spent 4 decades programming, and everything changes all the time
A half-aged kid here. This is the source of my anxiety, that all I’ve done and learned will age, slip through fingers and become forgotten. I wish our craft could stabilize on something, but it just doesn’t.
It does if you specialize in something that barely moves (AS/400, COBOL, others), but the experience of that career is almost the exact opposite of why many people get in to programming (lots of paperwork, consensus-based decisions, lots of waiting around trying to look busy, little new growth or exploration).
However, there is some light at the end of the “everything changes” tunnel: as you learn different frameworks and languages you’re gaining new perspectives on the deeper concepts, and for the most part those deeper concepts don’t change. In OOP the “gang of four” is practically as relevant now as it was then, for example.
Change is the only constant, I guess. This has always been part of anything computer-related. My dad started his career with punch cards, ended doing Java. You keep learning. But you've got to do that to some extent in every career.
If anything, things are stabilizing now more than ever before. Java and Javascript are almost 30 years old, and still as relevant as ever. Computers have been "fast enough" for most purposes and aren't obsolete the moment you've bought them, like they were in the early 1990s. The x86 architecture is surprisingly still with us. And despite all the new languages and frameworks, there's still tons of stuff being done in all of the old ones. They don't get obsolete as fast as they used to.
You can never do everything. Pick what you love, and focus on that.
A half-aged kid here. This is the source of my anxiety, that all I’ve done and learned will age, slip through fingers and become forgotten. I wish our craft could stabilize on something, but it just doesn’t.