Are you a programming opsimath ?
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Opsimath: one who learns, or begins to study, later in life: [^]. I started about age forty-one, programming (you guessed it) BASIC, and then 6809 assembly language, then Pascal, then Lisp, SmallTalk, then PostScript, then on to Visual Basic and Excel<=>VBA, finally, reaching a fantasized nirvana with .NET and C#. As this aging disintegratingly-animated package of meat-over-bones approaches (too soon) his 923rd. lunar cycle on this planet: he experiences it as wondrous, indeed, to behold, after thirty-years in the technical game, Visual Studio 2013, update 3, taking as long to complete simple actions in the design-ui as once measly 8-bit computers of yore used to traverse a doubly-nested for-loop ... that is: when Visual Studio 2013 doesn't crash on launch. Of course that is an invidious comparison, and I will flagellate myself in expiation as soon as I post this. cheers, Bill
“I have diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine happiness which have fallen to my lot: They amount to 14.” Abd-Ar Rahman III, Caliph of Cordoba, circa 950CE.
I wasn't an opsimath when I started studying programming (in 1972!), but I am definitely one now. As someone who has seen various programming 'paradigms' come and go (often more than once, but under different names) I can only agree with the OP that "the more things change the more they stay the same". I still love to learn new things and - where possible - work with them, but the increasing complexity of the underlying technologies (attempting to make what was a core programming task simply a 'given') means that you have to learn ever 'higher level' languages to effectively achieve much the same tasks you used to in the older environments, just with the whole thing taking more computer power: For example: Producing a correctly typeset document in InDesign now takes exactly the same time that it did in, say, Ventura 20 years ago, but is using over 100,000 times as much memory, disk space and CPU power... A corollary to this is that there are whole generations of programmers out there, many of them extremely well qualified on paper, who have absolutely no idea how the machinery they are using actually functions, or what it's limitations might be, which is fine until you hit one of those limits and then have no idea, say, why your apparently simple small SQL query overloads the server for 8 hours to return one single row recordset with two columns in it... I'll get me Zimmer frame... 8)
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BillWoodruff wrote:
reaching a fantasized nirvana with .NET and C#
Bill-ji, reach out to Xamarin and the world of Android (or if you prefer, iOS) will be open to you. New wonders await me, and I hope you. :) /ravi
My new year resolution: 2048 x 1536 Home | Articles | My .NET bits | Freeware ravib(at)ravib(dot)com
Xamarin brings the vagaries of Visual Studio to the Mac. It often hangs for no reason, or when 2 Android AXML files are open simultaneously and you try to move from Design view to Source view. It crashes, taking with it any and all changes you were making, Autosave being something that kicks in, inexplicably, after you've closed and re-opened a(n apparently) fully saved solution. I can't decide what is the biggest challenge: keeping Xamarin running long enough to do something useful on it or working with the horrendous user interface for Android. iOS support is slightly better but then, it has more to work with :rolleyes:
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Opsimath: one who learns, or begins to study, later in life: [^]. I started about age forty-one, programming (you guessed it) BASIC, and then 6809 assembly language, then Pascal, then Lisp, SmallTalk, then PostScript, then on to Visual Basic and Excel<=>VBA, finally, reaching a fantasized nirvana with .NET and C#. As this aging disintegratingly-animated package of meat-over-bones approaches (too soon) his 923rd. lunar cycle on this planet: he experiences it as wondrous, indeed, to behold, after thirty-years in the technical game, Visual Studio 2013, update 3, taking as long to complete simple actions in the design-ui as once measly 8-bit computers of yore used to traverse a doubly-nested for-loop ... that is: when Visual Studio 2013 doesn't crash on launch. Of course that is an invidious comparison, and I will flagellate myself in expiation as soon as I post this. cheers, Bill
“I have diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine happiness which have fallen to my lot: They amount to 14.” Abd-Ar Rahman III, Caliph of Cordoba, circa 950CE.
