Programming in the 60s vs today...
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Some of my coworkers are in their 60s and can debug any problem like it's nobody's business, because they learned low-level skills that have followed them throughout their entire careers. They have inner-working understanding the n00bs can only dream of. These days there's too many people in this field who'd have to resort to calling their IT support department because you disconnected their keyboard while they were away at lunch time. The framework, library, or language of the day they were experts at 3 years ago is useless today, and their skillset simply can't be adapted to new environments/situations. Those who are worth keeping around in the long term are few and far in-between--that's why there's so many job-hoppers.
Unfortunately a lot of that useful knowledge that's indicative of a serious programmer gets drowned out in today's application process. I applied for what was described as a senior position a couple months back with a local government bureau. An actual part of the interview I remember:
Them: "So what's an interface?"
Me: "A contract. It specifies a minimum requirement without specifying a concrete implementation. Kinda like 'I don't care what object you are, as long as you can do X, Y, and Z we're good.'"
Them: "What's a WHERE clause?"
Me: "A predicate to filter SELECT results."
Them: "Ok, any questions for us?"
Me: "No questions about design patterns, architecture, query optimization, PK/FK decisions, index clustering, version control, deployment, etc?"
Them: *Look at each other* "No."I never heard back :doh: I think I'm just terrible at interviews :laugh:
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Unfortunately a lot of that useful knowledge that's indicative of a serious programmer gets drowned out in today's application process. I applied for what was described as a senior position a couple months back with a local government bureau. An actual part of the interview I remember:
Them: "So what's an interface?"
Me: "A contract. It specifies a minimum requirement without specifying a concrete implementation. Kinda like 'I don't care what object you are, as long as you can do X, Y, and Z we're good.'"
Them: "What's a WHERE clause?"
Me: "A predicate to filter SELECT results."
Them: "Ok, any questions for us?"
Me: "No questions about design patterns, architecture, query optimization, PK/FK decisions, index clustering, version control, deployment, etc?"
Them: *Look at each other* "No."I never heard back :doh: I think I'm just terrible at interviews :laugh:
Were you being interviewed by HR people, or actual developers? If the latter, I suspect they immediately understood you were going to make them look bad. It's probably just as well you didn't hear back from them. In hindsight, perhaps the question you should've asked them is how *they* managed to get their jobs... :-D
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Not that I was alive in the 60s, but when it came to learning technology in the olden days it was more like this... you learn X, Y, and Z. Master them. You're a programmer. These days it's more like learn A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, and Y. You have to know them all. You're *supposed* to master them all. And you can use all of them for decades, but as soon as you don't know Z... you're a n00b! How dare you not know something. We want someone who's used Z forget A through Y... Z baby all the way! What... you want to spend time with family these days? Freak! Go home and study until you die... get that Z too. Although as soon as you do we're switching to AA. Experienced people know that to master everything these days is impossible. But gee golly that Z is so shiny. Who cares if it's a 90% copy of Y... Z is so shiny. Welcome to the future. :~
Jeremy Falcon
Jeremy Falcon wrote:
you learn X, Y, and Z.
I wasn't there either, but if I understand correctly, you didn't learn all three. You picked your career path and then learned COBOL or FORTRAN or ASSEMBLY. Or, you learned Pascal and BASIC and hoped to get a job teaching.
