The advantage (or disadvantage) of getting older: Seeing the younger generations come up with brilliant "new" ideas. New to them, whereas I think "yep, that was done 40 years ago, and 20 years ago, and now it's new all over again."
Part of the problem is the sheer breadth of IT and software development today. 40 years ago, I felt like I understood nearly everything: I designed processors at the transistor level, programmed from machine code through assembly to Lisp, Prolog, Pascal and other languages. Worked on projects from tiny to huge.
That's just not possible today. There are too many areas of application, too many frameworks and languages. Too many tools and platforms. Any individual developer is going to be in a niche. Your web developer knows nothing of how to write ABAP, your SAP developer has no clue how to do embedded programming for a microcontroller, your real-time embedded programmer knows nothing of databases, your database admin thinks React is something to do with nuclear power plants.
Today, it's all you can do to stay abreast of developments in your own field. There is little time to look for lessons from the past, or across to ideas from other, parallel fields.
Part of the problem is the sheer breadth of IT and software development today. 40 years ago, I felt like I understood nearly everything: I designed processors at the transistor level, programmed from machine code through assembly to Lisp, Prolog, Pascal and other languages. Worked on projects from tiny to huge.
That's just not possible today. There are too many areas of application, too many frameworks and languages. Too many tools and platforms. Any individual developer is going to be in a niche. Your web developer knows nothing of how to write ABAP, your SAP developer has no clue how to do embedded programming for a microcontroller, your real-time embedded programmer knows nothing of databases, your database admin thinks React is something to do with nuclear power plants.
Today, it's all you can do to stay abreast of developments in your own field. There is little time to look for lessons from the past, or across to ideas from other, parallel fields.