On lessons in learning from a 6 year old...

I've been developing software for what sometimes feels like a lifetime. I mean, it's almost a quarter of a century, so for some, it is indeed a lifetime. To the hip youngsters who have only ever known the internet world, mobile devices and touch interfaces, I'm a dinosaur. However, as someone once said somewhere: "what other people think about you is none of your business". The thing that has been occupying my thoughts more recently, is what I think about myself.

On the Road to Type A Nominalization

I studied computer science at university in the early nineties.  It's a long time ago now, and although it wasn't all mainframes, terminals and punch cards, it was still relatively early in terms of a real understanding of how to build complex software.  There was a lot of talk about object orientation, CASE tools, code generation and expert systems.

Prior to university, I'd done hobby programming in Z80 assembler, GW Basic, Turbo Pascal and 'C'. I couldn't imagine anything other than procedural programming because that's what I'd been doing up to that point, and getting some pretty good results with it too.

Learning how to use some crappy code generation tool that would create 30 almost empty Ada files with a marginal boiler-plate benefit did not set my world on fire.  However, the object orientation stuff was much more appealing.