No, I started about 12..13 years of Age, with a C64 & BASIC / asm, when many Kids in School already had an Amiga or 286/386 PC or so, didn't have the dough for "a real computer" as I was told to rather buy. As for VS2013, not using it yet. But when I heard MS hired the then head of the Eclipse team, I involuntarily emanated a scream of agony into the night, for I knew, the fate of my beloved tool of choice was sealed. ( hah I don't know how bad it really is and what the guy had to do with it, but still, MS, what were you thinking ;) )
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Opsimath: one who learns, or begins to study, later in life: [^]. I started about age forty-one, programming (you guessed it) BASIC, and then 6809 assembly language, then Pascal, then Lisp, SmallTalk, then PostScript, then on to Visual Basic and Excel<=>VBA, finally, reaching a fantasized nirvana with .NET and C#. As this aging disintegratingly-animated package of meat-over-bones approaches (too soon) his 923rd. lunar cycle on this planet: he experiences it as wondrous, indeed, to behold, after thirty-years in the technical game, Visual Studio 2013, update 3, taking as long to complete simple actions in the design-ui as once measly 8-bit computers of yore used to traverse a doubly-nested for-loop ... that is: when Visual Studio 2013 doesn't crash on launch. Of course that is an invidious comparison, and I will flagellate myself in expiation as soon as I post this. cheers, Bill
“I have diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine happiness which have fallen to my lot: They amount to 14.” Abd-Ar Rahman III, Caliph of Cordoba, circa 950CE.
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I wasn't an opsimath when I started studying programming (in 1972!), but I am definitely one now. As someone who has seen various programming 'paradigms' come and go (often more than once, but under different names) I can only agree with the OP that "the more things change the more they stay the same". I still love to learn new things and - where possible - work with them, but the increasing complexity of the underlying technologies (attempting to make what was a core programming task simply a 'given') means that you have to learn ever 'higher level' languages to effectively achieve much the same tasks you used to in the older environments, just with the whole thing taking more computer power: For example: Producing a correctly typeset document in InDesign now takes exactly the same time that it did in, say, Ventura 20 years ago, but is using over 100,000 times as much memory, disk space and CPU power... A corollary to this is that there are whole generations of programmers out there, many of them extremely well qualified on paper, who have absolutely no idea how the machinery they are using actually functions, or what it's limitations might be, which is fine until you hit one of those limits and then have no idea, say, why your apparently simple small SQL query overloads the server for 8 hours to return one single row recordset with two columns in it... I'll get me Zimmer frame... 8)
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Opsimath: one who learns, or begins to study, later in life: [^]. I started about age forty-one, programming (you guessed it) BASIC, and then 6809 assembly language, then Pascal, then Lisp, SmallTalk, then PostScript, then on to Visual Basic and Excel<=>VBA, finally, reaching a fantasized nirvana with .NET and C#. As this aging disintegratingly-animated package of meat-over-bones approaches (too soon) his 923rd. lunar cycle on this planet: he experiences it as wondrous, indeed, to behold, after thirty-years in the technical game, Visual Studio 2013, update 3, taking as long to complete simple actions in the design-ui as once measly 8-bit computers of yore used to traverse a doubly-nested for-loop ... that is: when Visual Studio 2013 doesn't crash on launch. Of course that is an invidious comparison, and I will flagellate myself in expiation as soon as I post this. cheers, Bill
“I have diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine happiness which have fallen to my lot: They amount to 14.” Abd-Ar Rahman III, Caliph of Cordoba, circa 950CE.
I made a living programming for 30+ years, starting with Fortran/punch cards and now C#/.NET. I'm 72 now and retired but I still program as a hobby. I hope I am still active if and when quantum computing comes to the desktop! (BTW I just read an article with the following example: To factor a large (250 digit) number with today's computers would take "a million networked computers running for a million years, but the same problem could be solved in minutes with a quantum computer") CQ#?
73
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One who doesn't learn, or stops to study, later in life. It's me. Is there special word for this?
Alex Fr wrote:
Is there special word for this?
