Forum: what defines a programming relic?

Glass’s differentiation of art versus practice is right on the money (July 2000, p. 15). But what I see as the problem for the mature practitioner (besides the smugness of the younger ones) is not necessarily overcoming technical obsolescence but emotional obsolescence. And this is what upper management and the young practitioners sense as well. The elders of the herd don’t have the energy to change, perhaps in spite of well-intentioned protestations that we will. I’ve noticed this time and again with my peers (agewise). That’s why I’ve always made it a point to be a “change agent” (I hate this term but it works)—to be at least one of the people leading the charge rather than laying back in the crowd and waiting to be one of the mercy kills. But simply because our technical skills may be diminishing doesn’t mean our usefulness to the organization has. Political persuasion and institutional memory can still make a technical professional useful to the IT organization. These are skills usually lacking in the young (except for the truly sophisticated). A smart organization keeps a few old stallions and mares around who know how to bring discipline to a place. Michael Gardner Sacramento, CA I do not fully agree with Glass’s view. Many of us no longer write code but that doesn’t mean if we had to we couldn’t. How many molecular biologists still go to the lab and pipette reagents or set up Western blots. I always believed writing code was a mechanical act that came at the end of an understanding of something we wanted to automate. Getting to this step is what experience is all about, not deciding if one should write “Index Skip” or “Index Jump.” The commercial interests in programming have had too much audience. I agree that formal specification of a problem is more valuable than coding it, because if you can explain it well then you understand it. Anybody can toss around the acronyms, but few really understand what problems they have been invented to solve. How many so-called programmers can tell you exactly how conversion of decimal to binary works mathematically? I don’t think you are a relic Bob. Andrew Bender Carlisle, MA