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Not that I was alive in the 60s, but when it came to learning technology in the olden days it was more like this... you learn X, Y, and Z. Master them. You're a programmer. These days it's more like learn A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, and Y. You have to know them all. You're *supposed* to master them all. And you can use all of them for decades, but as soon as you don't know Z... you're a n00b! How dare you not know something. We want someone who's used Z forget A through Y... Z baby all the way! What... you want to spend time with family these days? Freak! Go home and study until you die... get that Z too. Although as soon as you do we're switching to AA. Experienced people know that to master everything these days is impossible. But gee golly that Z is so shiny. Who cares if it's a 90% copy of Y... Z is so shiny. Welcome to the future. :~
Jeremy Falcon
In the end, it's all about breaking down and solving problems. I'll gladly learn a new stack/framework if it solves a problem at hand. (makes or saves $) That said, I usually don't (aside from maybe reading articles) invest in learning something new just to add a feather to my cap. On another topic, with the answers to the universe at out fingertips these days, getting by on your wits is much easier than it used to be. Either I've done it (or something like it) and can re-use the code/logic, or I can usually find something useful in less than 10 seconds using google. :laugh: This is why I haven't bought a real programming book/manual in more than 5 years. These days the only mastery required is in phrasing search terms. :)
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
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Joan M wrote:
OOP
Ooooooooh... shiny! Can I use code wider than 80 chars? Huh? Huh? Can I? Can I?
Jeremy Falcon
64k max in a block, you can use up to 1024 blocks
M.D.V. ;) If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about? Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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Were you being interviewed by HR people, or actual developers? If the latter, I suspect they immediately understood you were going to make them look bad. It's probably just as well you didn't hear back from them. In hindsight, perhaps the question you should've asked them is how *they* managed to get their jobs... :-D
I got the impression one person was definitely HR and one probably a developer. The third person I honestly couldn't place as he didn't say much beyond the greeting. I was just kinda dumbfounded. If I was hiring a carpenter to build a house I wouldn't ask him "Do you know what a hammer is? What about wood? Alright, that's all I need." :doh:
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Not that I was alive in the 60s, but when it came to learning technology in the olden days it was more like this... you learn X, Y, and Z. Master them. You're a programmer. These days it's more like learn A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, and Y. You have to know them all. You're *supposed* to master them all. And you can use all of them for decades, but as soon as you don't know Z... you're a n00b! How dare you not know something. We want someone who's used Z forget A through Y... Z baby all the way! What... you want to spend time with family these days? Freak! Go home and study until you die... get that Z too. Although as soon as you do we're switching to AA. Experienced people know that to master everything these days is impossible. But gee golly that Z is so shiny. Who cares if it's a 90% copy of Y... Z is so shiny. Welcome to the future. :~
Jeremy Falcon
One cannot simply learn everything that the industry uses, this could apply to other fields too.Considering the remarkable impact that computer and engineering has made on other disciplines and considering the modern trends in the industry.Older systems and technology gets replaced by newer system and programming languages.....On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero...
Caveat Emptor. "Progress doesn't come from early risers – progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things." Lazarus Long
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You had to, didn't you, he's gonna choose javascript.
Wrong is evil and must be defeated. - Jeff Ello
Nothing at all wrong with good old JS, even better, the new ES5 and ES6, but mastering them? :~
"'Do what thou wilt...' is to bid Stars to shine, Vines to bear grapes, Water to seek its level; man is the only being in Nature that has striven to set himself at odds with himself." —Aleister Crowley
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Not that I was alive in the 60s, but when it came to learning technology in the olden days it was more like this... you learn X, Y, and Z. Master them. You're a programmer. These days it's more like learn A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, and Y. You have to know them all. You're *supposed* to master them all. And you can use all of them for decades, but as soon as you don't know Z... you're a n00b! How dare you not know something. We want someone who's used Z forget A through Y... Z baby all the way! What... you want to spend time with family these days? Freak! Go home and study until you die... get that Z too. Although as soon as you do we're switching to AA. Experienced people know that to master everything these days is impossible. But gee golly that Z is so shiny. Who cares if it's a 90% copy of Y... Z is so shiny. Welcome to the future. :~
Jeremy Falcon
To digress a little.... Time was an intelligent and educated person could know just about everything there was to know. Literally. And from that grew the stereotype of the lone scientist in his lab coming up with some new invention to change the world... for a while, such people could exist, but not any longer. No one can know everything, not even within one subject area - the most anyone can be is a master at one or two (r more, maybe) disciplines within a subject, there is that much knowledge about. So science now, and in the future, is and will be a collaborative affair. The big advances now - take nuclear fusion (if it ever happens), quantum computing, or a myriad of medical advances - these aren't and won't be made by our stereotypical white-coated lone scientist in a lab, but by the collaborative efforts of different research groups around the world. We all have to stand now on the giant collective shoulder of those around us in order to see anything.
