minder-4001

I retired a month ago at 74. Like you I've used languages in anger that few these days have heard of (S3 anyone?), and design techniques that somehow seem to be devalued.

Claude and it's kin remind me of junior "just out of university" developers with piles of knowledge but no appreciation of the real world impact of anything. Of long conversations about edge cases and why they matter, extensive error-checking and logging.

The last place I worked had (some) users eager to be their own developer to get things done that much quicker. These are often the same users unable to accurately define what they really want, assuming that the nearby BA will understand and the magic will happen. They haven't worked out, and may not be interested in learning that they will be their own BA and that the uncertainties in their vision will be baked into the final offering.

In reality, I'm glad to be out, the fossil suffering the effects of the tools whilst unable to influence anything.

Tracking Russian satellites at school, one of the younger teachers had an account on the local university computer. He did data reduction and orbit calculations in Fortran and showed me the code, letting me try simple stuff. I found the spherical trig nasty, but the Fortan easy to understand.

Shortly after at Uni I wrote a dating system for the Rag Committee (UK thing to raise money for local charities) whilst learning other languages. Had fun with it and annoyed a few people.

Got a job with ICL and they taught me more languages and let me write some useful software as well as some outside-work fun stuff.

These days I use Python, bash and SQL, with occasional Perl. Some of the languages I used to know have completely disappeared like S3, Snowball, Pop3, 1900 assembler and so on.