development is not GUI-related. Business logic and algorithms is what it’s all about.
- amelius 10y agoMost algorithms are reusable, while most GUI code is not. Hence, most actual programming is happening on GUIs.
- fuzzy2 10y agoHm, depends on the business, I guess. Because from my experience, most business algorithms are proprietary and don’t have proper specifications. You can’t just use them somewhere else. You have to recreate them from scratch.
- gaius 10y agoProbably because your devs didn't write them in stored procs like they should.
- animal531 10y agoOnly roughly half the world believes in SP's. The other half (like me) believes that writing even the barest of hints of logic into SP's is a serious crime.
- gaius 10y agoSo you'd rather write the same logic in every app, and trust that every developer of every app does the same and gets it identical? Good for keeping busy I suppose but if I were your manager I wouldn't pay you for it.
- mdadm 10y ago>As in, "you Grey Breads remember using C++ and MFC, etc." As one who is neither "Grey" nor "Bread," you may wish to check your spelling :) But yes, it's kind of sad that this is the way things are now :(
- gozur88 10y agoGray and grey are both acceptable spellings. Or were you just talking about "bread"?
- mcguire 10y agoHmph. Sourdough life forever!
- mdadm 10y agoHah! Plain white bread is clearly where it's at!
- ourmandave 10y agoI am not Galdalf the Grey, I am Gandalf the BREAD! Er wait, Gandalf the White!
- WalterBright 10y ago> you Grey Breads remember using C++ and MFC, etc. I remember submitting my BASIC program on IBM punch cards. Using a card punch machine taught one to not make typos. You youngsters with your backspace keys!
- glasz 10y agothank you for making me smile during these horrible days.
- WalterBright 10y agoI'm actually not kidding. My first programs were done on punchcards back in 1974 or 1975. I then moved on to ASR-33s (barf), DECWriters (much better) and then ADM-3A glass terminals (heaven - a working backspace!). Using a text editor today is not much different than an ADM-3A, it just has more rows and columns on it and the font is slightly, but not much, nicer. (Why do the console fonts suck these days? Jeez) Edit: the first screen editor I had ran on an ADM-3A and was a TECO macro. I think TECO was the first "tty noise" programming language.
- onion2k 10y agoYou had literal patches though.
- jbuzbee 10y agoDoes anyone else remember using a hard-copy terminal? It's hard to even think about how I would edit, compile, debug and run programs where everything you typed or was echoed back, including passwords, was printed out on a paper roll. Want to look at your command-history? just grab the paper and look. Of course there was no fancy vi screen-oriented editor. We had ed and liked it!
- clort 10y agoWe had a teletype machine at my school in 1980 connected to the local authority mainframe. There was nearly always a queue to type your own program but you could write it out on a sheet of paper (one character per box) and get a printout of somebody who had typed it in for you. When they made a mistake your program didn't run and you had to send it again the next week. and I'm only 50!
- mark-r 10y agoThey prefer the young ones, because it's easier to get them to swallow the BS. They'll play the "fire and motion" game [1] with gusto. [1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000339.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000339.html
- th0waway 10y agoyeah, the young ones have spent the last several years distancing themselves from everything the old man has done, that doing anything that the old man does is seen as regressive. They don't want to do it the way the old man does until they ARE the old man.