Six years ago was a long time ago.
I've been outside of Computer Science and coding for six years. As someone looking from outside there has been a lot of changes in that time. To someone on the inside these changes seem small and iterative, but some truly impressive gains have been made.
Ever more languages directly implement concurrency and parallelism (Go & Swift), but now OoO seems to be the future.
Stack Overflow went from an announcement to 560 million page views a month. Before SO, searches for help with code would take me to sketchy forums or to some professor's website that was straight text and read like the ingredients on a cereal box. My SO profile is some sort of artifact. I wonder if someday it will be worth anything like low ICQ numbers were, hmm.
Github. Woah, a social network centered around a bunch of traditionally non-social people. I need to get a few projects from this blog on there. Really awesome use of the social network idea though.
Debian had three stable releases, PHP and Perl have not had a major revision, Google shut down countless services, Wikipedia went from 14 GB to 50 GB and we're all still using X.org to view web pages through ever more powerful browsers.
I've started using an actual IDE and won't go back to a simple text editor. I do some things that aren't completely Ada related and I'm okay with that, although I will still write Ada, but save_with_another_file_extension.c I just do it for the libraries. Dijkstra's ideas apply regardless of file extension.
I think the idea that functional programming is the future has finally subsided. Seriously, it had 40 years, if it were going to happen it would have happened by now. The JVM no longer has a new language to run every other day either.
Have I become more knowledgeable or has /r/Programming declined? Some of its thunder is now shared with Hacker News but the two of them together seem to have less interesting content than /r/Programming did six years ago.
Me? Well, I wore a uniform for a while, learned how to put 100 lbs of explosives 20 miles away, spent a year in a far away land, lifted some heavy things, and now back to assembling Legos through my keyboard.
I've been outside of Computer Science and coding for six years. As someone looking from outside there has been a lot of changes in that time. To someone on the inside these changes seem small and iterative, but some truly impressive gains have been made.
Ever more languages directly implement concurrency and parallelism (Go & Swift), but now OoO seems to be the future.
Stack Overflow went from an announcement to 560 million page views a month. Before SO, searches for help with code would take me to sketchy forums or to some professor's website that was straight text and read like the ingredients on a cereal box. My SO profile is some sort of artifact. I wonder if someday it will be worth anything like low ICQ numbers were, hmm.
Github. Woah, a social network centered around a bunch of traditionally non-social people. I need to get a few projects from this blog on there. Really awesome use of the social network idea though.
Debian had three stable releases, PHP and Perl have not had a major revision, Google shut down countless services, Wikipedia went from 14 GB to 50 GB and we're all still using X.org to view web pages through ever more powerful browsers.
I've started using an actual IDE and won't go back to a simple text editor. I do some things that aren't completely Ada related and I'm okay with that, although I will still write Ada, but save_with_another_file_extension.c I just do it for the libraries. Dijkstra's ideas apply regardless of file extension.
I think the idea that functional programming is the future has finally subsided. Seriously, it had 40 years, if it were going to happen it would have happened by now. The JVM no longer has a new language to run every other day either.
Have I become more knowledgeable or has /r/Programming declined? Some of its thunder is now shared with Hacker News but the two of them together seem to have less interesting content than /r/Programming did six years ago.
Me? Well, I wore a uniform for a while, learned how to put 100 lbs of explosives 20 miles away, spent a year in a far away land, lifted some heavy things, and now back to assembling Legos through my keyboard.
