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Comment by rco8786 | Hacker News Reader

By that logic we should all be using punch cards.

I get the notion that most new problems are just old problems being rediscovered/resolved though. I’ve been at this professionally around 10 years and closer to 20 as a hobby. It’s more and more frequent that I see a new framework/language/pattern being touted as the new hotness and I can remember using it years ago and migrating away for one reason or another after the inevitable shortcomings were discovered. Just last week I saw a blog post about using event pub/sub in JavaScript to decouple your code. Welcome back to 2002 (and probably a bunch of years before then too)

I still really enjoy my work, but today I tend to gravitate towards higher level systems design and mentoring the younger folks. This is kind of a weird turn here but you might consider a career coach. I was hesitant at first but mine really helped me get out of the boredom/rut that it sounds like you’re in.

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> By that logic we should all be using punch cards.

There are zero limitations in punching cards to express any modern program. And that is my point. Keyboards are faster, I use a fancy mechanical keyboard to write my code in a fancy IDE with autocomplete. The nature of the problems is the same, thou.

> I tend to gravitate towards higher level systems design and mentoring the younger folks.

I do the same. At work, I make sure that teams communicate between them, that they take into account the big picture and help them to push back agains deadlines when quality is at risk.

It is when I get home that I do not feel that urge of coding anymore. I still code at home, but I prefer to spend more time doing something that feels new and more challenging.

Machine learning is another area that I am interested in. But, not as a developer, that is the same thing that coding for anything else. I am improving my math skills, there I see a challenge. But, first I want to become better at drawing. One thing at a time.

I don't mean this at all in a morbid way, but I've long suspected that our lifetimes are slightly too long for our current environment.

If you're a smart autodidact, you can get really far, really fast, to the point where most remaining challenges, especially in a similar field, feel isomorphic to ones you've previously solved.

If you like drawing, and it feels new, and you have enough money to support yourself...go for it! Don't feel guilty; you may well have exhausted most of what programming has to offer you personally.

> By that logic we should all be using punch cards.

That's a bit hyperbolic. High level languages have been around for literal decades and modern languages and modern programming feel mostly like they're just re-discovering or remixing old ideas. There's no reason to go all the way back to punch cards.

> That's a bit hyperbolic

It was meant to be, in response to OP's hyperbole that there's nothing new being created.

> It was meant to be, in response to OP's hyperbole that there's nothing new being created.

You are right. Sorry for not expressing myself with clarity. To say that there's nothing new being created is hyperbolic and it is not what I wanted to say.

I just wanted to note that the pace of change is too slow to keep things interesting for decades. I am sure that if I do not code for 20 years, I will need to learn new things to get back into it as enough changes will have had accumulated in that time.

I can't say i've got anything close to your experience, but for me programming isn't necessarily about the challenge of solving some programming problem, but using it to make things. I like being able to type words and numbers into a computer, give them meaning, and use them to create new things. I don't really care much about whatever's new or awesome. I just come up with things i want to make that are interesting to me and make them for the sake of it. It's using programming to make things that interests me, not so much the solving the challenges of programming itself.

For example, to use something you mentioned in another post, a* or djikstra's algorithms. They're used over and over again because they work well. But that can be anything from a massive AAA open worlder, to a simple 2d platformer, down to something like dwarf fortress. All of those are games, all of those are using those algorithms for similar purposes, but each of those games couldn't be more different than eachother.

It's similar to the way nearly all music is made from the same 8 notes and scales. But people don't usually learn to play music for the challenge of learning scales. People learn to play music so they can play songs they like or write their own songs.

Yea, I don't disagree at all!

Hold on, modern pub/sub frameworks are WAY nicer than dealing with CORBA. shudder

I was neck deep back in the days when the only acceptable API was SOAP. I still wonder if anyone actually designed their systems around that POS or if they all did the same thing we did, wrapped a sane protocol in umpteen layers of XML crap at the outer edge.

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