alt Hacker NewsI can find an experienced doctor, plumber, musician or mechanical engineer that was doing it 50 years ago.
I’m not going to find someone that was doing software 50 years ago. And if I do, their experience is completely unrelatable.
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chrisweekly • today at 1:23 AM
That's one of the many many reasons I miss my dad so much. He went straight from MIT to GenRad circa 1970. I didn't start doing software till 1998, but we had some years of overlap -- and it was profoundly gratifying to connect w/ him on engineering topics. The learning was even bidirectional tho I'm sure I got more out of our pseudo-professional interactions than he did. Sigh. I really miss him.
I worked on compilers and tools starting in 1981. Proprietary compiler technology has disappeared over the decades and the development tools/language/process/compute have changed considerably. But the skills and role of a compiler developer seem similar, although maybe it just means this sub-field of software has matured.