Well, I think that's a difficult one because you'd really need to know context, and motivation, to choose an appropriate word. Consider someone who stops aggressively staying up-to-date in programming languages and technologies of choice because they are secure in their job, know it well, and want to devote time to family life, or other forms of mental development, or hobbies, or just enjoying the rewards of a life well spent: I would not use a negative term to describe such a person. But, you know, language is a living liquid continually taking the fractaly evolving shape of the cultural container (itself a flexible medium) it ferments in. Nothing wrong with your inventing a neologism: how about "noopsimath" as a value-neutral descriptor that has a slight touch of whimsy in the pun on "no-op" ? cheers, Bill
“I have diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine happiness which have fallen to my lot: They amount to 14.” Abd-Ar Rahman III, Caliph of Cordoba, circa 950CE.
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Opsimath: one who learns, or begins to study, later in life: [^]. I started about age forty-one, programming (you guessed it) BASIC, and then 6809 assembly language, then Pascal, then Lisp, SmallTalk, then PostScript, then on to Visual Basic and Excel<=>VBA, finally, reaching a fantasized nirvana with .NET and C#. As this aging disintegratingly-animated package of meat-over-bones approaches (too soon) his 923rd. lunar cycle on this planet: he experiences it as wondrous, indeed, to behold, after thirty-years in the technical game, Visual Studio 2013, update 3, taking as long to complete simple actions in the design-ui as once measly 8-bit computers of yore used to traverse a doubly-nested for-loop ... that is: when Visual Studio 2013 doesn't crash on launch. Of course that is an invidious comparison, and I will flagellate myself in expiation as soon as I post this. cheers, Bill
“I have diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine happiness which have fallen to my lot: They amount to 14.” Abd-Ar Rahman III, Caliph of Cordoba, circa 950CE.
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Opsimath: one who learns, or begins to study, later in life: [^]. I started about age forty-one, programming (you guessed it) BASIC, and then 6809 assembly language, then Pascal, then Lisp, SmallTalk, then PostScript, then on to Visual Basic and Excel<=>VBA, finally, reaching a fantasized nirvana with .NET and C#. As this aging disintegratingly-animated package of meat-over-bones approaches (too soon) his 923rd. lunar cycle on this planet: he experiences it as wondrous, indeed, to behold, after thirty-years in the technical game, Visual Studio 2013, update 3, taking as long to complete simple actions in the design-ui as once measly 8-bit computers of yore used to traverse a doubly-nested for-loop ... that is: when Visual Studio 2013 doesn't crash on launch. Of course that is an invidious comparison, and I will flagellate myself in expiation as soon as I post this. cheers, Bill
“I have diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine happiness which have fallen to my lot: They amount to 14.” Abd-Ar Rahman III, Caliph of Cordoba, circa 950CE.
Fantastic -- you've just described my entire history of programming as well - right down to the 6809 - I was somewhat younger when I did it, but it was at roughly the same actual time (in terms of which year it was)... I love it. And I agree: there was something intrinsically satisfying about programming an 8-bit machine in assembly language which is, somehow, missing from the beautiful high-level world of today...
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Alex Fr wrote:
Is there special word for this?
Well, I think that's a difficult one because you'd really need to know context, and motivation, to choose an appropriate word. Consider someone who stops aggressively staying up-to-date in programming languages and technologies of choice because they are secure in their job, know it well, and want to devote time to family life, or other forms of mental development, or hobbies, or just enjoying the rewards of a life well spent: I would not use a negative term to describe such a person. But, you know, language is a living liquid continually taking the fractaly evolving shape of the cultural container (itself a flexible medium) it ferments in. Nothing wrong with your inventing a neologism: how about "noopsimath" as a value-neutral descriptor that has a slight touch of whimsy in the pun on "no-op" ? cheers, Bill
“I have diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine happiness which have fallen to my lot: They amount to 14.” Abd-Ar Rahman III, Caliph of Cordoba, circa 950CE.
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I made a living programming for 30+ years, starting with Fortran/punch cards and now C#/.NET. I'm 72 now and retired but I still program as a hobby. I hope I am still active if and when quantum computing comes to the desktop! (BTW I just read an article with the following example: To factor a large (250 digit) number with today's computers would take "a million networked computers running for a million years, but the same problem could be solved in minutes with a quantum computer") CQ#?
73