But,OTOH, let's put it off until next quarter and let them worry about it.
Also, keeping the existing system has a 100% chance of being a nagging pain in the ass; but a pretty minimal chance of failing catastrophically in some novel way that the IT minions aren't already familiar with.
If we start development on a new system, it has a decent chance of being better; but a nonzero chance of going down in a firestorm of project-management failure, buck-passing, and overpriced Accenture code monkeys, which will make us look like total fuckups...
More accurately, there's also the chance that the rest of the Universe will pull so far ahead that the entire system will fail catastrophically, with that chance increasing as time goes forward. I still don't know how that guy down in Texas with the IBM tabulating card equipment is managing to keep himself supplied with blank punch-cards.
On the other hand, designing a new major system from scratch is not done lightly. Last I heard, somewhere between 66 and 75% of all such efforts turned out as failures. Which is especially sad when you consider that a lot of the original warty old systems were knocked out in a week or two by 1-2 people without the benefits of Dogbert Consultants to provide a grand architectural plan.
I think it's BS personally, if I build a bridge and it fails I'm held responsible. If I build a electronic system that fails and it hurts someone I'm responsible. If I'm a doctor and hurt someone same deal, if I'm a programmer and someone gets hurt from me code I wipe the chips from my beard, tuck my Hawaiian shirt in and go home.
Well, are you willing to pay for software development costs that include developers carrying insurance the way that doctors and engineering firms do? Are you willing to spend the amount of money it takes to hire competent developers? Are you willing to wait a significant amount of time so that the software design is thoroughly vetted and tested instead of just rammed out the door?
Or do you want your Lower Prices Everyday - Git-er-Dun cheap crap?
Why would we want to numb existential distress? This emotion is a social corrective mechanism that tells us when society is moving in the wrong direction. The reason it is becoming more of a problem in modern times is because our society is profoundly ill and we perceive that on some level. In the same way physical pain makes one pull one's hand out of the fire, existential stress makes one reevaluate one's life and look at ways it could be made more meaningful and more fulfilling. Why don't we just make a drug to cure ambition, sexual desire and distress of the conscience while while we are at it and wreck the human race for good?
I have existential high blood pressure. In effect, I exist, therefore I have high blood pressure. Which really means they haven't got a clue what's actually causing it. But it's just as dangerous as the other kind, so I have it treated.
Likewise, existential distress is not the the same thing as actual distress in response to actual situations. If you are always distressed for no concrete reason, not only are you continually miserable, you are also losing the baseline that tells you when things are objectively bad.
Ideally, one would want to numb the false (existential) distress, while not interfering with the normal feelings of distress.
I think you are forgetting the more important element here: porn. If you have access to more and more diverse porn than you could possibly ever watch, it'll be harder to convince you that you should blow yourself up for a religious cause. That, and a little bit of the exposure to outside ideas, but mostly the porn.
Sadly, I believe that both bin Laden and the 9/11 hijackers were well-loaded with porn. Didn't help.
I'm a big believer that the more information available to you, the better, but I also know that what a lot of people do when confronted with multiple sources is that they cherry-pick the ones they like and shut out the rest. The most tyrannical censorship of all begins at the eyes and ears.
> Actually, studies seem to indicate that too many choices cause confusion for the consumer and may actually have a detrimental effect.
20th century dictators used to state the same kind of thing, and maybe they were right.
Let's make people free from the responsability of their choices, let's make the big corps choose for them:
Meet the new boss(big corps), same as the old boss (nazists, fascists, totalitarian communists and other dictatorship forms).
You seem to think that the opposite of an excess of choices is a limited set of choices controlled by someone else. There's no room in your philosophy, Horatio, for any other cases.
It is a transfer of risk: You pay a company to assume the risk of a device failing during normal operation. As with any insurance, it is limited in what it covers, and it is more limited than an accidental damage plan.
As to if they are worth it, well it all depends on your situation. Largely it is if you can afford to replace the device in the event it fails. Insurance is rarely "worth it" in the overall sense. I mean obviously insurance companies have to take in more money, on average, they they pay out or they won't exist. So it comes down to the individual loss: You insure things you can't afford to pay for.
So in terms of an extended warranty, well if accidental damage is you concern then you'll need something additional. It would be for a case where you have an expensive device that you really can't afford to replace, and do not wish to do without.
