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Jukebox the Ghost in 2012, In my lungs I still feel young But my body won't play along I'm thinking this must not be where we Belong. Alan Kay

Jukebox the Ghost in 2012, In my lungs I still feel young But my body won't play along I'm thinking this must not be where we Belong. Alan Kay was talking somewhere, but I don't have the link, about how a lot of his success in his youth had to do with the research community around him, and I think he was asked a question about how that sort of thing changes as you grow older... He replied that the combination of growing older and not having that generous funding for whatever experiments they wanted to do and the dynamic research community, meant that he had to stop looking for validation at the "quality of my results" and instead had to feel pride at the "quality of my effort." Something I have kept in mind. The other thing I will say is that I am getting to an age where a lot of people really get set in their ways, and I am noticing that I am not. Like on a recent project I was trying to get team buy-in to move from Java to Kotlin, and the people who were super excited about it were 5-10 years younger and the people who were like “but why” were my generation and carried the day. I told this struggle to my wife and she attributed it to neurodivergence, she thinks I might have a mild or high-functioning ADHD that essentially gives me perpetual mid-to-late 20s enthusiasm with sime mild drawbacks (difficulty “cleaning as I go” when cooking for example, not handling the taxes until April when it becomes urgent, that sort of thing).

gnz11 4y ago
In general (nothing against Kotlin) I think it probably has to do with the prospect of having to fiddle about and work late with new tech for the same outcome as what you would have gotten with the tried and true tech. At the end of the day, I want to spend my time with my friends and family and not burning the midnight hours on work tasks that could have been avoided.
- hellisothers 4y ago
  This resonates but also essentially agrees w/the parent, the youth want to do what you just described for various reasons that benefit the youth, the older peeps didn’t, because of similar motivations.
- Aeolun 4y ago
  In my personal experience working with Kotlin saves you half the time on typing alone.
  - p1esk 4y ago
    Typing code is probably less than 5% of my daily time as a SWE.
    - abalashov 4y ago
      Why is this being downvoted? :-) It's totally true. The actual kinetics of coding from a "typing" perspective is a tiny part of any software engineer's job...
    - Aeolun 4y ago
      That is probably true, but that 5% is responsible for 50% of the daily frustration. Certainly when working in plain Java.
  - smsm42 4y ago
    If saving on typing time is the primary goal, APL is the way.
dehrmann 4y ago
> Java to Kotlin Don't. I tried it, liked the language itself, but went back to Java. Kotlin's syntax is nice, but it predates Java 8, so that syntax plays poorly with the stream API and lambdas. Iterop works as-promised, but again, Kotlin syntax doesn't work well with libraries that are Java-first (in my case, this was Hadoop). Finally, mainline Java keeps cherry-picking the best new language features while learning from their mistakes.
- za3faran 4y ago
  Don't forget pattern matching in Java is more fully fledged compared to Kotlin. Java is also getting string templates, and project Loom (virtual threads) make the entire suspend/await approach unnecessary.
rudasn 4y ago
> [...] he had to stop looking for validation at the "quality of my results" and instead had to feel pride at the "quality of my effort." Something I have kept in mind. Along the same lines, is the realisation that we tend to judge (?) others by the outcome of their efforts, but we judge ourselves by the outcome of our thoughts. I've read that somewhere, certainly more eloquently put, but it also stuck - esp. afrer having kids.
- nativeit 4y ago
  Unless it’s some other creative variation on the same theme, that sentiment is referring to what I learned in my college psych classes as the “Fundamental Attribution Error”. Simply put, the fundamental attribution error says that part of our nature leads us to attribute more of our own behavior to being the result of a nuanced blend of circumstances and external influences, while the behavior of others gets more associated with who they are and the internal choices they made with little or no consideration to forces beyond their control. It intuitively makes sense that this is the case, and for some reason it really stuck with me (it’s been 16-years since that class). Committing to working against this nearly universal implicit bias led me to being a more empathetic person over time.
Falkon1313 4y ago
>on a recent project I was trying to get team buy-in to move from Java to Kotlin, and the people who were super excited about it were 5-10 years younger and the people who were like “but why” were my generation Older people are more likely to have managed to do that before (introducing cool new tech/tools) and seen the costs of doing so. There simply are always switching costs, integration costs, and maintenance costs as well as new dependencies involved which can make it better in the long-run to simply keep using the potentially sub-optimal tech that everyone is already familiar with and using all day every day. One place where I've seen success with using different tech is in some batch-processing script-like thing that you can just deploy, set up a cron job, and then everyone can forget about it while it runs happily in the background for years. Of course, that'll mean another cost when it eventually does need to be changed, but if that's many years later, that may be negligible. Another is one-offs that you can run once, verify the results, and then throw away. But for something that's going to need substantial development or ongoing routine changes, the benefit might not outweigh the costs. Younger people might not have had that experience or be thinking in terms of that whole long-term lifecycle thing, while older people have already dealt with it.
brailsafe 4y ago
Having ADHD, I definitely feel more like your older colleagues now compared to how I felt in my early 20s before I'd burnt myself out just trying to do regular tasks efficiently. I'm interested in learning anything novel under two conditions, which are that results are potentially better in some way, and that the study time is paid for. If a new project arbitrarily wanted me to learn Kotlin in my personal time out of enthusiasm for code, I'd probably tell the team lead they should find someone else. I just absolutely don't give the slightest fucking shit about the company I work for, don't consider the work I do to be necessarily broadly important (outside the scope of delivering customer value) and don't anticipate I ever will. Code is just code, it does what it does, and if the outcome doesn't produce anything different or feel better to use or give me more of my time back, there's no point. But hey, I've only been employed for like half my adult life so far, so companies have never really shown that they have my back.
- crdrost 4y ago
  Thanks for sharing, it is especially helpful for me to get a perspective from someone who actually has ADHD! I definitely thought personally that Kotlin had some big advantages. • The most common comment on a pull request was asking people to remember to “@NonNull all the things!” so Kotlin’s non-null by default aspects seemed wonderful. • Maybe the second most common comment on a pull request was to replace “==” with Objects.equals(x, y), Kotlin just has a sane ==. Note that Objects.equals() is the correct choice because y.equals(x) is “safe” but unfortunately written Yoda-style whereas x.equals(y) causes null pointer exceptions (the x usually comes from a getter which is null-tolerant). • Kotlin had immutable records by default which made tests automatically more readable. • The ability to mix declarations for functions and data structures etc in one file, allowed for much less jumping between files. Meanwhile, the lighter syntax meant that the code in those files took up a lot less visual space, so these files were not overwhelming... So to your point it definitely “felt better to use and gave me more of my time back”, I felt, otherwise I would not have pushed for it. And yes I agree the time to learn the language should all be accounted for in development hours, not some weekend homework project, and I would definitely validate your skepticism about the dangers about caring for the company more than it cares about you.
ryan-allen 4y ago
> she thinks I might have a mild or high-functioning ADHD that essentially gives me perpetual mid-to-late 20s enthusiasm with sime mild drawbacks That is interesting! I do have ADHD and I'm now in my low 40s. The enthusiasm never goes away. I met an old housemate, whom I had not seen in 20 years, and he said "You were eager, and unlike the other housemates you were much more open to things and not set in your ways." I said mate, nothing has changed! It really is a pain when your peers don't want to try new things, but on the other hand, it's a good personality for leading a bunch of young guns with fire in their bellies!
smsm42 4y ago
For the young guys the experience of learning a new thing and playing with it is likely more valuable than for the guys that already had that experience a dozen times or so. It's not that older guys don't like new experiences, it that some experiences aren't new for them anymore.

