22 Nov
2011
22 Nov
'11
9:08 a.m.
On 22 Nov 2011 at 7:21, Vincent Slyngstad wrote:
If it really helps explain what is going on in a terse
and
to-the-point way, then I'll be glad of it, too. If it is a
distracting anecdote about someone's lifestyle, not so much.
Especially in the pre-Internet days, I'd be mighty annoyed about
having to stop and go look something up. (Also, I am just anal enough
that I wouldn't be able to resist looking the dang thing up to see
what I was missing.)
Maybe it's a cultural thing. If you've spent your life writing and
maintaining applications, you probably don't have much of a sense of
humor plowing through hundreds of thousands of lines of COBOL.. On
the other hand, if you've spent your time writing systems code
(drivers, operating systems, compilers, etc.), the view is a little
different, I think.
It could also be the times.
When I started out, nobody had a degree in computer science--the
discipline simply didn't exist. Nobody got into computer programming
for the money and backgrounds were widely varied, so there was a lot
of cross-pollination. I could not imagine, for the life of me, what
starting out today would be like, with standardized everything,
developing web applications, universities serving as trade schools
for the profession. A bureaucrat's dream, it would seem.
If I'd started today, I'd probably be a plumber.
--Chuck