I didn't buy the extended warranty on my Handspring Visor. Cost of a replacement when I dropped it 3 feet onto a carpet and cracked the glass was about the same price or more than the warranty, which came with various bits of incentive "candy".
I did buy the extended warranty on my LCD TV set, but that's because it carried lightning insurance. And lightning isn't something you take for granted around here.
That warranty has since expired, nothing in the house has been fried lately (knock wood), and a replacement with better specs is now cheap enough not to go the extended warranty route again, but I don't feel I wasted the money.
In most cases, if a salesman tries too hard to sell me an extended warranty, they'll lose the sale on the spot, but there are cases where an extended warranty can be worth something.
hey skippy -- lots of stuff for you to take in here, but try to understand.
the article isn't about firearms and guns at all.
it's about people making bombs -- TOTALLY different thing
did you know it's not legal to make a bomb? really!
Which is curious. Why is it illegal to make a bomb if we have a 2nd Amendment right to "keep and bear Arms?" I think that bombs count at armaments, and while I've seen a lot of interpretations made of the 2nd Amendment - many of which I don't buy into - if you're going to go with the one that keeping personal armaments is permitted for personal defense of liberty against a tyrannical government, why should said armaments be limited to things you can point and shoot? There's nothing in the Constitution that draws a line there that I know of.
On a practical level, I'm fine with outlawing bombs, considering the havoc people routinely wreak with other weapons, but on a logical level, I can't make sense of it.
The GNU components of Linux are valuable, but relatively few of the applications or system components these days are GNU. Or, I should say, probably as many as used to be, but there are so many more additions to Linux that aren't GNU and never were.
How has nobody pointed out yet that DRM stands for Digital Rights Management?
As you correctly guessed, whoosh. To understand why you whooshed, ask yourself whose "rights" DRM protects. Then see Words to Avoid to see why DRM opponents expand the R to "restrictions".
Ask yourself whose digital rights are being Managed!
I will probably never buy another Nook. Quite a few Barnes & Noble books I've purchased were supplied DRM-free by the publishers (thank YOU O'Reilly, Baen and Tor!) Nevertheless, I cannot keep backup copies of them in the event that B&N shuts down their servers, because all of the later Nook models hide their book storage in a private space that is apparently inaccessible even when rooted.
In other words, the publisher granted me certain rights, the seller (who doesn't actually even own the copyrights) takes some of those rights away. The only way to avoid that is to bypass the B&N store and download the books to the Gulag file store, because the original My books/Nook Books conveniences were not carried over to any of the later Nook models.
The US military budget is about as much as the next 10 biggest national military budgets *combined.* The US isn't one player in a delicate balance of superpowers; it is a massive unilateral force, driven by greed and paranoia to utterly irrational levels of military spending. No matter how much the US has, war hawks clamor for more. "Fewer bombs" is a sick joke in the context of the ridiculous number of bombs the US has. Scrap 90% of our military, and we'd still be an untouchable superpower.
I think that the sad truth is that the primary purpose of the military budget is to serve as a welfare program whereby congresscritters can hand out jobs to their constituents and pretend that it's not "wasteful gummint spending" because it's FREEDOM, DAMMIT!
An awful lot of money gets spent on horribly expensive military toys that the Pentagon claims not to want or need just because someone in Congress could get facilities opened back home to make and/or service them. You could replace quite a few bridges - and the Interstate highways connecting them - for the price of a single Osprey, if I have my numbers right.
Driver issue or a hardware issue? I always remember my ZIP hardware being solid as a rock.
Never had a problem with Zip (never used one enough, perhaps), but the Jaz drives were like single-use disposable. The cartridges outlived the drives.
Fortunately at the time the group I was working with was so profitable that no one cared. We used them to ship gigabyte-sized databases and tossed them as fast as they broke. Abandoned them when we got mainframe-to-mainframe FTP services, though.
All non progammatical web code has to do is describe a page. There is no reason on earth for requiring 2 completely different formatting languages - HTML and CSS - to do this. CSS is just a nasty hack on top of HTML which was already a hack anyway and along with embedded javascript its turned web coding into a total dogs dinner.
