Rowan Thorpe

…and you just gzipped it.

In my case not so much “lagging behind” as “stopped caring, ignoring, life’s too short for so much churn over nonessential filler”.

I long ago stopped getting caught up in “that discussion” about recent trends despite a stream of people lobbing leading questions to get the ball rolling. Because I also try to not do so more rudely than necessary, I have developed several diplomatically worded (or at least ambiguous enough to float opaquely off to the side of the offense spectrum) ways of essentially saying the following: The simplest and cheapest way of [A] learning the “computer science” end of software is by becoming proficient in Lisp, [B] learning the “engineering” end of software by becoming proficient in Forth, [C] learning how “busywork” is a dangerous and demoralising thing to confuse with “actual work” by maintaining some Java code, [D] learning how insidious and self-sabotaging “expert beginner syndrome” is by reading a lot of the relevent code-reviews and blogposts when maintaining Javascript & Python projects, [E] learning how mob-mentality and populism can lead to selective blindness and architectural stubbornness by working with large volumes of C & C++ code, [F] learning how it is all really abstraction-layers over something akin to an old-shool phone switchboard by working with Assembler, [G] learning how the only work with longevity is that which stands on the shoulders of giants by using Fortran libraries, [H] learning how the mere act of developing using languages with baked-in discipline can be inherently educational by using DbC/TDD/BDD/dependent-type/formally-verifying/etc based languages (SPARK-Ada, Haskell, Eiffel, ACL2, Rust, etc), and then [I] learning how - after a certain level of experience - the languages, frameworks, and tools become less important than the engineers’s mindset and the work that happens both before and after the fingers hit the keyboard…by finding semi-performant techniques for implementing masochistic things like a VM and a network stack in Bash script (as hobby tasks, not for real use). If they are coming from a more hands-on/hardware background I also recommend [J] how eye-opening it is to maintain your own customized LibreCMC image flashed onto an open router (the older/smaller the HW the better, because you have to be increasingly creative with your kernel & OS configs), and [K] how educational it is getting a RISC-V working on an FPGA. I top it off by saying that [L] despite coding on-and-off since my start with z80 assembler on an Amstrad in the mid-80s I still feel like a beginner with so much to learn, and [M] that fact is by far the part I love most about the field (not just field of “work” but of “mental endeavour”) - far more than status/seniority/raises. I find I don’t get bombarded so much with JS-framework-du-jour zealotry and expert-beginnerism after that.