It isn't limited to Google. At the end of 2014 Facebook put this thing in my brother's feed that said "It's been a great year" and then put in post he made right after our mother passed away. I wonder if it's a being young thing too?
Of course. You can't learn that sort of judgement (when to use vs when not to use) from a book.
But our profession's training material, at least in my experience reading, drills it in your head to use all these abstracting devices.
It's certainly true that you can get some "book knowledge" that tells you that you can over abstract. I mean, this blog post is one example. But I only hear this sort of stuff from things like blog post from experienced devs, it seems to me. (Or maybe I just read the wrong kind of books?)
> I can tell an amateur programmer from a professional by looking at their order of priorities when they grow a code base.
> Amateur programmers tend to put code de-duplication at the top of their priority list and will burn the whole house down to that often-trivial end.
To be fair, lots of how to program books spend a lot of time on teaching you how to abstract, and sing abstractions praises to the heavens, as it were. It takes some experience to learn that real world stuff is not like the toy programs in books.
I can only partially answer your question for Pascal: Look at the Free Pascal compiler.
I learned (Turbo) Pascal many years ago. Recently I've revived my usage while writing a video game. I wanted a mature, compiled, no GC language that worked well on Windows but wasn't C/C++. For the most part I've been happy with it.
It's still an alive project (version 3.0 released this year). It supports a wide selection of platforms, and a few Pascal dialects including Delphi, although I've been sticking to the old school procedural style in my game. It easily interfaces with C libraries (I've tried SDL and Lua).
As for the language itself, it seems to have lackluster support for template / generic programming, so I avoid it. That's a little disappointing to me but I think I can live without it. It does support old scool C++ style OOP, but try to avoid it because OOP's not cool anymore :).
There's plenty of documentation on the Internet, but not the amount of some of the more hip languages of today (and the websites tend to look older).
The number of tools is lackluster. It has an IDE called Lazarus that I've never used. The IDE seems focused on GUI development, which doesn't interest me. It comes with Turbo Pascal like IDE that runs in a console window, which probably won't be appealing to most people. I mostly use Notepad++ and script building in PowerShell for my game. I do miss the features from Visual Studio, like Intellisense though.
I was thinking about driving before GPS recently and I had to go somewhere I've never been to before. So I resolved to just look at Google maps before hand and then just try to driver there and back without my GPS unit or resorting to my phone. I really enjoyed it. I had to pay attention to where I was and what direction I was going. I feel like I actually learned the area better. So I get what you're saying.
> In a similar timeframe will anyone be able to read our digital thoughts?
Lots of famous writing from the ancient world doesn't survive in the original and had to be copied; what we have is copies of copies of copies, etc. And plenty of ancient works are lost.
We will need to copy to newer media what is important for archival purposes even now it seems.
Most mainstream music (i.e. stuff that makes it into Billboard's charts) is obviously targeted at teenagers and maybe people in their young 20's. I'd say the same thing is true about movies. I guess I wouldn't call any of this for "children" though but I guess this becomes a boring semantic argument at this point.
Tangentially, now that I'm over 30 it's starting to become painfully obvious that new music is geared towards younger people. I don't want to be one of those people who are stuck listening to music of their youth, but its so difficult to find things that appeal to me. I.e. music and films that are mature but still are progressing and not relying nostalgia.
Hmm so when were was there a lull? Serious question. I grew up in the 80's and although I don't check space news every day it doesn't seem like activity in space decreased in that time. All I'm really aware of is the loss in interest in, say, manned moon missions after Apollo 11. Are you talking about robotic probes?
I submit, as argued in my other comment, that greggman is the one assuming his/her experience should take priority.
If you are able to work years on end at 70 hours a week then more power to you. But that doesn't mean other people who do burn out are to blame or inferior b/c they didn't follow in greggman's footsteps or didn't choose "a career you don't get real enjoyment from".
Moreover, seriously consider this: Is working 72 hours for just 5 months enough to burn someone out? Especially if your young and responsibility free, wouldn't it take a lot longer?
Good to hear that you're happy and your choices have worked out, sincerely. But kindly please consider the following points:
1. You may not have worked enough to burn out. If you're in your 20's you can work longer too. If you don't have a family you can work longer.
2. Not everyone can make the career choices you got to make. I do program and enjoy it but it's way to risky for me personally to quit my corporate job. Please consider you might have some privileges others don't have or less responsibilities than other people.
3. For those of us who toil in the corporate world, depending on the situation, it is just foolish to spend more than the required 40 hours (except for limited crunch time). Why should I slave away and get no reward? I get paid the same. Consider that corporation might take advantage of those who do enjoy programming to do more work for less.
The author's analogy with Mozart's music is curious. Mozart's compositions are closer to the classical forms of a symphony, concerto, etc. than other well known composers who came later. He didn't slavishly follow some rules, but other composers broke way more rules than he did.
Most artist, according to my understanding, have never really made money on record sales even before the advent of Napster (for example, google "The Problem with Music" by Steve Albini). Most musicians are going to make money off of concerts tickets and T-Shirts, etc sold at concerts.
Album is _Hurt Seconds_ by The Shy Trafficker. I'll warn you that it's a long poorly recorded slog. There's a couple songs with some vocals but most of it is instrumental. Instrumental rock tends to be pretty unpopular I've found so I felt like the "warning" was needed.
I was in a band in my college years that played this "indie / experimental" instrumental rock. We only played maybe a dozen shows that were sparsely attended. There's one show we played that had at least 50-100 people, but that was because we opened for a semi-popular local band. In 2003-2004, just about when I left the band, we recorded an album in on of the band member's bedroom. I doubt more than a handful of people have ever listened to it.
This album is on Spotify. If it has any listens it's probably because I listened to it, or maybe another one of the former band members did.