The purpose of HTML is to organize data for display - and possible return via a submitted form. The purpose of CSS is to control the presentation of that data. HTML was invented first, and originally had to shoulder some of the responsibilities of CSS, but CSS is now the preferred presentation control medium, not least of which is that it makes it possible to "skin" HTML to adapt it to multiple display devices and/or view preferences.
JavaScript exists to allow dynamic manipulation of client-side data, display organization and CSS in a way ensured maximize frustration due to language inconsistencies and client portability issues.
It is entirely possible to make an unholy mess of these three tools, and people who employ cheap inexperienced programmers generate a lot of it. However, done competently, it is possible to make a much cleaner job of it.
The battery life of almost EVERYTHING is low. About the only electronics that can be charged at my leisure and not that of the device are my eReaders.
This isn't new. I bought a portfolio case for my Newton because it offered an AA battery pack instead of having to rely on the pitiful amount of juice that the Newton's internal AAA batteries could provide.
When I started in the field, your language choices were mostly assembler, COBOL or FORTRAN.
Oh come on! I bet you had those new kids on the block RPG and PL\I, too!
But I might be showing my youthfulness. And I'll get off your lawn before you sic your dogs on me.
Actually, I wanted to learn PL/I in school. They wouldn't install it. It required 1MB of DASD space and they weren't willing to dedicate an entire Megabyte just so I could use a language that wasn't that popular around town.
ps. I doubt your secretary can tell which OS they're running in the first place
Then you're an idiot. Just because someone doesn't understand technology doesn't mean they don't know when their menu items are in different places or when the nice obvious icon they had becomes some in-joke about Klingons.
secretary: OK. so what do you mean that "this new ribbon bar is all you need"? Where'd my "print" menu go???
Actually, I'm a lot older than 30. That was a jab at places that brag about the youth of their workforce.
When I started in the field, your language choices were mostly assembler, COBOL or FORTRAN. Except that I did OS programming, which meant that your choices were assembler, assembler, and assembler.
I've picked up a few more languages - and a few more assemblers - since then. Also a number of programming disciplines, UI frameworks, done some bare-metal real-time process control apps, several OS's, etc. etc. etc. Usually by the time a technology has gone mainstream I've been working on the next one.
And if I catch you walking on my lawn, I'll set the dogs on you!
The problem is that programming was a rapidly changing field up until a few decades ago.
Huh? Programming has never been a static field, but I think most people would argue that it has been changing at an increasingly rapid rate, just as all technology has. In the 1960s, the move was from assembler/autocoder to FORTRAN/COBOL/PL/1. In the 1970s, more online systems, 4GLs and Structured Programming and punched cards began to be replaced by terminals. In the 1980s, PCs, GUIs, OOP, primitive IDEs, MVC. In the 1990s, RDBMS's started popping up almost everywhere and were no longer exotic specializations. Multi-tasking GUI desktops became the norm, Linux appeared, the Internet took over and CORBA made a (brief) appearance as a "must-have" skill. Y2K brought the web to almost everything, then added SOAP and then AJAX. ORMs came to DBMS development and unit-testing frameworks sprung up all over. Scripting moved to the web. 2K10 brought widespread virtualization Big Data. And those are just the things that come to mind in a quick review.
It simply wasn't possible to be a good programmer (by today's standards) in the 1970's. You could be a good programmer for the time.
That sounds too much like the workman versus the tools.
am 33. People considered "old" are not even that much older than me.
That's because you ARE old, as programmers are considered old.
They had a much different experience learning to program. They didn't learn to program in "the wild west" like some of the really old programmers. Many received formal training at universities where they learned a lot of the theory of computing. They also benefited for learning in a time when more was known about how to program in a way that minimizes mistakes and increases scalability, maintainability, etc.
I don't want to burst your bubble, but I did my university stint a long time ago and I can assure you that a major chunk of it was the theory of computing. As for the rest, I can't actually tell if you are saying that modern programmers are the ones who were taught discipline or the older ones. Doesn't matter, since discipline and theoretical knowledge isn't what the typical boss is demanding. Mostly what I hear is simply "Git 'er Dun!" and I've been dinged more than once for trying to make something reliable, maintainable and scalable instead of just pushing out whatever slop can be delivered fastest.
>there's no reason you shouldn't be as capable of it at 80 as you were at 18 really.
