3 ms·

Shit, no! Look, I've been programming since 1982 (BASIC on a Hewlett-Packard with a 3" screen - lap equipment, essentially - then an Apple ][e for BASIC/assemb

by Vivtek 15y ago

Shit, no! Look, I've been programming since 1982 (BASIC on a Hewlett-Packard with a 3" screen - lap equipment, essentially - then an Apple ][e for BASIC/assembly, then Turbo Pascal, then real Windows with C++ for my first couple of professional jobs, moving into Tcl under AOLserver against databases in the 90's, adding Perl later) and so I think I know whereof I speak, and I've addressed this point before, but ... it just keeps getting easier to reach for the stars. Sure, there's a lot of wasted time on boring stuff, but that was already there back in the day. It's just easier to read about somebody else doing something than to do something yourself - but nobody's stopping you from doing hobby work on Z80 in assembler, or implementing your own language, or whatever - and no matter what you want to do, there are more tools, more references, more help to get off the ground and going. You want excitement? Stop reading blogs and just program something.

Yhippa 15y ago
Agreed. I think it's less exciting if you're the lone wolf coder sitting in your room optimizing the hell out of a language. With all the abstractions available nowadays programmers have gone away from developing their own frameworks to utilizing several to make something much bigger than they could have int he past. I understand that making your own sockets or database interface library might not be as exciting as rolling your own. However I feel that it's much easier for nearly anybody to pick stuff off the shelf and make something amazing which we all benefit from.
- brlewis 15y ago
  The lone wolf coder optimizing a language is excited about advances in garbage collection, which AFAICT have not slowed down. I'm in the "old-timer" bucket this essay describes, and I really can't twist my mind into any perspective that makes today less exciting than 20 years ago.
zerostar07 15y ago
I think he s talking about something else: having fun programming, not just being productive. The fact of the matter is you don't see many new concepts being introduced (say, garbage collection) but mostly new languages or programming styles, more ways to do the same things. And the proliferation of the web means many people work on client-server systems and interfaces. I guess it's inevitable, software engineering is mature enough nowadays and moves slowly. Maybe in 10 years it will be the geneticists' turn to complain.
- Vivtek 15y ago
  His point is wrong, then. Does he think that in the 70's there weren't COBOL programmers hacking out yet another set of flat-file database systems? So garbage collection is a solved issue - thank God - it just seems like he's quitting his job as patent clerk because everything's been invented already. And that's just not close to true. It's never true.

by Vivtek 15y ago

Yhippa 15y ago

Agreed. I think it's less exciting if you're the lone wolf coder sitting in your room optimizing the hell out of a language. With all the abstractions available nowadays programmers have gone away from developing their own frameworks to utilizing several to make something much bigger than they could have int he past. I understand that making your own sockets or database interface library might not be as exciting as rolling your own. However I feel that it's much easier for nearly anybody to pick stuff off the shelf and make something amazing which we all benefit from.

brlewis 15y ago
The lone wolf coder optimizing a language is excited about advances in garbage collection, which AFAICT have not slowed down. I'm in the "old-timer" bucket this essay describes, and I really can't twist my mind into any perspective that makes today less exciting than 20 years ago.

zerostar07 15y ago

I think he s talking about something else: having fun programming, not just being productive. The fact of the matter is you don't see many new concepts being introduced (say, garbage collection) but mostly new languages or programming styles, more ways to do the same things. And the proliferation of the web means many people work on client-server systems and interfaces. I guess it's inevitable, software engineering is mature enough nowadays and moves slowly. Maybe in 10 years it will be the geneticists' turn to complain.

Vivtek 15y ago
His point is wrong, then. Does he think that in the 70's there weren't COBOL programmers hacking out yet another set of flat-file database systems? So garbage collection is a solved issue - thank God - it just seems like he's quitting his job as patent clerk because everything's been invented already. And that's just not close to true. It's never true.