gnz11 4y ago

In general (nothing against Kotlin) I think it probably has to do with the prospect of having to fiddle about and work late with new tech for the same outcome as what you would have gotten with the tried and true tech. At the end of the day, I want to spend my time with my friends and family and not burning the midnight hours on work tasks that could have been avoided.

hellisothers 4y ago
This resonates but also essentially agrees w/the parent, the youth want to do what you just described for various reasons that benefit the youth, the older peeps didn’t, because of similar motivations.
Aeolun 4y ago
In my personal experience working with Kotlin saves you half the time on typing alone.
- p1esk 4y ago
  Typing code is probably less than 5% of my daily time as a SWE.
  - abalashov 4y ago
    Why is this being downvoted? :-) It's totally true. The actual kinetics of coding from a "typing" perspective is a tiny part of any software engineer's job...
  - Aeolun 4y ago
    That is probably true, but that 5% is responsible for 50% of the daily frustration. Certainly when working in plain Java.
- smsm42 4y ago
  If saving on typing time is the primary goal, APL is the way.

dehrmann 4y ago

> Java to Kotlin Don't. I tried it, liked the language itself, but went back to Java. Kotlin's syntax is nice, but it predates Java 8, so that syntax plays poorly with the stream API and lambdas. Iterop works as-promised, but again, Kotlin syntax doesn't work well with libraries that are Java-first (in my case, this was Hadoop). Finally, mainline Java keeps cherry-picking the best new language features while learning from their mistakes.

za3faran 4y ago
Don't forget pattern matching in Java is more fully fledged compared to Kotlin. Java is also getting string templates, and project Loom (virtual threads) make the entire suspend/await approach unnecessary.