I don't understand. The slightest googling of "brain aging" shows a tremendous amount of research in the inevitable shrinking of the brain, loss of neurons, and general decay of cognitive abilities. How can you say that ..
No one said that the rate of deterioration was so rapid that by 65 you can't solve simple math problems and by 75 you are a drooling idiot. I knew a local lawyer who held a place in the Guinness Book of Records for his late-life degrees. Last one received at about age 100, as I recall (he died at 102).
There are also a lot of claims made that one of the best ways to stave off age-related mental deterioration is to keep mentally active, and software design and programming should qualify for that, I'd think.
Finally, there's the question of just what is deteriorating. The problem is a lot worse, professionally speaking, if it's general deterioration, as opposed, to say, remembering how to conjugate Russian verbs.
Indeed, I suspect stackoverflow may not be able to measure the information we want to know.
Stackoverflow is committed to quick, specific answers. One of the things you get from experience is a lot of the same thing over and over again in minor variations, and your answers are more likely to be broader and less suited to the stackoverflow ideal.
I don't consider myself to be an old fart, yet I know how to do most of the things you mention there.
I know a tiny bit of COBOL; just enough to hate it. I could muddle through assembly if I had to. (True story: In college, my Intro to Computers instructor forced us to read and write System/360 machine code by hand.) C and C++: I'm rusty, but not incompetent. Java, C#, and SQL (any dialect) are my bitch. Log files don't terrify me; grep was made for a reason. Memory leaks are a pain, but not insurmountable. Test plans are for people who actually test (just kidding!).
Age: 33. (Not old, dammit!)
If you are over 30 and a programmer, your walker will be arriving shortly. Security will be on hand to escort you out.
Slashdot Mirror
But,OTOH, let's put it off until next quarter and let them worry about it.
Also, keeping the existing system has a 100% chance of being a nagging pain in the ass; but a pretty minimal chance of failing catastrophically in some novel way that the IT minions aren't already familiar with.
If we start development on a new system, it has a decent chance of being better; but a nonzero chance of going down in a firestorm of project-management failure, buck-passing, and overpriced Accenture code monkeys, which will make us look like total fuckups...
More accurately, there's also the chance that the rest of the Universe will pull so far ahead that the entire system will fail catastrophically, with that chance increasing as time goes forward. I still don't know how that guy down in Texas with the IBM tabulating card equipment is managing to keep himself supplied with blank punch-cards.
On the other hand, designing a new major system from scratch is not done lightly. Last I heard, somewhere between 66 and 75% of all such efforts turned out as failures. Which is especially sad when you consider that a lot of the original warty old systems were knocked out in a week or two by 1-2 people without the benefits of Dogbert Consultants to provide a grand architectural plan.
I think it's BS personally, if I build a bridge and it fails I'm held responsible. If I build a electronic system that fails and it hurts someone I'm responsible. If I'm a doctor and hurt someone same deal, if I'm a programmer and someone gets hurt from me code I wipe the chips from my beard, tuck my Hawaiian shirt in and go home.
Well, are you willing to pay for software development costs that include developers carrying insurance the way that doctors and engineering firms do? Are you willing to spend the amount of money it takes to hire competent developers? Are you willing to wait a significant amount of time so that the software design is thoroughly vetted and tested instead of just rammed out the door?
Or do you want your Lower Prices Everyday - Git-er-Dun cheap crap?
Can you stand up? I do believe it's working.
Why would we want to numb existential distress? This emotion is a social corrective mechanism that tells us when society is moving in the wrong direction. The reason it is becoming more of a problem in modern times is because our society is profoundly ill and we perceive that on some level. In the same way physical pain makes one pull one's hand out of the fire, existential stress makes one reevaluate one's life and look at ways it could be made more meaningful and more fulfilling. Why don't we just make a drug to cure ambition, sexual desire and distress of the conscience while while we are at it and wreck the human race for good?
I have existential high blood pressure. In effect, I exist, therefore I have high blood pressure. Which really means they haven't got a clue what's actually causing it. But it's just as dangerous as the other kind, so I have it treated.
Likewise, existential distress is not the the same thing as actual distress in response to actual situations. If you are always distressed for no concrete reason, not only are you continually miserable, you are also losing the baseline that tells you when things are objectively bad.
