Slashdot Mirror
Old-School Coding Techniques You May Not Miss
CWmike writes "Despite its complexity, the software development process has gotten better over the years. 'Mature' programmers remember manual intervention and hand-tuning. Today's dev tools automatically perform complex functions that once had to be written explicitly. And most developers are glad of it. Yet, young whippersnappers may not even be aware that we old fogies had to do these things manually. Esther Schindler asked several longtime developers for their top old-school programming headaches and added many of her own to boot. Working with punch cards? Hungarian notation?"
Placing arbitrary bars on what constitutes a "programmer worthy of the name" is just get-off-my-lawn elitism spawned by people who are watching their craft steadily devalue under attacks from all angles.
Damn skippy. In order for programmer to mean something, there must be a bar, and I've set this one pretty low. I suppose you think doctors are elitist pricks for requiring that you go to med school and get board certified before calling yourself a doctor.
it gets easier over time, and it will continue to do so until your arcane knowledge is as meaningless to society in general as pokemon trivia.
It isn't arcane, it's just the minimum (less than that) for you to be any good at any significant programming task.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"