Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
For another take that is arguably more powerful than regular expressions, see SNOBOL4 patterns. |
I must not read things such as these. They make me wish I was born in 1960. Then I would have lived through all the good computer stuff, and I would now be much closer to retirement.
I caught the last whiff of it, because I started on a very old XT in 1990, running DOS 3.2, and later 5.0, with only two 720 KB disk drives. So, I worked like it was te 70's or 80's until 1994. Then I was thrust into modern computing with OS/2 3.0, and later Windows NT.
That love of the old, hardcore CS stuff never went away though.
My education was Computer Science, with a specialisation in (very low level) programming of micro controllers because of the love of the hardcore stuff, but nowadays, I'm often writing HTML/CSS, and trying to understand the latest Javascript framework / library fad.
(I have just written an entire rant about that some pages back... the one that got this entire thing started
)
Yesterday and today, I've spend over a day to get a fracking user interface right, to show it at least somewhat similar in the major browsers (IE 11, Firefox and Chrome on the desktop, Safari on iOS, and Chrome/Android Browser and Firefox on Android).
A friend of mine, who is a front-end developer, could have probably done this in less than one day, and add jQuery transitions, slides, and other shizzle-wizzle to make it really smooth and blitzy. Or he would have used Bootstrap or something, which costs too much time to get into right now.
I can't. I'm just happy when the UI looks logical, somewhat decent, and works without problems.
Then, the data ends up at the server, in the backend and that's where I live. I write the stuff nobody ever sees.
I juggle data as if it's made of sushi, eating a piece every so often (hey... I do that with the rolls that fail, you know... so I eat invalid data as well). Analyzing it, transforming it, doing whatever the frack you want with it, saving it on disk and/or database... no problem. Done in a jiffy.
That same friend who can make the blitzy user interfaces was a colleague of mine some time ago, and we have 'helped' each other to meet deadlines.
Let's just say he doesn't want my help on UI's because they look like a work straight out of the 80's. I haven't the knowledge to make them glitzy and modern; I have to go look up everything. So while I *could* do it, it would be very time consuming.
Similarly, I don't want his help on the backend/data part... although if "crashing" was a requirement, I would. Crashing the application is the main perk of his backend code. He forgets half of the code, or just doesn't have the knowledge on how to do it right; just as I don't have it for doing nice UI's fast.
He writes front-ends, and does that very well.
I write back-ends and/or algorithms, and I do that very well.
Trying to swap our tasks results in either very ugly, or very crashy programs.
The pity is, the user interface is the stuff people see. Therefore that guy has a nice portfolio that he can show to people, while I can only show pictures of systems I've written code for. Nothing to see here... it's all inside. If you *SEE* my code, you'll probably looking at some sort of crash dump.
I would probably have loved being in the computer science field in the 70's and 80's (the time without screens and proper keyboards might have been a bit too old even for me).