Ideally, one would want to numb the false (existential) distress, while not interfering with the normal feelings of distress.
and here I was hoping for some Jim Carrey movie idea...
S-s-s-s-s-s-MOKIN'!!
I think you are forgetting the more important element here: porn. If you have access to more and more diverse porn than you could possibly ever watch, it'll be harder to convince you that you should blow yourself up for a religious cause. That, and a little bit of the exposure to outside ideas, but mostly the porn.
Sadly, I believe that both bin Laden and the 9/11 hijackers were well-loaded with porn. Didn't help.
I'm a big believer that the more information available to you, the better, but I also know that what a lot of people do when confronted with multiple sources is that they cherry-pick the ones they like and shut out the rest. The most tyrannical censorship of all begins at the eyes and ears.
> Actually, studies seem to indicate that too many choices cause confusion for the consumer and may actually have a detrimental effect.
20th century dictators used to state the same kind of thing, and maybe they were right.
Let's make people free from the responsability of their choices, let's make the big corps choose for them:
Meet the new boss(big corps), same as the old boss (nazists, fascists, totalitarian communists and other dictatorship forms).
You seem to think that the opposite of an excess of choices is a limited set of choices controlled by someone else. There's no room in your philosophy, Horatio, for any other cases.
It is a transfer of risk: You pay a company to assume the risk of a device failing during normal operation. As with any insurance, it is limited in what it covers, and it is more limited than an accidental damage plan.
As to if they are worth it, well it all depends on your situation. Largely it is if you can afford to replace the device in the event it fails. Insurance is rarely "worth it" in the overall sense. I mean obviously insurance companies have to take in more money, on average, they they pay out or they won't exist. So it comes down to the individual loss: You insure things you can't afford to pay for.
So in terms of an extended warranty, well if accidental damage is you concern then you'll need something additional. It would be for a case where you have an expensive device that you really can't afford to replace, and do not wish to do without.
I didn't buy the extended warranty on my Handspring Visor. Cost of a replacement when I dropped it 3 feet onto a carpet and cracked the glass was about the same price or more than the warranty, which came with various bits of incentive "candy".
I did buy the extended warranty on my LCD TV set, but that's because it carried lightning insurance. And lightning isn't something you take for granted around here.
That warranty has since expired, nothing in the house has been fried lately (knock wood), and a replacement with better specs is now cheap enough not to go the extended warranty route again, but I don't feel I wasted the money.
In most cases, if a salesman tries too hard to sell me an extended warranty, they'll lose the sale on the spot, but there are cases where an extended warranty can be worth something.
hey skippy -- lots of stuff for you to take in here, but try to understand.
the article isn't about firearms and guns at all.
it's about people making bombs -- TOTALLY different thing
did you know it's not legal to make a bomb? really!
Which is curious. Why is it illegal to make a bomb if we have a 2nd Amendment right to "keep and bear Arms?" I think that bombs count at armaments, and while I've seen a lot of interpretations made of the 2nd Amendment - many of which I don't buy into - if you're going to go with the one that keeping personal armaments is permitted for personal defense of liberty against a tyrannical government, why should said armaments be limited to things you can point and shoot? There's nothing in the Constitution that draws a line there that I know of.
On a practical level, I'm fine with outlawing bombs, considering the havoc people routinely wreak with other weapons, but on a logical level, I can't make sense of it.
It's actually more like Linux/GNU.
The GNU components of Linux are valuable, but relatively few of the applications or system components these days are GNU. Or, I should say, probably as many as used to be, but there are so many more additions to Linux that aren't GNU and never were.
How has nobody pointed out yet that DRM stands for Digital Rights Management?
As you correctly guessed, whoosh. To understand why you whooshed, ask yourself whose "rights" DRM protects. Then see Words to Avoid to see why DRM opponents expand the R to "restrictions".
Ask yourself whose digital rights are being Managed!
I will probably never buy another Nook. Quite a few Barnes & Noble books I've purchased were supplied DRM-free by the publishers (thank YOU O'Reilly, Baen and Tor!) Nevertheless, I cannot keep backup copies of them in the event that B&N shuts down their servers, because all of the later Nook models hide their book storage in a private space that is apparently inaccessible even when rooted.
