The Magpie Developer

Whenever I interact with fellow IT folks for the first time typical question asked is “In What Platform you work?”

I don’t have any answers to that. I worked in variety of stuff COBOL, RPG, CL, C, Java, JSP, ASP, VB, C#, Oracle, SQL, DB2, … too many to list.

My current project uses too many frameworks (Struts, Spring, Hibernate …) to do simple CRUD database stuff. Developer are carried away with these facinating framework and miss fundamendal points such as database concurrency.

What you “use” doesn’t matter, what you “deliver” matters. People fail to learn basics, very sad.

Best code language in the world that will last forever…

LOL Code (http://lolcode.com/)
Not shiny at all…very dirty in fact

@Thomas David Baker:

“On the other hand you don’t want to write ASP Classic apps with notepad for the next 50 years…”

Not even if it works well, keeps your clients happy, and earns you a good living?

To Aaron G,
Your summary is too simplistic.

I programmed for a few years before using a garbage collected language. Then, when I used .Net I was surprised by how many common mistakes just weren’t possible anymore. Later I read about the blub paradox. Now a days, I live in fear that there is something much better out there that I don’t know about.

The good news is that I work with a team of people which prevents me from jumping to every shiny thing I see.

I think the next big thing I have to discover is dynamic/implicit typing. I’ve experimented with it, but I don’t think it will hit me until I work with it full time.

"In a 5 year period we get one superb programming language - only we can’t control when the 5 year period will begin."
Alan Perlis

Welcome to the post-Singularity. You can’t possibly keep up, but you must try or the developer in the next cube over who puts in more hours will code you out of a job.

“Some dynamic language features are trickling down to the bastions of Java and .NET, but slowly, and with varying levels of success.”

Doesn’t that mean that if you stick with Java or C# you will not have to worry about any of this?

I guess what it boils down to is this:

Do you want to get work done, or do you want to advance the technology baseline?

We could all still be writing in assembly if a few people hadn’t gone out on a limb and invented higher level languages. Then, we had to have people go out on a limb and actually start to USE those languages.

C++ would not exist if it weren’t for the “shiny new thing”. Nor would Java. Nor would C# or the CLR. We probably wouldn’t have an internet, or a world wide web.

I guarantee you, those crusty old COBOL programmers you used to make fun of when you were fresh out of college felt much the same way as this article and it’s supporters do. Congratulations. You’ve achieved nerdvana.

Nerdvana is that place where programmers go when they stop learning. They feel their skills are valuable and will continue with the status quo until one day they wake up and realize there aren’t many jobs left, and those remaining are all maintenance.

At that point, you can choose to leave Nerdvana, and go to Management, or you can join the rest of your colleagues back on the learning treadmill and update your skillset. Either way, you’re not going to keep doing what you were.

I am a young programmer (24yo) and have learned pretty much everything to programming before the web languages started to appear. From basic to assembler, I think that covers more than enough territory for programming.

I can’t believe a language which started as “Pretty Home Page” finally ended up as a professional language. At first glance I thought the name implied corny website written by 12 yo kids full of animated smileys and blinking lights.

The only real contender to established tools I have seen is Java. But I never used it seriously because it generates huge bloatwares memory sucker. I have seen many pseudo benchmark Java vs C and I can’t believe for a second their speed is comparable.

I am glad I did stick with desktop development so I don’t have to keep up with all those “fancy”, buggy and hard to install/configure new languages. Microsoft provides pretty much all of the tools needed for the major OS which is Windows.

I simply love oranges, especially while typing comments.

What we could do is make a nice big public wiki-like
table - Excel Live or something - and have these columns:

Skillset (VB, VB.Net, VC++, C/C++, C#, C Omega, Linq, WPF, …)
Feature (Templates, dynamic typing, lambdas/function pointers, UDFs, one-line serialization ;-), , …)
HelpedMeOrHelpedMeNot (1,2,3,…10)
WantAsDirect? y/n
WantAsWorkaround? y/n
IThinkIsGoodThing y/n

and so on…

Someone has to figure out the moderation of content.
Just hope you get a correct statistical sample.
Hope. Anything else is incorrect or unreal :wink:

Jeff,

have you considered and alternate explanation: you are just getting old :slight_smile:

I started using emacs this past year (June 2007, for the recordbooks) because I wanted something non-shiny. Well, also because I wanted a flexible editor with good scripting and regular expression support, and had always wanted to learn LISP since my wee days in the 1980s.

Too bad its Lisp is e instead of common, but that’s okay.

As far as non-shiny goes, I’m stuck using VB6/VBA for most things at work. But, hey – no reason to not write good code.

Reading this while I’m supposed to be coding in LabVIEW, with a tiny bit of C added in. Non-shiny for the win!

(but I do Django on the train commute…)

Great post, Jeff!!
Does make sense.

Users don’t care whether you use J2EE, Cobol, or a pair of magic rocks.

Users don’t, but as I’m freelancer, customers almost always do. They wanted ror - I started writing on ror, if they will want xxx++, i will start learn it. This is what makes all that “top languages” lists.

I never used the magpie, I always used a raccoon. My old boss was a raccoon, easily distracted by every new shiny piece of tinfoil he saw in the garbage heap.

I spent alot of years trying to get him to realize what he was doing but it was always ‘his ball, his bat, his field, his way or the highway’.

Shiny items are sometimes good but it’s so easy for those in power (and not necessarily knowledge) to lose their way.

I really really look forward to ruby becoming a “thing of the past”. Then I can go back to ruby coding in peace and quiet, like I did before the arrival of the rails hordes.

I agree that the pursuit of the new and shiny for its own sake is counter-productive…now somebody needs to get that info to Microsoft who profits the most from constantly introducing “new and shiny”.
And to “encourage” adoption, older tech is “deprecated” routinely to make sure that the pursuit of new and shiny is first and foremost on the minds of every developer worthy of the name!

Even though I’ve not always agreed with you (Steven McConnell), sometimes you really hit the tack on the head with a satisfying force that could humble Thor himself. Many thanks for your well-written blog; it is one of the best on the 'net for this industry.