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Yes, that is a malaise that permeates our business and has done for a long time. The best you can do is pick a technology that looks like it has some legs and stick with it.
I waited 2 years to pick Silverlight, waiting to make sure it was mainstream, I was not going to get caught with a deprecated technology again. How did that work out for me - 14 applications need rewriting.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity RAH
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Just stay with: _start: mov edx,len mov ecx,msg mov ebx,1 mov eax,4 int 0x80 Works for me! :)
User: Technical term used by developers. See Idiot.
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Just come to the world of industrial machines and robots... We are always years away from what is being used nowadays... OOP is the new thing in PLC programming... :rolleyes:
Rhetorical question: how the h*** do you do OOP in plc code? :omg:
Charlie Gilley <italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape... "Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783 “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
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Not that I was alive in the 60s, but when it came to learning technology in the olden days it was more like this... you learn X, Y, and Z. Master them. You're a programmer. These days it's more like learn A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, and Y. You have to know them all. You're *supposed* to master them all. And you can use all of them for decades, but as soon as you don't know Z... you're a n00b! How dare you not know something. We want someone who's used Z forget A through Y... Z baby all the way! What... you want to spend time with family these days? Freak! Go home and study until you die... get that Z too. Although as soon as you do we're switching to AA. Experienced people know that to master everything these days is impossible. But gee golly that Z is so shiny. Who cares if it's a 90% copy of Y... Z is so shiny. Welcome to the future. :~
Jeremy Falcon
The code I am trying to maintain began with a definable message based API. It was a little slow on the under-powered embedded system we started with, so "optimizations" were made. This is my current contract interface: API[^] I now have logic in some key processing that depends on the string content of a global value. Rather than just look at the interface, I am reduced to searching through all project files for all references of said global string variable. I have code from multiple targets in the wrong files, etc. I've never seen entropy attack so fast.
Charlie Gilley <italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape... "Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783 “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
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I waited 2 years to pick Silverlight, waiting to make sure it was mainstream, I was not going to get caught with a deprecated technology again. How did that work out for me - 14 applications need rewriting.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity RAH
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I waited 2 years to pick Silverlight, waiting to make sure it was mainstream, I was not going to get caught with a deprecated technology again. How did that work out for me - 14 applications need rewriting.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity RAH
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Not that I was alive in the 60s, but when it came to learning technology in the olden days it was more like this... you learn X, Y, and Z. Master them. You're a programmer. These days it's more like learn A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, and Y. You have to know them all. You're *supposed* to master them all. And you can use all of them for decades, but as soon as you don't know Z... you're a n00b! How dare you not know something. We want someone who's used Z forget A through Y... Z baby all the way! What... you want to spend time with family these days? Freak! Go home and study until you die... get that Z too. Although as soon as you do we're switching to AA. Experienced people know that to master everything these days is impossible. But gee golly that Z is so shiny. Who cares if it's a 90% copy of Y... Z is so shiny. Welcome to the future. :~
Jeremy Falcon
Don't try to learn anything new until you need to. For instance, if knowing A, B, and C gets the job done where you're at now, then become proficient in A, B, and C. When you're considering trying to find a new job (or have to because you got fired/laid off), look at what's currently in use, and learn enough to at least be familiar with the general territory, and when you do get a job do the new tech, become proficient in it. Little secret - all programming languages are essentially the same. The primary stuff you have to learn is the topology of the framework(s)-de-jeurs. THAT is where the steep learning curves exist. I've been doing this crap for 40 years, and that's the way I've been doing it the entire time.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013 -
Don't try to learn anything new until you need to. For instance, if knowing A, B, and C gets the job done where you're at now, then become proficient in A, B, and C. When you're considering trying to find a new job (or have to because you got fired/laid off), look at what's currently in use, and learn enough to at least be familiar with the general territory, and when you do get a job do the new tech, become proficient in it. Little secret - all programming languages are essentially the same. The primary stuff you have to learn is the topology of the framework(s)-de-jeurs. THAT is where the steep learning curves exist. I've been doing this crap for 40 years, and that's the way I've been doing it the entire time.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013I'd agree with that - about the time you figure out the framework, it's just the same thing with different sauce. I pondered Xaml for a while, then I learned it was repackaged UIL from days past...