In other words, the publisher granted me certain rights, the seller (who doesn't actually even own the copyrights) takes some of those rights away. The only way to avoid that is to bypass the B&N store and download the books to the Gulag file store, because the original My books/Nook Books conveniences were not carried over to any of the later Nook models.
This is great for the consumer. More options and more competition is always good for the consumer.
Actually, studies seem to indicate that too many choices cause confusion for the consumer and may actually have a detrimental effect.
The same could be said for developers picking what platforms to supports, but "It sucks" basically says that more succinctly.
The US military budget is about as much as the next 10 biggest national military budgets *combined.* The US isn't one player in a delicate balance of superpowers; it is a massive unilateral force, driven by greed and paranoia to utterly irrational levels of military spending. No matter how much the US has, war hawks clamor for more. "Fewer bombs" is a sick joke in the context of the ridiculous number of bombs the US has. Scrap 90% of our military, and we'd still be an untouchable superpower.
I think that the sad truth is that the primary purpose of the military budget is to serve as a welfare program whereby congresscritters can hand out jobs to their constituents and pretend that it's not "wasteful gummint spending" because it's FREEDOM, DAMMIT!
An awful lot of money gets spent on horribly expensive military toys that the Pentagon claims not to want or need just because someone in Congress could get facilities opened back home to make and/or service them. You could replace quite a few bridges - and the Interstate highways connecting them - for the price of a single Osprey, if I have my numbers right.
They didn't have acronyms back in the 19th century, silly.
I always thought that acronyms were invented by IBM.
They used so many of them that the same 3 letters often applied to 5 different products. At the same time.
Driver issue or a hardware issue? I always remember my ZIP hardware being solid as a rock.
Never had a problem with Zip (never used one enough, perhaps), but the Jaz drives were like single-use disposable. The cartridges outlived the drives.
Fortunately at the time the group I was working with was so profitable that no one cared. We used them to ship gigabyte-sized databases and tossed them as fast as they broke. Abandoned them when we got mainframe-to-mainframe FTP services, though.
All non progammatical web code has to do is describe a page. There is no reason on earth for requiring 2 completely different formatting languages - HTML and CSS - to do this. CSS is just a nasty hack on top of HTML which was already a hack anyway and along with embedded javascript its turned web coding into a total dogs dinner.
The purpose of HTML is to organize data for display - and possible return via a submitted form. The purpose of CSS is to control the presentation of that data. HTML was invented first, and originally had to shoulder some of the responsibilities of CSS, but CSS is now the preferred presentation control medium, not least of which is that it makes it possible to "skin" HTML to adapt it to multiple display devices and/or view preferences.
JavaScript exists to allow dynamic manipulation of client-side data, display organization and CSS in a way ensured maximize frustration due to language inconsistencies and client portability issues.
It is entirely possible to make an unholy mess of these three tools, and people who employ cheap inexperienced programmers generate a lot of it. However, done competently, it is possible to make a much cleaner job of it.
The battery life of almost EVERYTHING is low. About the only electronics that can be charged at my leisure and not that of the device are my eReaders.
This isn't new. I bought a portfolio case for my Newton because it offered an AA battery pack instead of having to rely on the pitiful amount of juice that the Newton's internal AAA batteries could provide.
When I started in the field, your language choices were mostly assembler, COBOL or FORTRAN.
Oh come on! I bet you had those new kids on the block RPG and PL\I, too!
But I might be showing my youthfulness. And I'll get off your lawn before you sic your dogs on me.
Actually, I wanted to learn PL/I in school. They wouldn't install it. It required 1MB of DASD space and they weren't willing to dedicate an entire Megabyte just so I could use a language that wasn't that popular around town.
Never did get an RPG program to run, though.
or, wait for it, control-p
Actually, that's what infuriated me about Office 2008. It removed "unused" items from the File menu, and Control-P wouldn't work reliably.
ps. I doubt your secretary can tell which OS they're running in the first place
Then you're an idiot. Just because someone doesn't understand technology doesn't mean they don't know when their menu items are in different places or when the nice obvious icon they had becomes some in-joke about Klingons.
secretary: OK. so what do you mean that "this new ribbon bar is all you need"? Where'd my "print" menu go???
Actually, I'm a lot older than 30. That was a jab at places that brag about the youth of their workforce.