rudasn 4y ago

> [...] he had to stop looking for validation at the "quality of my results" and instead had to feel pride at the "quality of my effort." Something I have kept in mind. Along the same lines, is the realisation that we tend to judge (?) others by the outcome of their efforts, but we judge ourselves by the outcome of our thoughts. I've read that somewhere, certainly more eloquently put, but it also stuck - esp. afrer having kids.

nativeit 4y ago
Unless it’s some other creative variation on the same theme, that sentiment is referring to what I learned in my college psych classes as the “Fundamental Attribution Error”. Simply put, the fundamental attribution error says that part of our nature leads us to attribute more of our own behavior to being the result of a nuanced blend of circumstances and external influences, while the behavior of others gets more associated with who they are and the internal choices they made with little or no consideration to forces beyond their control. It intuitively makes sense that this is the case, and for some reason it really stuck with me (it’s been 16-years since that class). Committing to working against this nearly universal implicit bias led me to being a more empathetic person over time.

Falkon1313 4y ago

>on a recent project I was trying to get team buy-in to move from Java to Kotlin, and the people who were super excited about it were 5-10 years younger and the people who were like “but why” were my generation Older people are more likely to have managed to do that before (introducing cool new tech/tools) and seen the costs of doing so. There simply are always switching costs, integration costs, and maintenance costs as well as new dependencies involved which can make it better in the long-run to simply keep using the potentially sub-optimal tech that everyone is already familiar with and using all day every day. One place where I've seen success with using different tech is in some batch-processing script-like thing that you can just deploy, set up a cron job, and then everyone can forget about it while it runs happily in the background for years. Of course, that'll mean another cost when it eventually does need to be changed, but if that's many years later, that may be negligible. Another is one-offs that you can run once, verify the results, and then throw away. But for something that's going to need substantial development or ongoing routine changes, the benefit might not outweigh the costs. Younger people might not have had that experience or be thinking in terms of that whole long-term lifecycle thing, while older people have already dealt with it.

brailsafe 4y ago

Having ADHD, I definitely feel more like your older colleagues now compared to how I felt in my early 20s before I'd burnt myself out just trying to do regular tasks efficiently. I'm interested in learning anything novel under two conditions, which are that results are potentially better in some way, and that the study time is paid for. If a new project arbitrarily wanted me to learn Kotlin in my personal time out of enthusiasm for code, I'd probably tell the team lead they should find someone else. I just absolutely don't give the slightest fucking shit about the company I work for, don't consider the work I do to be necessarily broadly important (outside the scope of delivering customer value) and don't anticipate I ever will. Code is just code, it does what it does, and if the outcome doesn't produce anything different or feel better to use or give me more of my time back, there's no point. But hey, I've only been employed for like half my adult life so far, so companies have never really shown that they have my back.

crdrost 4y ago
Thanks for sharing, it is especially helpful for me to get a perspective from someone who actually has ADHD! I definitely thought personally that Kotlin had some big advantages. • The most common comment on a pull request was asking people to remember to “@NonNull all the things!” so Kotlin’s non-null by default aspects seemed wonderful. • Maybe the second most common comment on a pull request was to replace “==” with Objects.equals(x, y), Kotlin just has a sane ==. Note that Objects.equals() is the correct choice because y.equals(x) is “safe” but unfortunately written Yoda-style whereas x.equals(y) causes null pointer exceptions (the x usually comes from a getter which is null-tolerant). • Kotlin had immutable records by default which made tests automatically more readable. • The ability to mix declarations for functions and data structures etc in one file, allowed for much less jumping between files. Meanwhile, the lighter syntax meant that the code in those files took up a lot less visual space, so these files were not overwhelming... So to your point it definitely “felt better to use and gave me more of my time back”, I felt, otherwise I would not have pushed for it. And yes I agree the time to learn the language should all be accounted for in development hours, not some weekend homework project, and I would definitely validate your skepticism about the dangers about caring for the company more than it cares about you.

ryan-allen 4y ago

> she thinks I might have a mild or high-functioning ADHD that essentially gives me perpetual mid-to-late 20s enthusiasm with sime mild drawbacks That is interesting! I do have ADHD and I'm now in my low 40s. The enthusiasm never goes away. I met an old housemate, whom I had not seen in 20 years, and he said "You were eager, and unlike the other housemates you were much more open to things and not set in your ways." I said mate, nothing has changed! It really is a pain when your peers don't want to try new things, but on the other hand, it's a good personality for leading a bunch of young guns with fire in their bellies!

smsm42 4y ago

For the young guys the experience of learning a new thing and playing with it is likely more valuable than for the guys that already had that experience a dozen times or so. It's not that older guys don't like new experiences, it that some experiences aren't new for them anymore.