How Can an Old-School Coder Regain His Chops?

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How Can an Old-School Coder Regain His Chops?

Posted by timothy on Sunday August 1, 2010 @10:41AM from the just-eat-the-brain-of-someone-younger dept.

DonLab writes "I was a proficient software engineer in the 1980s, writing hundreds of thousands of lines of ALGOL, FORTRAN, COBOL, and Pascal programs, as well as working in 370 and 8080 assembly language & pre-relational DBMS systems. My hands-on programming career ended when I became a freelance analyst and designer, ultimately retiring young in the early '90s. Now I'd like to reenter the field, but I'm finding that I know nothing about today's post-C languages, programming tools, and computing environments. I wouldn't know where to start learning C++, PHP, Java, HTML5, or PERL, much less how to choose one over the other for a particular application. Can I be the only pre-GUI software designer or hobbyist searching for a way to update his skills for Windows, iOS, or Android?"

11 of 565 comments (clear)

Never touched C# by earthforce_1 · 2010-08-01 10:49 · Score: 0, Troll

I use C++ for all my development, with a small smattering of perl. Learning Python is on my TODO list. Never touched C# and have no interest in learning a MS platform only language.
\
Until 2 years ago, I was working at a place where embedded and DSP developers were using pure C - C++ was forbidden.

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1. Re:Never touched C# by binarylarry · 2010-08-01 11:04 · Score: 0, Troll
  
  The GNOME project has adopted Mono (and thus C#) although it has quite a few Mono lead devs on its board. I doubt anyone else in FOSS land or other technologies companies relish the idea of getting into bed with Microsoft. They have a history of fucking their partners.
  As I mentioned earlier, C# is just a knock off of Java.
  It's extremely similar if you're familiar with both, 98% of a port can be done with search and replace... s/using/import/g, etc.
  
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2. Re:Never touched C# by V!NCENT · 2010-08-01 11:08 · Score: 0, Troll
  
  Nope, nope and partialy. So no.
  Better go with C++, which is alround. C with classes is what you need for the Mac. Linux still uses C for the largest part.
  Currently the market wants:
  -Linux sys admins
  -.Net developpers (Microsoft C# runtime crap that will insta-kill any desire you have to go back into programming after exactly 5 seconds)
  
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Re:C-sharp by binarylarry · 2010-08-01 10:54 · Score: 0, Troll

C# is just a windows specific knockoff of Java.
It's important if you're specifically looking for a Microsoft job, which is like 10% of the job market.
With such poor leadership and Microsoft's general power waning, it probably won't ever surpass being a niche technology.

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Re:C-sharp by binarylarry · 2010-08-01 10:58 · Score: 0, Troll

In a way... sure.
It fits the exact same position as the wine project. It's a clean room reverse engineered version of a Microsoft technology stack.
How well does Wine work these days? How well does Mono work?

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Re:Don't by syousef · 2010-08-01 11:17 · Score: 0, Troll

Proficiency in ALGOL, FORTRAN, COBOL, and Pascal makes you stand out from the crowd. Market yourself as a specialist.
Yes but asking such a silly question on slashdot makes him unemployable. There are thousands of tutorials, books and even complete development environments online. If this is a genuine query this guy is LAZY.

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Re:Old person syndrome by syousef · 2010-08-01 12:58 · Score: 0, Troll

You're being too nice. I wasn't and got modded troll. The reality is he's got the whole of the Internet with thousands upon thousands of resources - books, tutorials, whole development environments he can download, and instead he's chosen to post to ask slashdot? WTF?! I wouldn't want to work with him.

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These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Google? by frank_adrian314159 · 2010-08-01 13:15 · Score: 0, Troll

Good God, if you really can't figure out where to start, you really are too old.

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That is all.
Re:C-sharp by binarylarry · 2010-08-01 15:28 · Score: 0, Troll

C# is exactly like Java to program in, unless you need to do anything complicate like generate bytecode at runtime.
Then C# is a clusterfuck.
C#: It makes the easy things easy and the hard things impossible (like performance, scaling and security... LOL)

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Re:C-sharp by Lumpy · 2010-08-02 00:34 · Score: 0, Troll

which makes me question the reality of the "article" Has this guy been unplugged cince 1990? He does not know how to use google to answer 90% of what he is asking?
Honestly all it takes is a few moments searching google to find every resource needed to learn all these "new" languages and learn that knowing only one is how you fail. You need to know several and master a couple to be a high value programmer. Look at current job listings and see what is being asked for. Hell write a script to scrape the job sites and aggregate the averages of languages desired to get a day to day picture of what is hot right now.
He whole question sounds like he in 1990 retired and built a time statis chamber and put himself in it for the past 20 years.... Fishy.

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Re:C-sharp by stimuli_ii · 2010-08-02 05:17 · Score: 0, Troll

I was waiting for you to say: "2010 is the year of Linux". Just like 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, etc...