Beeing a developer after 40

[Peter TB Brett]

On 02/05/2016 11:31, Lyn Teyla wrote:
> Stephen Barncard wrote:
>
>> obviously one hasn't been to a LC event lately.  More white hair
>> and ponytails on old folks than an AES convention. The cool geeks
>> club.
>
> I’ve got nothing against younger or older people at all, but:
>
> Whenever I come across photos of LiveCode events, and see white hair
> and baldness everywhere, it often makes me question my own sanity
> regarding my choice of programming language.

What's wrong with baldness? :-D

> And then, I start questioning the sanity of younger people, who
> appear to _want_ to code using a non-English-like language, and
> multiple different languages at that, if deploying to different
> platforms.
>
> Apparently, younger people, for some reason, don’t seem to want an
> English-like language (some even going as far as to avoid such
> languages as much as possible), or be able to use that same language
> to create desktop, mobile, server and web apps.
>
> Should we be learning all sorts of non-English-like programming
> languages, just because everyone else is doing it, even though
> they’re less intuitive to use?

I'll play Devil's advocate here.

All programming languages are the same.  All are just a way of 
expressing a set of instructions for a computation.  Iterating over a 
list is iterating over a list, whether you write it as:

     -- LiveCode
     repeat for each key tKey in tArray
         write tArray[tKey] & return to stdout
     end repeat

     -- LiveCode Builder (fake syntax, we don't have
     -- "encoded as" yet)
     repeat for each element tItem in tList
         write (tItem & "\n") encoded as "UTF-8" \
             to the output stream
     end repeat

     # Python
     for t_item in t_lst:
         print(t_item)

     ;; Scheme
     (for-each (lambda (x) (display x) (newline)) lst)

     // Rust
     for t_item in t_lst.iter() {
         println!("{}", item)
     }

     // C++
     for(auto && n : vec) {
         std::cout << n << '\n';
     }

Once you understand the _underlying_ principles of programming (and 
you've probably learnt N programming languages), maybe learning an 
(N+1)th language is simply a matter of figuring out how the language 
goes about "telling the computer what to do" and then adding a link to 
the language's standard library reference manual to your browser's 
bookmarks bar.

Maybe LiveCode isn't more intuitive than any of the other many 
programming languages that people use.  In some ways, perhaps it is 
_less_ easy to use because it's rather verbose, it doesn't have a very 
expressive type system, and it lacks an extensive 3rd-party developer 
ecosystem.

Maybe, if you look closely at the programming languages that "young 
people" are choosing to use, the syntax is not an important criterion in 
that choice.

Maybe if LiveCode fits your needs well, it makes sense to stick with it, 
regardless of what's fashionable in the world of programming languages.

                                         Peter

P.S. "Because everyone else is doing it" is not a good reason to do 
something.  However, it is a good reason to clearly understand why 
you're not.

-- 
Dr Peter Brett <peter.brett at livecode.com>
LiveCode Open Source Team

LiveCode 2016 Conference: https://livecode.com/edinburgh-2016/