I'm also getting up there in years (approaching 30 years of experience since I started programming when I was 12). It hit me the other day that since technolog

I'm also getting up there in years (approaching 30 years of experience since I started programming when I was 12). It hit me the other day that since technology cycles last about 3 years, then I've seen 10 of them. Here, let's list them: 80s: * Programming for small business with HyperCard * Programming flowcharts in Visual Interactive Programming 90s: * Programming in C/C++ * Programming in assembly language * Programming in Scheme (Lisp) 2000s: * Programming in the shell * Programming in PHP/MySQL * Programming in Javascript * Programming in Swift/Objective-C/Java * Programming in MATLAB/Octave Bonus: * Wanting to program in Elixer/Clojure/F# etc I could probably write a book on most of these. The last one is nebulous because functional programming languages tend to drop all the contextual familiarity of mainstream languages on the ground and force us to start over. I think that's why they haven't caught on yet. So I'm in mourning about that, but also that cargo culting has gotten so big. I spend the majority of my time now working around the inherent flaws of whichever paradigm I'm using. So that might be reconstructing the call stack knee-deep in callback hell or learning the entirety of a framework in order to extend the one piece of functionality that it should have had to begin with. It wears on you. If it takes 10 years to master something, then what's one to do after 20? 30? History begins to repeat itself and it's not fun the second time around. For example the rush to static types is sounding alarm bells but people don't know how bad it can get because they haven't been 10 levels down in template hell. You sound depressed, but that's ok because depression is inevitable if we apply our problem solving skills to daily life. The real world is not a computer, it doesn't require that level of prognostication. Trying to create a life free of mistakes causes us to relive them over and over again, until all we remember is how we've failed. Most of the anxiety felt by older programmers comes from the market takeover of computer science. Reading survivor bias articles all day gets more taxing the longer your ship hasn't come in yet. There should be a viable alternative like the undying lands of academia where older programmers can congregate and make the world a better place. But that's been under attack too and we would likely find the same sweatshops there. We're long overdue for a programmer's guild that funds open source projects whose unicorns make more than enough money to go around for everyone. An alternative to capital as a buy-in. I imagine a future where we earn a stipend to write languages and frameworks that don't suck, rather than toiling all the days of our lives away chasing money that never makes up for the lost time. That's what I would work towards, ideally. I shouldn't have written all this but it's Sunday so what the heck. I definitely hear you. Email sent!