4 ms·

in the poker world, there was a turning point around 2002, where all of a sudden out of nowhere, 22-year-old kids were DESTROYING the "old fart" professionals -

in the poker world, there was a turning point around 2002, where all of a sudden out of nowhere, 22-year-old kids were DESTROYING the "old fart" professionals - the kids learned poker on the internet, and condensed a lifetime of learning into two years with better learning materials and faster play. this may or may not be happening now in the programming world. i've met a handful of "old fart" programmers who are exceptional. i've also met a handful of twenty-something programmers who are equally exceptional. but as far as the long tail goes, the kids are much less resistant to new ideas, new concepts (for example functional programming). i think it might be a generational difference, and i think it could shake up the software economy in the next decade. edit for the trolls: new to a particular person, not to the world. functional programming is a new concept to most of the people i've met, including several very strong engineers.

mattvanhorn 14y ago
Since when is functional programming a "new concept"? Ah, youth.
rumcajz 14y ago
Old farts may remember that functional programming is used since 1950's.
- jes5199 14y ago
  sure, but my father was a professional programmer from the late 1960s until the 1990s, and he had never heard the term until I told him about it, in like 2005 - when it became a fad.
  - dalke 14y ago
    I suspect that most professional programmers haven't heard of functional programming even now. You do realize that there's no functional programming language in the top 30 languages on the Tiobe list, and none of the main Microsoft or Apple languages are functional. Most programmers don't know much about the general field of software development, much less follow the fads. Here's a test: did your father know about Scheme?
dalke 14y ago
"new concepts (for example functional programming)" New? Functional programming has been around since the 1960s. ML was first available in 1973. Haskell was first released in 1990. Even Python, a decidedly non-functional language, included the "map", "apply", and "reduce" builtins in its 1.0 release in 1991. The author of the essay says that 45 is often considered "old fart" age. Let's say someone was 25 when Backus presented "Can Programming Be Liberated From the von Neumann Style? A Functional Style and its Algebra of Programs" in 1977. That's 35 years ago, making them 60. Or perhaps the reference date should be when "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" came out in 1985? Making them 52 now. (I picked age 25 since at age 20 they would be "out of nowhere, 22-year-old kids" you were talking about.) By neither criteria is functional programming new enough that a 45 year should consider it a "new concept."
- adrianN 14y ago
  If you take the existence of papers as a measure about what is relevant for an industry programmer, then I hope you are familiar with things like writing formal proofs using Coq and Isabelle (Coq started in the eighties), or generating programs directly from a specification.
  - dalke 14y ago
    I don't. That's why I included SICP in 1985 as another reference point. Quoting from Wikipedia on "Functional Programming": Also in the 1970s, the development of Scheme (a partly functional dialect of Lisp), as described in the influential Lambda Papers and the 1985 textbook Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, brought awareness of the power of functional programming to the wider programming-languages community. Even then, my own knowledge of functional programming started in the mid-1990s, as a physics grad student. It wasn't good knowledge, most assuredly, but enough that I am confident that a hot-shot young developer of 1990 would know the basics about as well as a hot-shot young developer now. Oh, and I even remember my advisor coming in one day exclaiming that we should all learn Dylan; that it was the new, elegant language of the future. ("About as well" because there 1) there's more documented experience with functional programming, and 2) there are many more developers now, so statistical distributions say that there are going to be a few more people now who know it better than they did then.)
cunac 14y ago
I love that child innocence when they discover 'new' stuff , ahh good old days I miss that :-)
beagle3 14y ago
> but as far as the long tail goes, the kids are much less resistant to new ideas I think that the "old farts" resist "new ideas" mostly because they aren't really new, and they know where those ideas went the last time around. You know, "fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice..."; An example: Object Oriented Databases; when they were popular (early nineties), all the "cool kids" thought the "old farts" were just resisting the "new idea", when in fact the "old farts" had experience with earlier network/entity databases (some of which weren't far from the object databases of the day), and knew why they preferred the relational databases to everything else. For a modern example: I don't know anyone experienced with HPC who like hadoop. You pay about 10 times (CPU, management costs) for using hadoop compared to actually solving the problem at hand - in return for getting the code to a working state twice as fast (e.g. 6 months without hadoop == 3 months with hadoop). If your problem scale is small, it might seem like a win, but it isn't; If you need 10 servers instead of one, you paid ~$10000 and another month in system administration without noticing. You might still come out ahead, depending on your constraints, but it isn't clear cut. When you're running 1000 servers instead of the 100 you could have, that's easily a couple of million dollars, which is disastrous for many projects -- and yet, I get labeled "old fart" for not embracing hadoop. edit: minor edits
adrianhoward 14y ago
i've also met a handful of twenty-something programmers who are equally exceptional. but as far as the long tail goes, the kids are much less resistant to new ideas, new concepts (for example functional programming). i think it might be a generational difference, and i think it could shake up the software economy in the next decade I've had exactly the opposite experience. The young guys I come across are resistant to things like FP finally poking into some bits of the mainstream. The old guys are going "Yay! People are finally taking functional programming seriously!". I'm in my forties. I'm guessing you're in your twenties. I'm pretty sure both of our experiences are due much more to selection bias in who we know than any age differences in how developers approach problems and "new" technology.

