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I was late to the game [...] What game? Newer technology isn't always better. It's just... newer. What really makes you think you have to keep up with the lat

by jdale27 17y ago

I was late to the game [...] What game? Newer technology isn't always better. It's just... newer. What really makes you think you have to keep up with the latest technology? Are you just trying to keep up with the other code monkeys, or do you really want to learn something? [H]ow do you force yourself to step outside your comfort zone of doing things the way you know how and trying something new? If "step[ping] outside your comfort zone" is what you want, then you don't need anything that is new in absolute terms, but only something that is new to you. Here's a suggestion: learn Lisp. It's fifty years old, and yet the main dialects (Common Lisp, Scheme -- 20-30 years old themselves) contain interesting features that are only beginning to make their way into "mainstream" languages.

WesleyJohnson 17y ago
What game? I suppose I was referring to the fact that I jumped on board with using the Microsoft Stack starting with classic ASP when they were well into ASP.NET 2.0. It was also a reference to the fact that I had one programming class in High School, never went to college and didn't get my first programming gig until I was 26. What really makes you think you have to keep up with the latest technology? Are you just trying to keep up with the other code monkeys, or do you really want to learn something? Very relevant question and something I hadn't paused to consider. At first thought, I'd say it's a little of both which tells me I should really take some time to evaluate that and go from there. Thanks for your suggestion with Lisp as well. As someone else pointed out, it should be more about learning underlying concepts and ideas of programming and less about the language, framework or etc. I would imagine there are some great fundamentals I could learn by taking on a language like Lisp that, as you mentioned, would be well outside my comfort zone.
jonny_noog 17y ago
Newer technology isn't always better. This is a great point that one would think obvious enough, except that there's usually some pretty powerful vested interests that I suspect like to try hard to obscure it in order to keep users and devs on the constant upgrade treadmill, in turn padding their bottom line. Case in point: My favourite Linux distro Debian, knows newer isn't always better very well. They are sometimes criticised for their stable release being "behind the times", but if you want the cutting edge you can pretty easily run the Debian Testing or Unstable releases (even Unstable is pretty stable most of the time). What people don't get or perhaps don't want to accept is that Debian stable values stability over all else, it's meant for server applications and the fact that it's a bit "behind the times" makes it better for this role than it would be otherwise.

by jdale27 17y ago

WesleyJohnson 17y ago

What game? I suppose I was referring to the fact that I jumped on board with using the Microsoft Stack starting with classic ASP when they were well into ASP.NET 2.0. It was also a reference to the fact that I had one programming class in High School, never went to college and didn't get my first programming gig until I was 26. What really makes you think you have to keep up with the latest technology? Are you just trying to keep up with the other code monkeys, or do you really want to learn something? Very relevant question and something I hadn't paused to consider. At first thought, I'd say it's a little of both which tells me I should really take some time to evaluate that and go from there. Thanks for your suggestion with Lisp as well. As someone else pointed out, it should be more about learning underlying concepts and ideas of programming and less about the language, framework or etc. I would imagine there are some great fundamentals I could learn by taking on a language like Lisp that, as you mentioned, would be well outside my comfort zone.

jonny_noog 17y ago

Newer technology isn't always better. This is a great point that one would think obvious enough, except that there's usually some pretty powerful vested interests that I suspect like to try hard to obscure it in order to keep users and devs on the constant upgrade treadmill, in turn padding their bottom line. Case in point: My favourite Linux distro Debian, knows newer isn't always better very well. They are sometimes criticised for their stable release being "behind the times", but if you want the cutting edge you can pretty easily run the Debian Testing or Unstable releases (even Unstable is pretty stable most of the time). What people don't get or perhaps don't want to accept is that Debian stable values stability over all else, it's meant for server applications and the fact that it's a bit "behind the times" makes it better for this role than it would be otherwise.