pre-internet days
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Richard MacCutchan wrote:
they seem not to have any idea what to do if things go wrong
It's not just in software, though. We live in a "disposable" society where no-one mends anything, ever. There was a classic posting in a local community facebook group earlier this year. I can't remember it word for word, but the gist of it was this:
FREE: New electric lawnmower. Used once, I ran over the power lead. Might be of some use to anyone who knows how to repair the cable.
:sigh: :( :doh: When I was in Junior school (age 8 - 11) our teacher brought in a television, and on wet playtimes we were allowed to dismantle it - she provided a range of screwdrivers and pliers. No H+S, no risk assessment, no PPE, of course. We didn't learn much about how TVs worked but at least we learned how to dismantle things!
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I wasn't around back in the day, but I can't believe people were more productive back then, having to go through magazines and books and scan pages and pages to find the solution... Also, things go fast now, but I'm always amazed at how many languages there were back in the day. Not to mention types of hardware. And those went fast too. Things probably moved just as fast, it's just that you didn't hear about it. I mean, COBOL, released in 1960, had multiple versions and compilers by 1963. From Wikipedia: "The COBOL specification was revised three times in the five years after its publication. COBOL-60 was replaced in 1961 by COBOL-61. This was then replaced by the COBOL-61 Extended specifications in 1963, which introduced the sort and report writer facilities." Another popular language from that time, ALGOL, got three additional implementations in 1960 and four in 1961, and that continues until 1967. The 70's and 80's saw at least eight new popular languages (for a total of 16) and the 90's (which I consider pre-internet even though it was around) saw at least ten new popular languages. I think we're as stable as we've ever been :laugh:
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I'd agree that the pace of change was faster back then than we tend to assume. Those of us who lived through it are getting on a bit now and everything seems fast to us now. However I do think we were pretty productive back then. Writing out COBOL on coding sheets in pencil was horrendously slow, but before you picked up a coding pad you knew exactly what you needed to do and had done "dry runs" on paper, and probably discussed every line of code with a colleague. Once the punch girls had done their stuff, which they were generally very accurate with, there was a very good chance that the code would run exactly as per spec. We did only a little re-working of code. Also, because everything was long-winded, the code didn't get extraneous "bells and whistles" that today's idle fingers end up stuffing every application with. (Yes, I'm guilty of that too). Later on I was supporting overnight batch jobs. A suite might involve 15 - 20 separate programs, each (when printed) being a pile of COBOL about 3" - 4" thick. When the bleeper went, it was out with the 600-baud modem and teletype, to get the memory + register dump of the failure (90% of the time it was a S0C7 exception). Then you had to pinpoint the line(s) of code, print out as little as possible of that bit to work out a fix (no time for testing, the overnight schedule was tight enough as it was), compile it and restart pronto. No need for manuals, your only tool / language was COBOL and you knew every verb and operator of that inside out.
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sorry if this dates me too much, but I kind of miss the pre-internet days working as a dev. Technology didn't move that fast, a new compiler would be available every great once in awhile. You could keep most libraries in your head because they rarely ever changed. Most of the time you were only limited by imagination and memory (ram). So you would subscribe to any tech magazine to get the latest info. there would be code samples of something clever, articles on the pitfalls of a language feature, or work progress of getting a new complier up and running. My shelves were packed with any books I could get ahold of and every magazine that had something interesting. The internet is the first tool I have to reach for now. there is just soo much to know and it's almost impossible to keep it all in your head. For me to remain a dev until retirement is going to be a stretch, so I'm thinking of going into education to tech software development. I've notice that many of the younger devs out there can slap something together that works, but don't any have the fundamentals on how any of it works underneath: they can put gas in the car, but have no idea what's under the hood that makes it go, and that bothers me. any other gray beards out there seeing the same thing?
I've been developing software since 1997. Actually, I already started as a kid in 1986. And I cannot agree with you. Yes, it has become impossible to keep everything you need to know in your head. But nowadays, you just have to keep in your head where to find the information you need. If you're using a wide-spread programming environment, the only skill you need is to formulate a good search phrase, and Google will give you exactly what you need in 90% of the cases. And yes, younger devs start working without thinking first and sometimes don't seem to know what they're doing. But honestly, were you any different when you were younger? I wasn't. Today I usually say: I need a full understanding before I code the first line. But when you're still young and inexperienced, that is sometimes not possible, as due to your lack of experience you are not able to understand everything. So you have to compensate this with overconfidence and enthusiasm. At a first glance, this looks like younger developers are faster and better. But in reality, they make more mistakes and cost the company more money than experienced developers because they cause a lot more bugfixing and technical support than an experienced developer. But again, were you any different when you were younger? I think nobody was. So your view of things is probably a generational issue rather than a real change of things.