mattvanhorn 14y ago

Since when is functional programming a "new concept"? Ah, youth.

rumcajz 14y ago

Old farts may remember that functional programming is used since 1950's.

jes5199 14y ago
sure, but my father was a professional programmer from the late 1960s until the 1990s, and he had never heard the term until I told him about it, in like 2005 - when it became a fad.
- dalke 14y ago
  I suspect that most professional programmers haven't heard of functional programming even now. You do realize that there's no functional programming language in the top 30 languages on the Tiobe list, and none of the main Microsoft or Apple languages are functional. Most programmers don't know much about the general field of software development, much less follow the fads. Here's a test: did your father know about Scheme?

dalke 14y ago

"new concepts (for example functional programming)" New? Functional programming has been around since the 1960s. ML was first available in 1973. Haskell was first released in 1990. Even Python, a decidedly non-functional language, included the "map", "apply", and "reduce" builtins in its 1.0 release in 1991. The author of the essay says that 45 is often considered "old fart" age. Let's say someone was 25 when Backus presented "Can Programming Be Liberated From the von Neumann Style? A Functional Style and its Algebra of Programs" in 1977. That's 35 years ago, making them 60. Or perhaps the reference date should be when "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" came out in 1985? Making them 52 now. (I picked age 25 since at age 20 they would be "out of nowhere, 22-year-old kids" you were talking about.) By neither criteria is functional programming new enough that a 45 year should consider it a "new concept."

adrianN 14y ago
If you take the existence of papers as a measure about what is relevant for an industry programmer, then I hope you are familiar with things like writing formal proofs using Coq and Isabelle (Coq started in the eighties), or generating programs directly from a specification.
- dalke 14y ago
  I don't. That's why I included SICP in 1985 as another reference point. Quoting from Wikipedia on "Functional Programming": Also in the 1970s, the development of Scheme (a partly functional dialect of Lisp), as described in the influential Lambda Papers and the 1985 textbook Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, brought awareness of the power of functional programming to the wider programming-languages community. Even then, my own knowledge of functional programming started in the mid-1990s, as a physics grad student. It wasn't good knowledge, most assuredly, but enough that I am confident that a hot-shot young developer of 1990 would know the basics about as well as a hot-shot young developer now. Oh, and I even remember my advisor coming in one day exclaiming that we should all learn Dylan; that it was the new, elegant language of the future. ("About as well" because there 1) there's more documented experience with functional programming, and 2) there are many more developers now, so statistical distributions say that there are going to be a few more people now who know it better than they did then.)

cunac 14y ago

I love that child innocence when they discover 'new' stuff , ahh good old days I miss that :-)

beagle3 14y ago

> but as far as the long tail goes, the kids are much less resistant to new ideas I think that the "old farts" resist "new ideas" mostly because they aren't really new, and they know where those ideas went the last time around. You know, "fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice..."; An example: Object Oriented Databases; when they were popular (early nineties), all the "cool kids" thought the "old farts" were just resisting the "new idea", when in fact the "old farts" had experience with earlier network/entity databases (some of which weren't far from the object databases of the day), and knew why they preferred the relational databases to everything else. For a modern example: I don't know anyone experienced with HPC who like hadoop. You pay about 10 times (CPU, management costs) for using hadoop compared to actually solving the problem at hand - in return for getting the code to a working state twice as fast (e.g. 6 months without hadoop == 3 months with hadoop). If your problem scale is small, it might seem like a win, but it isn't; If you need 10 servers instead of one, you paid ~$10000 and another month in system administration without noticing. You might still come out ahead, depending on your constraints, but it isn't clear cut. When you're running 1000 servers instead of the 100 you could have, that's easily a couple of million dollars, which is disastrous for many projects -- and yet, I get labeled "old fart" for not embracing hadoop. edit: minor edits

adrianhoward 14y ago

i've also met a handful of twenty-something programmers who are equally exceptional. but as far as the long tail goes, the kids are much less resistant to new ideas, new concepts (for example functional programming). i think it might be a generational difference, and i think it could shake up the software economy in the next decade I've had exactly the opposite experience. The young guys I come across are resistant to things like FP finally poking into some bits of the mainstream. The old guys are going "Yay! People are finally taking functional programming seriously!". I'm in my forties. I'm guessing you're in your twenties. I'm pretty sure both of our experiences are due much more to selection bias in who we know than any age differences in how developers approach problems and "new" technology.