Tom,
I've had a career full of the likes of you, and most of them are just
about as insufferable as you. They make things work, and really never
learn anything in depth or bother to document much of anything. Their
code is full of "neat" tricks that are fine for personal stuff, but
unmanageable in commercial code. And, of course, there is the simple
fact that the capability for mature judgment does not present itself
until around age 25. That is not to say that youngsters cannot do some
amazing things, but it is to say that remarkably little of that turns
out to be useful or used down the road. Having observed literally
hundreds of programmers in my long career, I might have the occasional
insight into what makes a programmer tick, and what makes the programs
of a particular programmer useful. It is rather like the fire service.
When you look for people to work as volunteer firemen, you have to
select carefully to avoid the adrenalin junkies. They are dangerous,
and they tend to burn out early, to coin a phrase. Your very attitude
towards Logo betrays your basic problem. Logo has matured into a
capable and useful language, not at all limited to little kids, though
still useful as a starting point for those kids. Tony said less than I
have, but I can hear him cheering in the background. You revel in
having worked with and conquered the complexity, while those of us who
have been doing this all of our lives are looking for leverage to make
our efforts go further. Certainly, I would many times like to unclutter
my mind of all the useless details that I have accumulated over the
years. They helped me get my job done, but they were anything but
closely related to the actual tasks that I had to accomplish. I spent
several years managing and repairing an assembler based system for
which I did not have even a majority of the source code. If you want
complexity, that is about as rough as it gets. But, all I proved is
that I could do it, not that the effort was worthwhile. It was an
idiotic situation that never should have existed, and I was well paid
or I would never have touched it. I could also list off all the
wonderful things that I managed in my childhood, but what would be the
point, if I had not turned that into a mature pursuit. At sixty-two, I
am still at it, and learning every day. I also have a clear picture in
my mind of what I want from a programming language or any other
technical system. I try to use the appropriate tools that allow me to
get the most done with the least effort, while providing something that
is clearly documented with the least effort and highly reusable. I
wrote COBOL code that is still basically in use more than 30 years
after I wrote it, not because it is wonderful and tricky, but because
it is clear, simple, and allows itself to be easily modified by even
fairly bad programmers. The structure was simple enough that it was
fairly difficult to mess up. It was a simple batch program set with
almost 50,000 lines of code in it. It produced the monthly board report
for a multi-billion dollar corporation, and involved data from every
division of the company, and it was all written and tested in 6 weeks.
The guy who wrote the original report must have been a friend of yours.
It worked, but took months to make the simplest modification, because
it was a pile of poorly documented and designed code. So, unless you
did something worthy of a Nobel prize, nobody will care in the long
run. The question is, can you do something useful now, that helps the
people you work for or with get something done that matters to all of
you. If so, my congratulations. If not, why not consider that being an enfant
terrible is only a small part of life.
Hopefully, before you are 30, you will realize how much fun you have
been for the rest of the world.
Everett L.(Rett) Williams II
Tom wrote:
I began making websites with frames when I was 11, discovered CSS and
PHP at 12 and was spinning Linux at 14. I am 23 now. Never let age get
in your way; Sometimes you might feel a little helpless because you
are just not getting a concept (I had a hard time learning to make an
OO system in practice - what goes where and how stuff interacts, I
understood the theory) but that only made me want to know it even
more.
Now, I'm not a fantastic super coder but I managed to turn my hobby
into my job and I still program for fun as well and I'm pretty happy
with that.
gr,
Tom
On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 12:59 AM, Tony Finch <dot@dotat.at> wrote:
On Sun, 25 Jul 2010, Matthew Wild wrote:
Everett L Williams II wrote:
Start him on Logo. It is not a children's language any more, and it was
specifically designed for simple robotics, certainly in the virtual
mode, but also in the real. I would not start my worst enemy on a
functional language like lua, however much I may like it myself.
Logo is also a functional language, albeit old fashioned. (It's quite
similar to traditional lisp in its distinction between variables and
procedures and its dynamic scope.)
Sure, Logo gives a nice introduction to the *concept* of programming,
and it's fun to see children realising that yes - they can actually be
in control of the computer/robot, and it's not hard. But someone
wanting to actually take up programming is long past that point
already.
Logo is a serious programming language. Don't be prejudiced by the way it
has been targeted.
Tony.
--
f.anthony.n.finch <dot@dotat.at> http://dotat.at/
VIKING: WESTERLY OR NORTHWESTERLY, BACKING SOUTHERLY FOR A TIME, 3 OR 4,
OCCASIONALLY 5. SLIGHT OR MODERATE. RAIN LATER. GOOD.
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