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Comment by ourmandave | Hacker News Reader

Ah, "Grey beard". The term Microsoft used to separate the old from the young at a conference when they first introduced the .NET framework. Classic "old bad, good new" sales.

As in, "you Grey Breads remember using C++ and MFC, etc."

Yes I remember. Because it was yesterday just before I came to your conference!

I still went home and started learning what the hell XML was though. =(

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> you Grey Breads remember using C++ and MFC, etc.

I remember submitting my BASIC program on IBM punch cards. Using a card punch machine taught one to not make typos. You youngsters with your backspace keys!

thank you for making me smile during these horrible days.

I'm actually not kidding. My first programs were done on punchcards back in 1974 or 1975. I then moved on to ASR-33s (barf), DECWriters (much better) and then ADM-3A glass terminals (heaven - a working backspace!).

Using a text editor today is not much different than an ADM-3A, it just has more rows and columns on it and the font is slightly, but not much, nicer. (Why do the console fonts suck these days? Jeez)

Edit: the first screen editor I had ran on an ADM-3A and was a TECO macro. I think TECO was the first "tty noise" programming language.

You had literal patches though.

Does anyone else remember using a hard-copy terminal? It's hard to even think about how I would edit, compile, debug and run programs where everything you typed or was echoed back, including passwords, was printed out on a paper roll. Want to look at your command-history? just grab the paper and look. Of course there was no fancy vi screen-oriented editor. We had ed and liked it!

We had a teletype machine at my school in 1980 connected to the local authority mainframe. There was nearly always a queue to type your own program but you could write it out on a sheet of paper (one character per box) and get a printout of somebody who had typed it in for you. When they made a mistake your program didn't run and you had to send it again the next week.

and I'm only 50!

I certainly do. I found even punch cards preferable. The awkwardness of the input method meant that I stayed away from tech for almost 15 years after the first quarter of my freshman year in college.

I still can't wrap my head around the fact that we have developers who work on .NET and have never touched either WinForms or WebForms.

And I am relatively young.

WebForms can die in a fire, and thankfully has, for the most part, but WinForms is still plenty good enough for cranking out quick and dirty tools. Maybe I'm old, or it's just because I started out in high school doing VB6 forms applications, but I still prefer it unless I have a good reason, over WPF.

WinForms is also a pretty thin layer over Win32 controls, as well, so if you have to switch between .Net and native C/C++ Windows dev, it's less of a context switch.

WebForms changed the game. ASP was a sub-subset of VB, but WebForms with C# made websites full-scale eventful and stateful programs for the first time. I had never felt such power and freedom programming for the web.

Yes, some people would put humongous data structures in view state, and yes, more-better solutions have arisen, but WebForms deserves your respect!

It really doesn’t. I’ve never seen a good WebForms site / app and I’ve always dreaded working with them. They were a regressive step.

If you worked long enough with WebForms, then you'd know what an inefficient, slow and complicated event-hairball it is.

I curse every time I have to go back to any old WebForms-based project to do some changes.

> WebForms with C# made websites full-scale eventful and stateful programs for the first time.

And that is why it can go die in a fire!

We do a lot of new development in Winforms. Ironically, it's our migration path away from green screen programs.

>> I still can't wrap my head around the fact that we have developers who work on .NET and have never touched either WinForms or WebForms.

>> And I am relatively young.

I still can't wrap my head around the fact that we have developers who worked on WinForms and never used MFC or ATL or wrote C code to the Win16/32 API :).

And I'm... er... used to be young.

I'm in my 20s, and when I was starting it was the Win32 API, in C. It really wasn't that long ago.

Unity3d is probably exposing tons of people to .net without winforms

Not all development involves GUIs. Well, let’s go even further and say most development is not GUI-related.

Business logic and algorithms is what it’s all about.

Most algorithms are reusable, while most GUI code is not.

Hence, most actual programming is happening on GUIs.

Hm, depends on the business, I guess. Because from my experience, most business algorithms are proprietary and don’t have proper specifications. You can’t just use them somewhere else. You have to recreate them from scratch.

Probably because your devs didn't write them in stored procs like they should.

Only roughly half the world believes in SP's. The other half (like me) believes that writing even the barest of hints of logic into SP's is a serious crime.

So you'd rather write the same logic in every app, and trust that every developer of every app does the same and gets it identical? Good for keeping busy I suppose but if I were your manager I wouldn't pay you for it.

>As in, "you Grey Breads remember using C++ and MFC, etc."

As one who is neither "Grey" nor "Bread," you may wish to check your spelling :)

But yes, it's kind of sad that this is the way things are now :(

Gray and grey are both acceptable spellings. Or were you just talking about "bread"?

Just the bread. Grey is a more automatic way to spell it than gray, for me.

The correct spelling is regional. Gray is a color and grey is a colour.

Hmph. Sourdough life forever!

Hah! Plain white bread is clearly where it's at!

I am not Galdalf the Grey, I am Gandalf the BREAD! Er wait, Gandalf the White!

They prefer the young ones, because it's easier to get them to swallow the BS. They'll play the "fire and motion" game [1] with gusto.

[1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000339.html

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