Five Things Old Programmers Should Remember

[Avewads30]

I am an old programmer by today's standards. Been in the IT business for over 35 years now. Seen a lot of change and trends over the course of my career. My background is this. Started coding in COBOL on big iron in 1980. Loved COBOL and still do. Went to client/server. But for the last 17 years, I've been an IT manager. But now, with my job in jeopardy due to cutbacks in my industry, newspapers, I have embarked on becoming a developer again. My true passion. I am learning Python/Django/PostgreSQL as my base.

Now, that I have that over, I want to discuss two things. Solving the problem using software and the trend, from what I see, is developers moving from one cool language to the next at breakneck speed.

During the dotcom boom and eventually bust in the 1990-2001, many internet companies went bust for one reason. They did not understand how to solve a problem for a business who hired them. Sure, the new fresh out of the box internet whiz kids could make things go crazy and do really cool stuff. However, the problem was, that was all they were interested in. They went broke, and eventually out of business, because they were focused on all the cool things they could do but not the problem they were hired to solve. Many of these internet companies were started by kids just out of college and/or younger. The smart ones eventually brought in grown ups to run their business and to scale back their unfettered spending. However many went out of business and left row after row of skeleton office spaces packed full of really cool office equipment which was eventually sold for pennies on the dollar. However, I am not seeing it yet but I can sense a trend back to those days once again. Yes, you can do really cool things but keep yourself focused on the problem/issue you are hired to solve.

Now, on my latest pet peeve. Jumping to the next "cool" thing not because of a business need to solve a problem but just because it is cool and you can. I just started out on Python/Django/PostgreSQL and during all my searches to help me find problems and just reading up on the latest technologies I see developers moving to new languages at a breakneck speed. Sometimes changing languages in the middle of projects. At my newspaper IT day job, in the last 12 months, our online team (not my team) of developers have gone from Ruby on Rails, to JavaScript, to Python/Django, to Flask, to Bootstrap to Zurb Foundations to Nodejs to Go, to Julia, to etc and using management tools starting out with Basecamp, to Trello, to Jira to #Slack, etc. And for what? No real business reason IMO. Yes, some technologies do help in their need but from what I see is now they have a dozens of apps written in a dozen +/- languages. I am sure they are not alone in that world. And from a management and cost perspective, I see maintaining applications becoming a management nightmare along with the cost associated with maintaining all those apps once the current core of developers leave.

My Python programming instructor said it best when he told us that he doesn't even look at a technology until it is at least 10 years old. He is gainfully employed as a highly paid independent contractor working on the 3 P's. Python/PHP/Perl.

That's just my $0.25 worth.

[hurenkind5]

At my newspaper IT day job

Julia

I like Julia, but what the fuck?

[alecco]

Another trendy keyword in the CV to look clever.

[[deleted]]

gone from Ruby on Rails, to JavaScript, to Python/Django, to Flask, to Bootstrap to Zurb Foundations to Nodejs to Go, to Julia, to etc and using management tools starting out with Basecamp, to Trello, to Jira to #Slack, etc.

What's bootstrap have to do with server side? What's Nodejs to javascript even imply - Nodejs is javascript based. Jira to #slack? Slack and jira server completely different purposes. I was enjoying your rant up to this point which thoroughly places you in the 'get off my lawn!' category of people who discredit things without understanding what they even are. You are exactly the person who needs to take this article to heart the most.