Comment by lcuff | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lcuff | Hacker News Reader

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As someone who started programming professionally at 25, and stopped professionally at 60, here is my experience: At 25, I could do a decent job of "drinking from the firehose". I could learn new things very quickly, and retain what I learned. At 60, the time it took to understand stuff grew longer, and the ability to retain it basically disappeared. I was programming in Ruby on Rails, and learning about a new gem or a new test environment was 'fine', but the next day, I needed to return to the documentation at length to refresh myself. It made being productive super difficult. I still do very small hobby projects, mostly using stuff I learned 10 or 15 years ago. This might not be true for everyone, but guaranteeing that 'anyone' can program at any age is just not true. Especially not in an environment where you need (a) a language, possibly 2 or 3 (b) a framework, (c) a test framework (d) an IDE, (e) a production environment (f) a source control system (g) a problem tracking system. YMMV. You need to check it out for yourself if you're considering it.

> As someone who started programming professionally at 25, and stopped professionally at 60

Almost exactly my career progression. Mine was Fortran, BASIC, C,various assembly languages, ReXX, SQL, various 4GLs, C++ and other stuff. So basically, don't stop learning!

Although I have a very fat book called "Crafting Interpreters" sitting on my desk right now, that I don't really feel like opening. But maybe I will.

I am sure age is a factor, but the environment is changing so much quicker these days than it used to. That must make it only more difficult to stay up on the latest framework, which you probably feel understandably confident will be out of style in a year based on your experience.

This is pretty specific to web development. Many companies have mountains of code written in languages that have been around for decades, and don't expect you to pick up the latest framework to be relevant.

Eventually I hope web development grows up and quits chasing the next great framework as if it will somehow make their life better or their work easier. SQUIRREL! SQUIRREL!

The pre-flexbox/react days were less than a decade ago if you don't count browser specific prefixes. All that garbage is starting to get cleaned up. Give it another 10 years and it is going to be solid for the rest of your career.

I find this highly improbable, for multiple reasons. (a) It's unlikely that requirements will stop changing. In the early days of the web, you didn't need to support forms, shopping carts, or phone-sized screens. No one knows what new user interfaces will be invented, or what new uses folks will find for the web, but rest assured they're coming. New frameworks and technologies will be developed to make them easier to create. And the first iterations of those technologies will be amateurish by later standards. (b) Standards of performance will continue to grow. In the early web, you created a site somewhere and expected it to be 'fine' for anyone in the world to access, and if it went down, well, it will be up soon. Now, replicated sites, CDNs, and completely new architectural schemes (AWS, eg.) are possible and often preferred. Again, these will spawn different ways of using them, and evolving architectures. (c) Our development methodologies will also continue to change, often seeking improvement by trial and error. The amount of technology wrapped in to any one project will continue to grow apace.

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