Kent

C is for Curmudgeon

A curmudgeon is a "cranky old man", something that I feel old enough to apply for. With many obvious exceptions, computer science has always struck me as a young man's business. Yes, I should say, "young person's business", but the 20% of the industry made up of non-men please forgive me. One symptom of that, however, is the continual re-invention of many items. I am reminded of a discussion I had many, many years ago with a curmudgeon at the time around "Why is OOP any better than structured programming?" Similar discussions of "Why is C++ any better than C? Why is C any more than just a macro-assembler?" etc. have happened. Each generation (and by generation in this business, I mean about 5 years) redefines good practices, and feel that they have invented perfection, while the curmudgeons sit back and rail about how no one listens to them, they had discovered that years ago and that "They were doing that with toggle switches and rocks. Uphill in both directions." (Just bring up any sort of "new" programming language topic with a Lisp fan for extreme examples) All that this cycle tells me is that eventually, today's "Agile programming, managed (or scripting) language, Web service building, hot programmers will one day be curmudgeons in their own right, complaining about the kids cum cowboys when they get older. Maybe if we just spend a bit less time focussing narrowly on our own solutions, pop our heads up and see what else is out there. There are lessons to be learned from old-school waterfall analysts writing in PL/1, from Ruby on Rails folk cranking out "scalable enough" Web sites, from Java folk, and from .NET folk.