Comment by whamill | Hacker News Reader

Comment by whamill | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how the author's outlook has changed since 2007? Has he spent the last 4-5 years learning new technologies or constantly bettering himself or just stuck with what he learned in 2007 and become bitter at the reality of the industry moving on? Sure, COBOL programmers from back in the day are still in demand in certain scenarios, but his anger seems to be to stem from an unwillingness to learn; an expectation that once one has learned something they should simply be further rewarded for having learned it and continued to use it for a long period of time.

The fact is that if you learn some programming language in 2007 and just do the same stuff for the next 4-5 years without expanding your education, your experience or what you try to make of it, you're going to be behind the 'cool kids' that spent the last 4-5 years learning every new language that popped up. But if you spent the 4-5 years with just that one language learning new ways of implementing things, learning how better to take a higher level view of programming and software design and other facets of use in this industry - then he wouldn't be behind anyone else.

It would interest me to find out how things have progressed for the author given his rant at generalists, project management and learning new things

He's also wrong-headed about the fields he cites as "unchanging". Yes, lawyers still cite Blackstone, but the law is changing all the time nonetheless. Computer programming has similar foundational material (sorting, searching, you name it -- almost nothing in Knuth is "out of date"). Business has changed radically in recent years. Even accountants have to retrain themselves constantly; the Internal Revenue Code changes every single year (sometimes dramatically), rules of accounting change, new requirements like Sarbanes-Oxley come into play.

Sometimes accountants don't get much respect, but I have to admire anyone who can gobble the Internal Revenue Code every year and come up with procedures that (usually) don't get any of their clients fined or jailed and (ideally) don't cause them to go bankrupt.

> almost nothing in Knuth is "out of date"

Actually, quite a lot of TAOCP are out of date. TAOCP's discussion of floating point arithmetic, while correct, predates IEEE 754 and not that useful now. TAOCP's analysis of algorithms, while correct, ignores locality of reference as it predates importance of CPU caches and branch predictors. TAOCP spends inordinate amount of pages on external sorting with tapes; while external sorting is still important, most of Knuth's specifics are not. I can go on and on...

You're making the same mistake as the author of the post -- thinking that the technology of today is the way it's always going to be, and that the ideas of the past are gone forever.

In fact, these things are cyclical. Mainframe->microprocessors->network computing servers. Floating-point emulation using integers on the CPU->External floating-point coprocessors->on-chip math coprocessors->external GPUs. Manipulating gigantic data sets on resources like Amazon S3 has many commonalities with classic tape storage (arguably more than it does with rotating disk storage -- retrieving a big object from S3 brings it in as a stream of data. Reading the whole glob and processing it as a stream is reasonably efficient but random access sucks. Sounds like a tape, no?). IEEE 754 isn't necessarily the last word in floating point arithmetic. I can go on and on... :-)

"you're going to be behind the 'cool kids' that spent the last 4-5 years learning every new language that popped up"

Why? 90% of those languages will either fall out of fashion or have very small cult followings. Wouldn't your time be better spent refining your craft with tools you will actually use.

Because they're broadened their experience and knowledge with new languages and learning new things. My point isn't so much about learning the very latest thing so much as it is about learning in general. At the very least the people who spent the last 4-5 years learning new languages will have been exposed to different ways of doing things and different ways of looking at the common problems - something that someone who didn't learn anything except repeating their experience over and over wouldn't have learned.

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