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Welcome to HN and for making this place more magical by your presence. Have seen other very senior programmers here over the years. Paul Lutus comes to mind now

by aws_ls 6y ago

Welcome to HN and for making this place more magical by your presence. Have seen other very senior programmers here over the years. Paul Lutus comes to mind now[1]. One question: Do you go through a mid life crisis in programming in your 40s/50s? My story (just felt like sharing): I am in my 40s and have been programming for 30 years (I first wrote in Fortran in my Engineering College, 1st semester). Later professionally coded in C++ for around 10 years (and still keep coming back to it, as needed). Java for 10 years. Golang for 7 years. And Python for last 2-3 years. And there were other languages like Visual basic (late 90s). A lot of Unix shell scripting. I still think, I am at my best. But do have occasional self doubts. The main difference from younger days, which is perceptible to me, is the need for eye glasses, and needing slightly bigger fonts on occasions (HN is perfect that way). I teach/guide my elder son, in programming, who just turned 20, and doing well as a programmer - did half of K&R C chapters and decent in algorithmic programming. Spent few months at Codeforces website and reached specialist level (Next level is Expert, which is generally considered respectable by any standard). And he also likely lurks on HN. :) So now, when I see your message, it only makes me happy, that HN has likely at least 3 generation of programmers if not more. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=lutusp https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=lutusp Edit: typo

rbanffy 6y ago
> Paul Lutus comes to mind now I used GraFORTH and TransFORTH so much... I'm in my 50's now, started my career during college, writing educational software for Apple II clones (not in FORTH, sadly). Now mostly Python, since the early 2000's, with little bits of other languages here and there. I find HN delightful for the diversity we see here.
joelbluminator 6y ago
Just keep up the good work, glasses or no glasses
jv22222 6y ago
@aws_ls I wanted to surface this answer to a question about burnout answered by genedangelo. I is on page 2 here but I think it is relevant to what you are asking. > genedangelo 1 day ago > The one thing that comes to mind is to avoid the "hammer looking for a nail" syndrome. I see this all the time, especially in academia. Rather than worry about learning all the latest stuff, concentrate on solving the problem at hand in the simplest and most effective manner. If that requires you to learn new things, then that's a great time to expand your repertoire - working on a specific problem. Of course you have to strike a balance, but mainly concentrate on solving problems rather than being up-to-date on all the latest stuff and trying to find the proverbial nail for your new hammer. Additionally, I am in a coder in my 50s and I have to say I am not going through any kind of mid life crisis in programming! Like genedangelo, I just focus on problems that need to get solved and I really don't care how I solved it as long as I use a great tool that is meant for that job. Super happy to learn a new tech if it makes sense for the problem. There was a phase a few years ago where folks were using node.js to build all kinds of websites, including content heavy text based sites that would be better served as static html or dynmaic Ruby, PHP etc. I think that's the classic mistake of a hammer looking for a nail and I can imagine it was really unsatisfying to build those kinds of sites with that kind of tech and might even contribute to burnout (just speculating).
- aws_ls 6y ago
  Thanks a lot @jv22222 for sharing your own perspective apart from highlighting @genedangelo 's reply. Just to clarify, I am also not going through a crisis as such, thankfully. Just a doubt on future continued ability lingers on occasions. What you say, makes sense to me. After a few decades, we just see some patterns repeating with different names - RPC -> CORBA -> RMI -> Web servcies (based on SOAP) -> REST (based on JSON) -> Google RPC (going again to binary style) ... and so on. Not being cynical. Things progress in a way, but also have echos of the past.

by aws_ls 6y ago

rbanffy 6y ago

> Paul Lutus comes to mind now I used GraFORTH and TransFORTH so much... I'm in my 50's now, started my career during college, writing educational software for Apple II clones (not in FORTH, sadly). Now mostly Python, since the early 2000's, with little bits of other languages here and there. I find HN delightful for the diversity we see here.

joelbluminator 6y ago

Just keep up the good work, glasses or no glasses

jv22222 6y ago

@aws_ls I wanted to surface this answer to a question about burnout answered by genedangelo. I is on page 2 here but I think it is relevant to what you are asking. > genedangelo 1 day ago > The one thing that comes to mind is to avoid the "hammer looking for a nail" syndrome. I see this all the time, especially in academia. Rather than worry about learning all the latest stuff, concentrate on solving the problem at hand in the simplest and most effective manner. If that requires you to learn new things, then that's a great time to expand your repertoire - working on a specific problem. Of course you have to strike a balance, but mainly concentrate on solving problems rather than being up-to-date on all the latest stuff and trying to find the proverbial nail for your new hammer. Additionally, I am in a coder in my 50s and I have to say I am not going through any kind of mid life crisis in programming! Like genedangelo, I just focus on problems that need to get solved and I really don't care how I solved it as long as I use a great tool that is meant for that job. Super happy to learn a new tech if it makes sense for the problem. There was a phase a few years ago where folks were using node.js to build all kinds of websites, including content heavy text based sites that would be better served as static html or dynmaic Ruby, PHP etc. I think that's the classic mistake of a hammer looking for a nail and I can imagine it was really unsatisfying to build those kinds of sites with that kind of tech and might even contribute to burnout (just speculating).

aws_ls 6y ago
Thanks a lot @jv22222 for sharing your own perspective apart from highlighting @genedangelo 's reply. Just to clarify, I am also not going through a crisis as such, thankfully. Just a doubt on future continued ability lingers on occasions. What you say, makes sense to me. After a few decades, we just see some patterns repeating with different names - RPC -> CORBA -> RMI -> Web servcies (based on SOAP) -> REST (based on JSON) -> Google RPC (going again to binary style) ... and so on. Not being cynical. Things progress in a way, but also have echos of the past.