My 20 Year Career is Technical Debt or Deprecated

peacemaker

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Interesting article, thanks.
Any code rots if it stops to make money...

I hope it's not about B4X ! Even if we already lost Basic4PPC.
 
aeric

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peacemaker said:
Basic4PPC.
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"Developed early 2004..."
Next year, it would be 20 years anniversary. B4X is going strong.

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AnandGupta

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If you don't keep up with changes in time and requirements, you turn dodo.
Becoming programmer does give me bread and butter but does not allow me to use tools I learnt 30 years ago. Still learning new tricks.

Never thought it will be true in my life time, when I saw in a black & white movie in my childhood, the magician looking at the mirror and seeing the princess roaming in her garden, far far away.
Video call on a flat glass called mobile !!
 
toby

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AnandGupta said:
but does not allow me to use tools I learnt 30 years ago. Still learning new tricks.
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You certainly didn't waste your time, and you have made good use of what you have learned long ago without you realizing it. The proof: it's much easier for an experienced programmer to learn a new language than for true beginners who know nothing about programming.
 
Magma

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MikeH

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The most valuable thing you've (we've) learned in that time is - learning how to learn. That will always be useful.
 
MikeH

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aeric said:
and recently people only need to learn how to prompt the chatGPT.
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Humans are always better. I'd rather employ you than a faceless, emotionless machine. ChatGPT is clever but its not the answer and will never be the complete solution. For one thing, I'd rather see my money going to another human, who will feed himself and his family, thereby encouraging other humans and we need that because we're social creatures. As much as I like and enjoy using my Alexa (I have 3, so Alexii?), she doesnt come close to engaging with a real human.
 
AnandGupta

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Well ChatGPT is just a front end for the manuals, wikis, tutorial etc. I use it just to save my time going through the pages.
 
B

bob21358

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Interesting and thought provoking article. I am a programmer of over 45 years. I started with punch cards - and a 24 hour turnaround on submitting your punch cards and receiving the result! And imagine sitting in front of a computer program printout that is 30cm (12 inches) thick and trying to find a bug, or make a mod. And by the way computer printouts had 66 lines per page!

I was lucky enough to be involved in the early days of online systems come (PDP 11/70 running RSTS/E using Basic). We had 16k of memory in which to write our programs - welcome to Maximum Memory Exceeded but there was no more 24 hour turnaround.

To the present day and I have no doubt that every bit of code I wrote is now gone! And I wrote a lot of code over the years. My last programming project was in 2016 using Ruby on Rails. But alas even that project is gone.

I think back to all those late nights (3am, 4am). Trying to solve bugs. Last minute changes before go live. All that worry. All for what?

I do feel a bit sad about it sometimes - everything I created has gone. All that blood, sweat and tears.

But that is progress - sometimes it is two steps forwards and one step backwards. But what can be done today is amazing. The possibilities are virtually endless. When I started programming I could never have dreamed of what is possible today. How could you - when you looked at your program with a syntax error because you left out a full stop - there goes another 24 hours.

But I do worry about the future of programming. The art of programming will be lost. Not immediately but certainly with the next ten years. And all those programming languages will be gone. All those frameworks will be obsolete.

Is that necessarily bad? Most probably not. There will be other problems/issues appear. What they will be is nearly impossible to predict. But they will be there.

So if you are a modern day programmer, what I suggest is
  • Maximize your earning potential (go ask for more money)
  • Keep your skills current (yes you will go up some dead ends)
  • Develop people skills (the days of sitting in a dark room with headphones on are going)
  • Get involved more in other things - hobbies, sport, community etc. - because you will need them
And remember those who do not learn from history are bound to repeat it.
 
netsistemas

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Interesting article. It has helped me to realize that even we will die
In other words, if we disappear, so will our software. Only the Roman aqueducts will survive
 
R

RVP

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My take from this article is that as a programmer you must always be ready to to learn new languages and concepts to stay relevant and employable. I really don't care if my code is eventually replaced or made obsolete, no matter what you use that will always eventually happen. But if you are a good programmer, and keep up to date with technology it can be you who replaces that old code.
 
MikeH

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bob21358 said:
So if you are a modern day programmer, what I suggest is
  • Maximize your earning potential (go ask for more money)
  • Keep your skills current (yes you will go up some dead ends)
  • Develop people skills (the days of sitting in a dark room with headphones on are going)
  • Get involved more in other things - hobbies, sport, community etc. - because you will need them
And remember those who do not learn from history are bound to repeat it.
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Yes I agree with everything you say. About these points I've quoted.... the third one is the one I find most challenging. It feels so different to what gets my interest, i.e. computer programming. People are extremely complex/complicated in comparison. If I could understand people, I wouldn't need to know computer programming, I'd be way beyond that. Also, when you understand one person, another comes along thats totally different and you have to learn again. Psychology/philosophy are my next favourite subjects because of that and whilst I can learn enough about computer programming to finalise a product, learning about people in order to develop people skills is never ending.
 
C

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aeric said:
blog.visionarycto.com

My 20 Year Career is Technical Debt or Deprecated

Deprecated should be my middle name
blog.visionarycto.com blog.visionarycto.com

I just read this from another forum. Maybe someone resonates with this topic.
I am glad I found B4X and still developing programs.
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I take the glass half full view. All of that endless technical churn provides an equally endless source of job security for those who bring new skills for new projects, those who bring "obsolete" skills to maintain old projects, and those who can do both to transform old projects into new ones. This is true even if the source of the churn is marketing dazzle and FOMO. Ride the wave, baby!
 
AnandGupta

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In fact I could not find any "obsolete" code in my box !
All code from BASICA (first one), still gives me some knowledge of logic need to implement in C# (latest one).
And yes I sincerely thank Erel for giving us B4X which allows me to make Android apps in simple code like VB !!
 
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