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DerekT-P wrote:
we learned how to dismantle things!
I did much the same at home. Like you I did not always understand how the things worked but I did learn how to try and find out.
Funny. My uncle and some of his other retired buddies took over the science department at a private school. Labs include multi week disassembly of small 4 cycle engines, using long cables like jump ropes to detect Earth's magnetic field, etc. Sounds like a similar mindset.
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raddevus wrote:
He had a bug in a for loop that was copy pasted into his code dozens of times. It failed in production when he was out of town and unavailable
I would hope that his boss contacted him, and told him not to bother coming back...
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. -- 6079 Smith W.
Daniel Pfeffer wrote:
I would hope that his boss contacted him, and told him not to bother coming back...
Boss didn't take action because this employee represented head-count to the boss and kept his Management Kingdom larger than if he started getting rid of people. :sigh:
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I certainly don't want to go back to finding the appropriate MSDN documentation CD out of the folder of 12 that will have the documentation for Substring as I don't know if it is SubString or Substring as IntelliSense hasn't been invented either. The internet has certainly made it easier to plagiarise though and has defo made it easier to find examples of larger sections of code, as well as (obviously) places people can just post their homework expecting someone else to do it for them. I'd hate to be a lecturer these days, half the job must be trying to work out if people have got others to do their work.
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Daniel Pfeffer wrote:
I would hope that his boss contacted him, and told him not to bother coming back...
Boss didn't take action because this employee represented head-count to the boss and kept his Management Kingdom larger than if he started getting rid of people. :sigh:
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Richard MacCutchan wrote:
they seem not to have any idea what to do if things go wrong
It's not just in software, though. We live in a "disposable" society where no-one mends anything, ever. There was a classic posting in a local community facebook group earlier this year. I can't remember it word for word, but the gist of it was this:
FREE: New electric lawnmower. Used once, I ran over the power lead. Might be of some use to anyone who knows how to repair the cable.
:sigh: :( :doh: When I was in Junior school (age 8 - 11) our teacher brought in a television, and on wet playtimes we were allowed to dismantle it - she provided a range of screwdrivers and pliers. No H+S, no risk assessment, no PPE, of course. We didn't learn much about how TVs worked but at least we learned how to dismantle things!
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sorry if this dates me too much, but I kind of miss the pre-internet days working as a dev. Technology didn't move that fast, a new compiler would be available every great once in awhile. You could keep most libraries in your head because they rarely ever changed. Most of the time you were only limited by imagination and memory (ram). So you would subscribe to any tech magazine to get the latest info. there would be code samples of something clever, articles on the pitfalls of a language feature, or work progress of getting a new complier up and running. My shelves were packed with any books I could get ahold of and every magazine that had something interesting. The internet is the first tool I have to reach for now. there is just soo much to know and it's almost impossible to keep it all in your head. For me to remain a dev until retirement is going to be a stretch, so I'm thinking of going into education to tech software development. I've notice that many of the younger devs out there can slap something together that works, but don't any have the fundamentals on how any of it works underneath: they can put gas in the car, but have no idea what's under the hood that makes it go, and that bothers me. any other gray beards out there seeing the same thing?
The biggest change other than the speed is the missing "craft" of coding. The young devs who slap together something that works barely care about whether the code is readable or maintainable. Agile and patterns are a religion that must be followed to the letter regardless of the effect. Nesting three "if"s is a crime despite the readability it renders and the fulfillment of a "one function - one purpose". I estimate that I have roughly 500 books on IT and coding, but few are as memorable as Petzold. A young dev would not even know of the impact Petzold made and why it was important. Most of the magazines have gone under and dealt with technology and techniques no longer in favor, so they have met the dumpster on even terms. I am afraid "grey beard" is fast becoming "white" like Gandolf.
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Yes, a sea change from the days when I used to debug in hex, over the phone. Eliminating possible causes of a bug until, to steal a phrase, what remains must be the truth, requires the ability to think deductively, which is rooted in logic. In an age where emotions are treated like facts, the ability to debug this way is severely compromised.
Robust Services Core | Software Techniques for Lemmings | Articles
The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.I got a job after debugging by phone. I was working in Germany using software from a company in the US. There was an intermittent bug that was driving us crazy and the company could not fix it. The president of the company had me describe the bug in detail to one of his developers so they "could better fix it". I ended up describing to him the steps it must have gone through and the kind of code it must be running at the point the bug came up - he found the appropriate code and I said something like: "...and then it will have a pointer to a block that it constructs the message string in before adding the terminating null at the end of the string"; "Yes, there is a pointer for the message"; "Has it allocated enough memory for the block? Perhaps it didn't allow for the terminator."; "Allocated memory?"; ...at which point the problem was solved! The president had been listening in on the call and immediately offered me a job. Ah, the good old days!
