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Comment by ilovecaching | Hacker News Reader

Kids these days do a lot of disgusting things. They don't know how to write their own linker scripts, read assembly, or code in a real man's language (C). They think dynamic typing is "fun" and "productive". They don't even know how to manage threads or memory and use entire megabytes of RAM to send messages to each other using an inferior version of irc. Primarily they constantly waste precious cycles, eat quiche, and spend the rest of their time trying to solve the trivial problem of generating and consuming html in as many ways as possible. They don't even know who Ken is.

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This reminds me of the famous quote by Socrates:

“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.”

Sorry.

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/01/misbehave/

You should clarify in the text of your comment that the quote is apocryphal, as not everyone will click your link.

Apologies.

Oh no, just a friendly suggestion! I was about to post a similar comment myself, not realizing immediately that you'd beaten me to it.

But a similar quote about the young is completely real -- just not by Socrates (who after all wrote nothing), but rather by Aristotle -- Book II, Part 12 of his "Rhetoric" has him complaining about young people -- it's a long passage, but some gems "They have exalted notions, because they have not yet been humbled by life or learnt its necessary limitations; moreover, their hopeful disposition makes them think themselves equal to great things-and that means having exalted notions. They would always rather do noble deeds than useful ones: their lives are regulated more by moral feeling than by reasoning."

Youth unemployment explained in a quote: "They would always rather do noble deeds than useful ones"

"Millenials" described to a tee. Socrates quote was also pretty much right on. "Millenial" might be the most ingenious modern scam amongst software vendors, marketing, and every other person hangle their shingle and selling the millenials-are-unique nonsense.

Ive ranted before about this but as the learned ancients have already spoken about it then it should be obvious to all by now - each generation is more lenient in its upbringing of the next generation, sees problems arise from that, and then tries to explain it away by any means other than accepting blame for the trouble self-inflicted.

Im old enough to have seen this repeated 3x in my own lifetime and a small amount of reading can show to anybody else that this has been the case for over 2000 years. Neither Tim, Jeff, Satya, Richard or (name your fav 'modern' CEO here) can solve this. Its a human psychology problem which we have been happily creating, recognising, refusing blame for, and buying snake-oil solutions for, for as long as the world has had the written word.

Wake up people.

For the record: Im huge fan of freepascal but write most of my own code in python out of laziness(batteries included is powerful motivator for me). Sometimes dabble in C#, now learning ecmascript(again), and next trying again to learn nim and C. Father, product manager.

In regard to ecmascript, have you considered Haxe?

Thanks for the reminder and yes i have Haxe on my 'to review' list.

As a counterpoint I would say that the old people that in that high level language called C, (real men use Punch cards ;) ), had no clue about user interfaces, developer productivity, used waterfall models for planning, and in general, creating something that was somewhat horizontal and useful ended up being a titanic task, and also with crazy price tags. Wait let me write that client/server software again using CORBA :(.

Planning is for imbeciles who are unable to fly by the seat of their pants.

s/quiche/avocado\ toast

can't even terminate s command.

Try it in vim, it works! It's an escape char for the space ;)

Vim is for \(avocado toast | quiche\) eaters. It's bloated. Real programmers use ed.

Exactly. ed(1) is the standard text editor:

https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.html

TECO users look down upon you with scorn and contempt.

I figured I'd check: is "Ken" Ken Thompson?

Presumably, though I bet Mel would be an even better figure here: http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html

IRC wasn't a great experience for a lot of things back in the day unless you setup your own bouncer/relay.

Real programmers set up their own bouncer relays

Oh please, actual Real Programmers, just picked up the phone and whistled at 9.6kb/s.

Most old POTS phone switches still had the older pulse interface, so you dialed by hitting the hangup button really fast. The new fancy frequency encoding from 300-3300Hz was faster but not proper hacking anymore, you needed extra HW for this. Doable, but generating pulses was much easier.

cough FORTAN cough Real languages have arrays

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