I love it when a post on HN shows up a day after a mid-morning brunch based rant about the subject at hand. It was my observation during the discussion that if

I love it when a post on HN shows up a day after a mid-morning brunch based rant about the subject at hand. It was my observation during the discussion that if you take away all of the shiny toys that attend what passes for web development these days, your average programmer would be left pretty much high and dry and unable to continue at that point. Having vented at that point I backed down and admitted that this was a VERY old argument that always takes place as things change. Further that I really couldn't see any good reason why things should be done the hard way. I even used to make jokes in my code where main or the equivalent had a single function called 'just-do-it'. The fact that I started out with IBM 360 BAL is totally irrelevant to today's programmer and should be. I do worry about cases of 'what happens when': even the best calculator is worthless if you don't know how to lay out the problem. But that is a a minor problem/objection. I also find it interesting that my 'antique' knowledge has provided employment for precisely those situations he mentions in the article: I can easily 'glue' together the output from one black box to another. No one needs to worry about the boxes in question; which is good since often they are inherited and are either a mystery or are quite fragile or both. My code in the middle is typically quite short and very easily modified to meet changing needs as necessary. So as much as I might rant and rail about 'In my day', I'm actually better off today than I was then. I also note that much of the toys I mock are in fact written by programmers with the same bent as I have---much rather write a utility than an application :)