Charlie Gilley <italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape... "Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783 “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
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silverlight was mainstream? perhaps within microsoft public statements, not so much anywhere else. Sure, like their phone there was an audience, but it remained at low percentage.
Signature ready for installation. Please Reboot now.
All right mature then, there were some pretty big companies heavily committed to it and I am completely MS centric :-O
Lopatir wrote:
like their phone
Whew I got lucky there, dodged it completely...
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity RAH
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Not that I was alive in the 60s, but when it came to learning technology in the olden days it was more like this... you learn X, Y, and Z. Master them. You're a programmer. These days it's more like learn A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, and Y. You have to know them all. You're *supposed* to master them all. And you can use all of them for decades, but as soon as you don't know Z... you're a n00b! How dare you not know something. We want someone who's used Z forget A through Y... Z baby all the way! What... you want to spend time with family these days? Freak! Go home and study until you die... get that Z too. Although as soon as you do we're switching to AA. Experienced people know that to master everything these days is impossible. But gee golly that Z is so shiny. Who cares if it's a 90% copy of Y... Z is so shiny. Welcome to the future. :~
Jeremy Falcon
I was a little too young to learn programming in the 60s, but had my university education around 1980. That was an age where a lot of exciting things happened in the language world - every man had his own language. I can't count the languages I have been programming in. So when people asked me how many langugages I were familiar with, I said: Maybe three or four. First comes the algorithmic. That covers Fortran, Basic, Algol and Pascal including variants like Concurrent Pascal. Then comeplain C and C++ and Objective C, and lesser known languages like CHILL and the vendor-specific Planc, and later I have been using Java and Javascript ... and let's throw in COBOL, for good measure. Python, of course, and PHP. Those are all samples of Language One - the way of thinking is very much the same in all of these, and syntax differnces are not that significant. Second comes the "workspace" model which is like a sandpit where you throw in and take out functions and objects over time. Smalltalk comes in this class; my main experience is with APL, which is also quite different with its extremely array based data structures. Yet, the most essnetial difference from the algorithic group is the workspace model. The third language is the predicate languages, of which I have only used three variants: SQL, Prolog and SNOBOL. You could say that SNOBOL is a semi-algorithmic language; it has flow control and at the top level is rather sequential, but the more familiar you are with the language, the more you leave to predicate logic. I never became friendly with XSLT, and am happy that I managed to sneak out of it :-) regex I have to do every now and then. Fourth language: Essentially Lisp, which I have only used for programming Emacs. I can see that some people like it, but it doesn't give you much help in offloading the conceptual model into the saved file; essentially you must free up space inside your brain to hold the model. For a couple of projects, we peeked at functional programming, but I wouldn't count that as number five. We just studied the syntax of Erlang (and peeked at others from a distance), but I never really tried it in pratice. I would rather like to add as number five: Data modelling - not a complete language by itself, as it usually won't provide definition of operations, only the interface to them. I think this language (group) is the most underrated one! A good data model, whether you use ER or ASN.1 or an XML schema, is essential to understand the problem domain. You may say that if you use
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Rhetorical question: how the h*** do you do OOP in plc code? :omg:
Charlie Gilley <italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape... "Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783 “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
:laugh: The most normal question is: OOP? What is that? We program using lines and boxes which is the best for everything, even if we can't move the code between PLC brands and/or series...
www.robotecnik.com[^] - robots, CNC and PLC programming
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