alt Hacker NewsIt's horrifying to see someone who started working 10 years after me talking about "when I was young" :-D
Programming was more exciting when you had amazing things to imagine having - like a 256 colour screen or BASIC that ran as fast as machine code (ACORN ARCHIMEDES) or the incredible thought of having a computer powerful enough to play a video and even having enough storage to hold a whole video!
2400bps! Checking email once a day
Everything came true. My screen has 16million colours and I don't notice. I have 12 cores and 64GB of memory and fibre optic internet. The extremely exciting future arrived. That mind-expanding byte article I read about Object Oriented programming came true enough for us to see that it wasn't the answer to everything.
There are 2 problems now - nothing one does is unique. You can't make a difference because someone else already has done whatever you can think of doing ....and of course AI which is fun to use but threatens to make us even more useless.
I just cannot really get my sense of excitement back - which may just be because I'm old and burned out.
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I'm disappointed that you said "2400bps" instead of "2400 baud". :/
It's always surprising to me when I see people being nostalgic for the old days. Yes, things seemed simpler, but it was because there was less you could do.
I'll always fondly remember my attempt to get on GeoLink with a 300 baud modem, and then my parents realizing that the long distance calls made it far, far too expensive to use, and returning it. Sure, I was disappointed at the time, but it wasn't too much later that 56k modems existed and we had a local unlimited internet provider. And now it's a fun story.
But I was actually just as frustrated at the time as I am now, but for different reasons. Change exists, and that's good.
I agree that it feels harder to make your mark today. But I don't think it's actually harder. There's plenty of fun things that people would love to see people do. Just yesterday, I found out about the Strudel musical programming language and watched an amazing video of someone making Trance with it. And those kind of discoveries happen constantly now, where they were pretty seldom back 30 years ago.
We're at the point that anyone can make a game, app, webpage, etc if they put enough effort into it. The tools are so easy and the tutorials are so plentiful and free that it's really just about effort, instead of being blocked from it.
I've been saying "we live in the future" about once a month for years now. It's amazing what we have today.
I used to play British Legends on Compuserve at 300 baud and wrote a CNET 5-star software that was a hit worldwide in the late 90s.
Get off my lawn!
And yes, the whole "when I was young" saga starting in ... 2010 ... made me pause too.
It's not just that you're old and burned out. There is a declining marginal value of improvements.
Take sound, for example. Going from "no sound" to "sound" was huge. Going from just beeps to IBM PC sound was a real step. CD-quality was a real step. Going from CD-quality to 64-bit samples at a 1 MHz sample rate is a yawn. Nobody cares. The improvement on CD quality isn't enough to be interesting.
I have high enough bandwidth. Enough screen resolution. Enough RAM, enough CPU speed, good enough languages freely available, enough data.
The problem is, everything that was an easy win with all that has already been done. All that's left is things that aren't all that exciting to do.
(I don't think this is permanent. Something will come along eventually - a new paradigm, a new language, a new kind of data, something - that will open a bunch of doors, and then everything will be interesting again.)
> Checking email once a day
In an ironic twist of life, this is almost what I'm back doing right now. I turned off notifications and pull messages years ago because of all the messages I'm getting for a dozen different systems. I check mail at most a few times per day and that's it. I wouldn't be able to work if I'd have to actively keep an eye on them. I can get away with it because everybody is using Slack for work or WhatsApp for personal life, so there is no urgency to check mail. I'm on Slack too, so I see if I have messages there but WhatsApp is silenced and I allow no notification of any sort on the lock screen of my phone.