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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DerekT-P wrote:
we learned how to dismantle things!
I did much the same at home. Like you I did not always understand how the things worked but I did learn how to try and find out.
My elder brother loved to dismantle things to see how they worked. :) I had to figure out how they worked so I could out them back together again - a skill my brother never quite got the hang of. :sigh:
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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I got a job after debugging by phone. I was working in Germany using software from a company in the US. There was an intermittent bug that was driving us crazy and the company could not fix it. The president of the company had me describe the bug in detail to one of his developers so they "could better fix it". I ended up describing to him the steps it must have gone through and the kind of code it must be running at the point the bug came up - he found the appropriate code and I said something like: "...and then it will have a pointer to a block that it constructs the message string in before adding the terminating null at the end of the string"; "Yes, there is a pointer for the message"; "Has it allocated enough memory for the block? Perhaps it didn't allow for the terminator."; "Allocated memory?"; ...at which point the problem was solved! The president had been listening in on the call and immediately offered me a job. Ah, the good old days!
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
:thumbsup: :)
Robust Services Core | Software Techniques for Lemmings | Articles
The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. -
I certainly don't want to go back to finding the appropriate MSDN documentation CD out of the folder of 12 that will have the documentation for Substring as I don't know if it is SubString or Substring as IntelliSense hasn't been invented either. The internet has certainly made it easier to plagiarise though and has defo made it easier to find examples of larger sections of code, as well as (obviously) places people can just post their homework expecting someone else to do it for them. I'd hate to be a lecturer these days, half the job must be trying to work out if people have got others to do their work.
Quote:
I'd hate to be a lecturer these days
For three years, way back in the dusty past, I was a professor of Computer Science at a Polytechnic. The syllabus hardly changed from one year to the next. Forty percent of it was "History of Computing", in the third year that was reduced to twenty-five percent but a lot of it was the same. Computers were nearly all mainframes with mini-computers becoming popular (not micros - minis, PCs had not been invented yet). I left to get a proper job. ;-) Back then I thought I knew most of what there was to know; these days, well...! :|
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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A code review should have caught the duplication. Bond Keep all things as simple as possible, but no simpler. -said someone, somewhere
Matt Bond wrote:
A code review should have caught the duplication.
Yes, but this was a long while ago now -- around 2000 -- and this particular place allowed developers to work autonomously. Each dev managed his/her own services. That's good and bad, I know. That was a great thing if you were apt to do it all and "own" your stuff. This guy was not up for that though and it became obvious in production some time after midnight. :sigh:
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My elder brother loved to dismantle things to see how they worked. :) I had to figure out how they worked so I could out them back together again - a skill my brother never quite got the hang of. :sigh:
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
-
sorry if this dates me too much, but I kind of miss the pre-internet days working as a dev. Technology didn't move that fast, a new compiler would be available every great once in awhile. You could keep most libraries in your head because they rarely ever changed. Most of the time you were only limited by imagination and memory (ram). So you would subscribe to any tech magazine to get the latest info. there would be code samples of something clever, articles on the pitfalls of a language feature, or work progress of getting a new complier up and running. My shelves were packed with any books I could get ahold of and every magazine that had something interesting. The internet is the first tool I have to reach for now. there is just soo much to know and it's almost impossible to keep it all in your head. For me to remain a dev until retirement is going to be a stretch, so I'm thinking of going into education to tech software development. I've notice that many of the younger devs out there can slap something together that works, but don't any have the fundamentals on how any of it works underneath: they can put gas in the car, but have no idea what's under the hood that makes it go, and that bothers me. any other gray beards out there seeing the same thing?
I agree with your views. Even now, I still believe that standardized, n-tier client server applications were far easier to develop and maintain for a LAN once .NET was released than the garbage that has become Internet development these days. They were also more secure and much more targeted to the users they were supposed to support. Microsoft reached a zenith of technological ease with its ASP.NET WebForms model only to throw it away and have it supplanted by a bunch of technical know-it-alls who feel it is more important to tout their favorite technologies instead of well-developed applications. Every list of "excuses" used to promote the current technological mess of the Internet has practically nothing to do with any benefits for the organization as a whole or the users it is supposed to service. Since the mid 2000s, development has become a pantheon to ambiguity, technical ideologies, and a pace of change that is simply insane. No one can keep up with it anymope and nor should they try...
