Linux

Lots of good insight there. While I disagree with much of it, I get it.

I’m all for keeping one’s cognitive skills. However it is a fact that this decline happens, and that there is a phase of life where one has wisdom without necessarily having the same raw intelligence they had before. The wisdom is encoded in crystallized intelligence.

Yeah, realizing you have that wisdom is eye opening and it's actually pretty powerful. I can hunt down bugs by smell now with surprising accuracy. But I'm not convinced it's mutually exclusive to fluidity. I guess I'm just hoping my brain doesn't petrify and am battling against it.

That was possible because those machines don’t change too much as time marches on. Because they use a stable platform, his organization was able to do better work by relying on his deep expertise. He could train those younger guys because it was the same platform he’d always used. Same dirt, same physics, mostly the same machines, same techniques, same pitfalls, etc.

It's a poor analogy for software though. Software is an ongoing conversation. Not a device you build and forget about. User demands change, hardware changes, bugs are found, and performance is improved.

I'm honestly curious what the oldest line of code in the Linux kernel is now. I would be pretty shocked to see that anything survived 30 years. And I don't think that's because of enshittification.

This example doesn’t work as well with C/++ since that’s older than most people here (though the language has also gone through iterations) and likely won’t be going away any time soon. But still, in most cases you probably don’t want to use that language for general work.

Why not? Because you won’t be able to hire younger devs? That is a function of this culture of pushing for change in everything.

No, because C/++ isn't the right tool for every job. If I want to write up something quick and dirty to download a sequence of files, I'm not going to write that in C. It's worth learning other things.

I have to admit though that the conservative approach is more suited to things like a kernel, aerospace applications, or other things with lives riding on it. But also software that doesn't change becomes useless and irrelevant very quickly. For instance, running Windows XP is a bad call in just about any case.

But again I'm also not trying to say all software should be trend following. Just that devs should embrace learning and experiencing new things.