DEV Community

Cover image for What are some things that only someone who has been programming 20-50 years would know?
Alex_Kucher
Alex_Kucher

Posted on

What are some things that only someone who has been programming 20-50 years would know?

  • Programming in 1980: "Everything is a pointer to a contiguous buffer of values… because… C."

  • Programming in 1990: "Everything is an object, we care about business logic and databases.”

  • Programming in 2000: “Code readability and extreme use of design patterns is so much more important than performance. Hardware is cheap. Anyone can code.”

  • Programming in 2010: "Of course we are an agile team. We have daily scrums to find out which JavaScript framework our team will try today."

  • Programming in 2020: "Everything is a pointer to a contiguous buffer of values… because data-oriented-design and cache-misses…”

Top comments (18)

Collapse
 
jonrandy profile image
Jon Randy 🎖️
  • You don't have to use a bundler
  • It's OK to have the server generate full HTML pages
  • You can make websites without JS
  • The ZX Spectrum's video resolution is 256x192 pixels. The video memory starts at address 16384 - beginning with 6144 bytes of monochromatic bitmap data (interlaced and split into thirds), followed by 768 bytes of attribute (or colour) data - each byte of which defines the background and foreground colour for a block of 8x8 pixels
Collapse
 
hasnaindev profile image
Muhammad Hasnain

I agree with all the points but you don't have to use a bundler? I mean, technically, you don't but bundlers are only used to write code to different files instead of a single one, IMO, that that makes code easy to understand and clean. (Given one knows what one is doing.) Or what would happen when you have code that can potential expand to have 1000s of lines?

Collapse
 
jonrandy profile image
Jon Randy 🎖️

I just mean what I say - you don't have to.

Honestly, the amount of times I've seen the tiniest projects all wrapped up in a ridiculous amount of tooling... these projects would be way easier to work on by just throwing out all the tooling out and going back to basics.

I've had interview candidates when I ask them to build a simple FizzBuzz app - do it in React FFS. It's ludicrous - everyone just seems to want to use the 'cool' tools and the latest fads. Much more consideration should be given to the appropriateness of the tech being used. So much stuff these days is using sledgehammers to crack nuts.

Thread Thread
 
hasnaindev profile image
Muhammad Hasnain

Ooh yes, I definitely agree with this! People should crack their nuts with appropriate tools. :D

Collapse
 
miketalbot profile image
Mike Talbot ⭐

Now I'm thinking about sprite splitting on the C64 - there's a memory lol.

Collapse
 
psiho profile image
Mirko Vukušić

POKE 16384,255 .... ahh it all started with that arround 1985 :)

Collapse
 
codenameone profile image
Shai Almog

As a guy who started programming in the early 80s this is pretty hilarious and accurate ;-)

Collapse
 
hasnaindev profile image
Muhammad Hasnain

Ooh WTF. Bruh, I'm 22. You have more experience in programming than I have in literally anything in my life.

Collapse
 
codenameone profile image
Shai Almog

So you're totally missing out on 68k assembler (that's the old chip on the Apple II device)... Seriously, experience is a lot but in our industry 85% of the stuff I have experience with is no longer applicable. I used to be an expert in CORBA, had a ton of books on OpenDoc. Hell, you'd probably need to Google them and SOM, OS/2 etc.
COBOL is still around but I don't want to touch that crap with a 10ft long pole.

Experience just means I'm old.

Thread Thread
 
jonrandy profile image
Jon Randy 🎖️

I just bought a book on Z80 assembly language for the ZX Spectrum 😛

Thread Thread
 
codenameone profile image
Shai Almog

Loved that machine!

Collapse
 
glsolaria profile image
G.L Solaria

Stop changing the framework we work with every few weeks! It's making the code more fragile while the devs get up to speed with it. There will be a new framework that is interesting each week - it doesn't mean we should use it straight away. Wait and see how the community evolves and how responsive the community is to problems and features. Perhaps we could even get involved with the community of we want to commit that deeply to it. We can wait before making a decision to change the framework sometimes!

Collapse
 
hasnaindev profile image
Muhammad Hasnain

I'm gonna do it: npm install is-boolean-object

Collapse
 
mwichmann profile image
Mats Wichmann

The thing you learn after all this time is there are no magic bullets. A lot has changed in SW dev but the problems we suffer from aren't fixed because they're all ultimately human problems, not tool deficiencies, language deficiencies, etc.

Collapse
 
brentdalling profile image
Brent Dalling

This needs to be read by many devs.

Collapse
 
merri profile image
Vesa Piittinen

And if mistakes been made, you can always npm uninstall stuff.

Collapse
 
andreidascalu profile image
Andrei Dascalu

Hell no! Do not npm uninstall. Just npm install weird-fix-package

Collapse
 
andreidascalu profile image
Andrei Dascalu

Say what? Always npm install for as long as there's still some disk space left.