Steve Naidamast Sr. Software Engineer Black Falcon Software, Inc. blackfalconsoftware@outlook.com
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The biggest change other than the speed is the missing "craft" of coding. The young devs who slap together something that works barely care about whether the code is readable or maintainable. Agile and patterns are a religion that must be followed to the letter regardless of the effect. Nesting three "if"s is a crime despite the readability it renders and the fulfillment of a "one function - one purpose". I estimate that I have roughly 500 books on IT and coding, but few are as memorable as Petzold. A young dev would not even know of the impact Petzold made and why it was important. Most of the magazines have gone under and dealt with technology and techniques no longer in favor, so they have met the dumpster on even terms. I am afraid "grey beard" is fast becoming "white" like Gandolf.
Rusty Bullet wrote:
I am afraid "grey beard" is fast becoming "white" like Gandolf.
:laugh:
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sorry if this dates me too much, but I kind of miss the pre-internet days working as a dev. Technology didn't move that fast, a new compiler would be available every great once in awhile. You could keep most libraries in your head because they rarely ever changed. Most of the time you were only limited by imagination and memory (ram). So you would subscribe to any tech magazine to get the latest info. there would be code samples of something clever, articles on the pitfalls of a language feature, or work progress of getting a new complier up and running. My shelves were packed with any books I could get ahold of and every magazine that had something interesting. The internet is the first tool I have to reach for now. there is just soo much to know and it's almost impossible to keep it all in your head. For me to remain a dev until retirement is going to be a stretch, so I'm thinking of going into education to tech software development. I've notice that many of the younger devs out there can slap something together that works, but don't any have the fundamentals on how any of it works underneath: they can put gas in the car, but have no idea what's under the hood that makes it go, and that bothers me. any other gray beards out there seeing the same thing?
I'm a gray beard, 69, still working as a dev. Used to be a mainframe instructor, hardware and software. I know a guy with a masters degree in computer science. He may not have measured electron flow in a semiconductor in a physics lab as I have done, but is still very knowledgeable, picks up things quickly and is already productive. I do not worry about it. I am concerned that AI will someday supplant humans and our brains will shrink even more. Microsoft has already resorted to offering Bing search links, instead of actual help for bugs. That concerns me a bit. I am also concerned about teachers that teach because they can't do. My sons have had professors like that, requiring me to help.
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sorry if this dates me too much, but I kind of miss the pre-internet days working as a dev. Technology didn't move that fast, a new compiler would be available every great once in awhile. You could keep most libraries in your head because they rarely ever changed. Most of the time you were only limited by imagination and memory (ram). So you would subscribe to any tech magazine to get the latest info. there would be code samples of something clever, articles on the pitfalls of a language feature, or work progress of getting a new complier up and running. My shelves were packed with any books I could get ahold of and every magazine that had something interesting. The internet is the first tool I have to reach for now. there is just soo much to know and it's almost impossible to keep it all in your head. For me to remain a dev until retirement is going to be a stretch, so I'm thinking of going into education to tech software development. I've notice that many of the younger devs out there can slap something together that works, but don't any have the fundamentals on how any of it works underneath: they can put gas in the car, but have no idea what's under the hood that makes it go, and that bothers me. any other gray beards out there seeing the same thing?
I don't have a beard, but you are on point. I have written assemblers, OS'es, communications processing for async, bisync, SDLC, TCP/IP, data compression, file system managers, ... to name a few things. But, the thing I miss the most is good, concise, well-written documentation.
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I've been developing software since 1997. Actually, I already started as a kid in 1986. And I cannot agree with you. Yes, it has become impossible to keep everything you need to know in your head. But nowadays, you just have to keep in your head where to find the information you need. If you're using a wide-spread programming environment, the only skill you need is to formulate a good search phrase, and Google will give you exactly what you need in 90% of the cases. And yes, younger devs start working without thinking first and sometimes don't seem to know what they're doing. But honestly, were you any different when you were younger? I wasn't. Today I usually say: I need a full understanding before I code the first line. But when you're still young and inexperienced, that is sometimes not possible, as due to your lack of experience you are not able to understand everything. So you have to compensate this with overconfidence and enthusiasm. At a first glance, this looks like younger developers are faster and better. But in reality, they make more mistakes and cost the company more money than experienced developers because they cause a lot more bugfixing and technical support than an experienced developer. But again, were you any different when you were younger? I think nobody was. So your view of things is probably a generational issue rather than a real change of things.
Your mention of google. . .this is important in the discussion of "pre-internet" vs. "post-internet" because I want to bring up an important point about google. When we say or think "post-internet" it really is "post-internet + google" that we are talking about when we say how all this info is at our finger tips now. Because, do people remember when we had the internet but when you searched for something it may take 45 minutes to find the information you were seeking?? I do. You would go through 20 pages of search results at times, navigating to several of the hits themselves in a percentage of each page before you found what really answered your question. I think of this almost weekly and tell my kids how awesome it is (we have it) today where if you are able to think for a moment on your search terms, boom, there it is EXACTLY what you were looking to be answered, in the first 3 hits usually.