When I started in the field, your language choices were mostly assembler, COBOL or FORTRAN. Except that I did OS programming, which meant that your choices were assembler, assembler, and assembler.
I've picked up a few more languages - and a few more assemblers - since then. Also a number of programming disciplines, UI frameworks, done some bare-metal real-time process control apps, several OS's, etc. etc. etc. Usually by the time a technology has gone mainstream I've been working on the next one.
And if I catch you walking on my lawn, I'll set the dogs on you!
The problem is that programming was a rapidly changing field up until a few decades ago.
Huh? Programming has never been a static field, but I think most people would argue that it has been changing at an increasingly rapid rate, just as all technology has. In the 1960s, the move was from assembler/autocoder to FORTRAN/COBOL/PL/1. In the 1970s, more online systems, 4GLs and Structured Programming and punched cards began to be replaced by terminals. In the 1980s, PCs, GUIs, OOP, primitive IDEs, MVC. In the 1990s, RDBMS's started popping up almost everywhere and were no longer exotic specializations. Multi-tasking GUI desktops became the norm, Linux appeared, the Internet took over and CORBA made a (brief) appearance as a "must-have" skill. Y2K brought the web to almost everything, then added SOAP and then AJAX. ORMs came to DBMS development and unit-testing frameworks sprung up all over. Scripting moved to the web. 2K10 brought widespread virtualization Big Data. And those are just the things that come to mind in a quick review.
It simply wasn't possible to be a good programmer (by today's standards) in the 1970's. You could be a good programmer for the time.
That sounds too much like the workman versus the tools.
am 33. People considered "old" are not even that much older than me.
That's because you ARE old, as programmers are considered old.
They had a much different experience learning to program. They didn't learn to program in "the wild west" like some of the really old programmers. Many received formal training at universities where they learned a lot of the theory of computing. They also benefited for learning in a time when more was known about how to program in a way that minimizes mistakes and increases scalability, maintainability, etc.
I don't want to burst your bubble, but I did my university stint a long time ago and I can assure you that a major chunk of it was the theory of computing. As for the rest, I can't actually tell if you are saying that modern programmers are the ones who were taught discipline or the older ones. Doesn't matter, since discipline and theoretical knowledge isn't what the typical boss is demanding. Mostly what I hear is simply "Git 'er Dun!" and I've been dinged more than once for trying to make something reliable, maintainable and scalable instead of just pushing out whatever slop can be delivered fastest.
>there's no reason you shouldn't be as capable of it at 80 as you were at 18 really.
I don't understand. The slightest googling of "brain aging" shows a tremendous amount of research in the inevitable shrinking of the brain, loss of neurons, and general decay of cognitive abilities. How can you say that . .
No one said that the rate of deterioration was so rapid that by 65 you can't solve simple math problems and by 75 you are a drooling idiot. I knew a local lawyer who held a place in the Guinness Book of Records for his late-life degrees. Last one received at about age 100, as I recall (he died at 102).
There are also a lot of claims made that one of the best ways to stave off age-related mental deterioration is to keep mentally active, and software design and programming should qualify for that, I'd think.
Finally, there's the question of just what is deteriorating. The problem is a lot worse, professionally speaking, if it's general deterioration, as opposed, to say, remembering how to conjugate Russian verbs.
Indeed, I suspect stackoverflow may not be able to measure the information we want to know.
Stackoverflow is committed to quick, specific answers. One of the things you get from experience is a lot of the same thing over and over again in minor variations, and your answers are more likely to be broader and less suited to the stackoverflow ideal.
I don't consider myself to be an old fart, yet I know how to do most of the things you mention there.
I know a tiny bit of COBOL; just enough to hate it. I could muddle through assembly if I had to. (True story: In college, my Intro to Computers instructor forced us to read and write System/360 machine code by hand.) C and C++: I'm rusty, but not incompetent. Java, C#, and SQL (any dialect) are my bitch. Log files don't terrify me; grep was made for a reason. Memory leaks are a pain, but not insurmountable. Test plans are for people who actually test (just kidding!).
Age: 33. (Not old, dammit!)
If you are over 30 and a programmer, your walker will be arriving shortly. Security will be on hand to escort you out.
I rather preferred the APK spam.
At least this is shorted and less offensive to the eye.
Spam is spam, though.