I don't want to judge people by their age, and I won't.
But please
If you decided to become web developer at the age of sixty+, stop starting every single conversation with the 3min monologue about how different things were in your days when you were doing everything on paper and how great it was.
I'm here to fucking teach you how to code. Not to invent a time machine and send you back.
And for God's sake, stop touching my laptop.

At the same time, there is the opposite: I’m 46, started with assembler on the Atari when I was 12 and worked in the field since I was 17; the level of understanding from many young programmers is astoundingly bad.
You see many get in web programming, which is pretty much the McDonalds of tech, because they can’t do anything else. They don’t have a clue how the computers really work because everything they know is at a high level of abstraction and they come up with rules and mantras about how things should be depending on the fad of the moment.

Of course, you have some great talent, like there always was, but they’re now hidden in the mass.

Was it better before? Yes definitely because the barrier of entry was much higher since you needed a lot of passion to make anything work with the dev environments we had; as a result, the skill level in teams was a lot better.

@thomasd3 i concur completely with this even though i am a young developer(27) and started at around 17 or 18(can't really remember) and have always felt that the level of abstraction that we have in this day and age does hide a lot in terms of software engineering.

To make it worse I feel that a lot of people feel a general distaste for the idea of theoretical knowledge in terms of CS and normally believe that their Node.js docs are the end all be all of software engineering.

There is many more to it than just web development. Even if the field has gotten a major revamp over the years. I still consider it lesser than the field of compiler design, systems engineering as a whole etc etc

@thomasd3 I never screwed around with my Atari, but that just brings a flush of memories in👍

But as a WebDev myself, I like to think I’m above the norm as full stack enterprise ecommerce being my market.

@thomasd3 I agree, but it's not my point here. My point is that if you have no idea but you're coming to school to learn, stop reminiscing and actually learn.

@AleCx04 @thomasd3 I, too, concur. I started programming in BASIC on my parents Commodore C16 in 1986 and moved to C on an Amiga 500 in 1990.
Learning C first before moving on to C++ in 1996 was the best that could happen to me.
Nowadays I keep getting asked what would be best to start with. Java, C# or C++. And my answer is always the same: Neither, start with C. If you got the basics, everything else will be a lot easier!

But @idocerra has a point here! I dislike monologs beginning with "Back in *MY* days...", too!
No, it wasn't fun at all to write sources in a 2-color-editor and juggle around floppy disks to build a project. And it certainly wasn't "better".

However, real men code assembler using punch cards anyway. 😅

I know I have a lot more freedom to do stuff as a much younger dev (22), but man, listening to you guys talk about stuff from the 80s and all sometimes makes me wish I'd been in that generation. I know, I know, it wasn't all fun and games, but I like how tech from that time was really direct and you had to actually understand stuff to do anything. Plus I'm a C/C++/ASM guy anyway, so that just reinforces it.

Though I got my start on a Pentium 3 machine with Turbo C++ (good old TC!) so I can't complain that much, lel. I think starting with that and not, say, JavaScript or Python, did rather influence my tech preferences.

@Yamakuzure @thomasd3 @AleCx04 The discussion is off topic, but I like it and find it a very important one. I myself miss the mathematical understanding in many of my colleagues. I started my career in 1999 with Common Lisp and have been mostly a Lisper since. I am deeply passionate about functional programming because I am a mathematician per trait. And I shake my head when "programmer" cannot even comprehend simple computational logic ...

@idocerra I feel your point, too, but it is not a thing of age. I have a mentee who starts every bloody question with "But back at my old job ..." and ends it with "... why can't I just leave it that way?" She's 19 and had a 6 week internship at her "old job" . I think it is a question of respect towards the things you don't know and the person who teaches you those things that some are just missing.

@felbit yeah, it's not a thing of an age, I agree. I focused on that because..well, that person's got no prior experience with computers. Ffs, he doesn't even have a computer (I asked). So this is something COMPLETELY new to him. He was never doing anything of a computer matter in "another way". This is pretty much the only way he's ever been taught to code. And he still complains and compares.
I mean, okay, I get it, back in the highschool we were writing code on paper too, but what is he comparing here? Writing essay on paper and now (oh no) somebody makes you to type code on a computer? Yeah, that's different, but it's your choice 😣